His Days in Hollywood

Tuesday, Jun. 08, 2004 By RICHARD CORLISS
THE FIRST FAN: The former sidekick— taking in a show with wife Nancy in the White House— became a leading man in politics
PETE SOUZA / THE WHITE HOUSE
Article Tools
Print
Reprints
Sphere
RSS

(3 of 4)
Million Dollar Baby displayed a tense defiance in Reagan, an untamed sexiness that he also used in Knute Rockne. His Gipp is famous for the deathbed peroration. But it's in his early scenes that he hints at the sort of screen personality he could have become, if Jack Warner hadn't insisted he keep playing the boy next door to the male lead.

Related Articles

Gipp has no interest in joining Rockne's rookies; baseball is his game. But when Rock sees him kick a football over the grandstand, he asks Gipp to try out for the team. "All right, if you insist," Reagan almost snarls. Throughout, teacher and student crack wise with each other like two newspapermen in a screwball comedy. Reagan's casual, almost flirtatious insolence is instantly attractive, and very modern for a 1940 rah-rah epic.

Reagan is just as brash, if more naive, in Kings Row. The film touches, daintily, on sexually possessive fathers, insane children, vindictive doctors, the hatred of the rich for the poor and, in the relationship of Reagan's character Drake McHugh and his friend Parris (Robert Cummings), a hint of homoeroticism. Reagan flawlessly navigates Drake's descent from rube bonhomie to maturing resolve to blackest despair, then up to a final splash of sunlight. Reagan considered the film his top accomplishment and never tired of screening it. In 1948 Wyman sued for divorce, charging extreme mental cruelty. But she had another complaint: "I just couldn't stand to watch that dismal Kings Row one more time."

Jack Warner had two more roles for his budding star — a migrant worker who becomes a kind of Anglo Cesar Chavez in the vigorous melodrama Juke Girl, and an R.A.F. pilot in Desperate Journey, again supporting Flynn — before Uncle Sam cast him as a stateside warrior. A natural leader, if not a natural actor, Reagan was often cast as a government enforcer and even more often as a soldier. As Stephen Vaughn observes in Ronald Reagan in Hollywood: Movies and Politics, "No 20th century President, with the exception of Dwight D. Eisenhower, had been seen in uniform by more people."

Captain Reagan, kept out of action because of poor vision, never saw hostile fire. Indeed, since he was assigned to the First Motion Picture Unit (jocularly given the acronym FUMPOO) at the old Hal Roach studios making propaganda films for the armed forces, he could usually bunk at home. They also serve who narrate documentaries.

Many stars, Clark Gable and Stewart among them, returned from war to reclaim their eminence. Reagan was not of their wattage, and again he had loser's luck. Bogart got the haunted-hero roles at Warner; Reagan got the scraps, like the part of a suicidal epileptic in the 1947 Night unto Night. After a decade, Warner still hadn't decided what genre best suited Reagan. Melodrama? Let him play a small-town D.A. in the 1951 anti — Ku Klux Klan Storm Warning, with another lynch-mob scene and heavy emoting from all the principals but Reagan. Comedy? Put him in The Girl from Jones Beach (1949), where he's an artist who has assembled the perfect pinup from the comeliest body parts of 12 models.

Virtually every male lead made westerns in the '50s, so Reagan was happily back on a horse in such ordinary oaters as Tennessee's Partner and Cattle Queen of Montana. His big hit of the decade was the silly Bedtime for Bonzo, a parable of cross-species adoption (Reagan and Diana Lynn try raising a chimp as a human child) in which the star spent much of his time with an animal perched in his lap or on his head. Though it gave his detractors much excuse for merriment, Reagan proclaimed himself proud of the film.