reluctant, he then extended himself in an even larger gesture,offering to read Rockne’s lines for the screen test Reagan needed to ace in order to win the part. It all helped. When Knute Rockne — All American premiered in South Bend, Indiana, home of the University of Notre Dame, a quarter million fans greeted the cast. The Gipper role would prove a turning point in Ronald Reagan’s career.
Reagan’s next career peak—the role he himself considered his best—was Kings Row, in which he played,as he often did in those years, the hero’s best friend.Opening in early 1942, just months after Pearl Harbor, Kings Row established its claim on filmic immortality by virtue of a simple five-word question:“Where’s the rest of me?” It’swhat Reagan’s character, Drake McHugh, demands to know after waking from surgery to discover both his legs amputatedby a sadistic doctor. Reagan would go on to make the famous linethe title of his 1965 autobiography.
Measured by box office, though, the most important movie for the future president was a film released in 1942, Desperate Journey. It reteamed himwith Errol Flynn.Two years earlier they’d appeared together in Santa Fe Trail, in a thrilling wartime tale directed by Michael Curtiz, best known today for Casablanca . Desperate Journey follows the perilous path through Nazi Germany of an RAF bomber crew shot down and trying, against enormous odds, to escape. It was the number-two-grossing film of the year, second only to the enormously loved Mrs. Miniver .
Yet by the time Kings Row and Desperate Journey opened, they were showing to a country that was not the same as when the movies were filmed.On December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor was attacked, Franklin D. Roosevelt went before Congress to ask it to declare the United States officially at war. If America was at war, so was Hollywood.The movie industry, an important one for national morale, became a critical part of the war effort.
The month before he’d moved to Los Angeles from Des Moines, Reagan had joined the Army Enlisted Reserve.Arriving in Hollywood, he was appointed second lieutenant in the cavalry. With the United States now in the war, he was ordered to active duty—it was April 1942,two months after Kings Row had opened in theaters. His eyesight—he suffered from astigmatism—kept him from assignment to a combat unit.
Transferring from the cavalry to the Army Air Corps, the actor was sent first to a public relations unit andthen to the just-created First Motion Picture Unit.Never before had a military unit been made up completely of movie professionals dedicated to putting all their skills, talent, and imagination into training and propaganda films.It was this unit, based in Culver City in the formerHal Roach Studios (once home to Laurel and Hardy, among other comedy greats, andnow dubbed Fort Roach), to which Ronald Reagan would be attached for most of the rest of the war.In 1943, a twenty-two-minute filmhe’d narrated, Beyond the Line of Duty, won the Oscar for “Best Short Subject.”Though he both appeared in and voiced-over numerous movies,he was also the unit’s personnel officer, andat the end of his active duty in 1945, when he returned to civilian life, he held the rank of captain.
Wars leave no one they’ve touched the same. Though he’d spent the years of World War II far from the front, making films in Culver Cityand Burbank, Ronald Reagan had served honorably. He’d contributed exactly as the U.S. government had called upon him to do. Yet not only did the postwar landscape he confronted now look and seem different; so did he.
One of those who apparently saw him in a new—and unflattering—light was hiswife of eight years, Jane Wyman. They’d married in 1940, two years after shooting Brother Rat together.She’d become a Warner contract player in 1936 at nineteen, having appeared,though often as an uncreditedchorus girl, inthirty or so pictures by the time they started dating.A
Reagan’s next career peak—the role he himself considered his best—was Kings Row, in which he played,as he often did in those years, the hero’s best friend.Opening in early 1942, just months after Pearl Harbor, Kings Row established its claim on filmic immortality by virtue of a simple five-word question:“Where’s the rest of me?” It’swhat Reagan’s character, Drake McHugh, demands to know after waking from surgery to discover both his legs amputatedby a sadistic doctor. Reagan would go on to make the famous linethe title of his 1965 autobiography.
Measured by box office, though, the most important movie for the future president was a film released in 1942, Desperate Journey. It reteamed himwith Errol Flynn.Two years earlier they’d appeared together in Santa Fe Trail, in a thrilling wartime tale directed by Michael Curtiz, best known today for Casablanca . Desperate Journey follows the perilous path through Nazi Germany of an RAF bomber crew shot down and trying, against enormous odds, to escape. It was the number-two-grossing film of the year, second only to the enormously loved Mrs. Miniver .
Yet by the time Kings Row and Desperate Journey opened, they were showing to a country that was not the same as when the movies were filmed.On December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor was attacked, Franklin D. Roosevelt went before Congress to ask it to declare the United States officially at war. If America was at war, so was Hollywood.The movie industry, an important one for national morale, became a critical part of the war effort.
The month before he’d moved to Los Angeles from Des Moines, Reagan had joined the Army Enlisted Reserve.Arriving in Hollywood, he was appointed second lieutenant in the cavalry. With the United States now in the war, he was ordered to active duty—it was April 1942,two months after Kings Row had opened in theaters. His eyesight—he suffered from astigmatism—kept him from assignment to a combat unit.
Transferring from the cavalry to the Army Air Corps, the actor was sent first to a public relations unit andthen to the just-created First Motion Picture Unit.Never before had a military unit been made up completely of movie professionals dedicated to putting all their skills, talent, and imagination into training and propaganda films.It was this unit, based in Culver City in the formerHal Roach Studios (once home to Laurel and Hardy, among other comedy greats, andnow dubbed Fort Roach), to which Ronald Reagan would be attached for most of the rest of the war.In 1943, a twenty-two-minute filmhe’d narrated, Beyond the Line of Duty, won the Oscar for “Best Short Subject.”Though he both appeared in and voiced-over numerous movies,he was also the unit’s personnel officer, andat the end of his active duty in 1945, when he returned to civilian life, he held the rank of captain.
Wars leave no one they’ve touched the same. Though he’d spent the years of World War II far from the front, making films in Culver Cityand Burbank, Ronald Reagan had served honorably. He’d contributed exactly as the U.S. government had called upon him to do. Yet not only did the postwar landscape he confronted now look and seem different; so did he.
One of those who apparently saw him in a new—and unflattering—light was hiswife of eight years, Jane Wyman. They’d married in 1940, two years after shooting Brother Rat together.She’d become a Warner contract player in 1936 at nineteen, having appeared,though often as an uncreditedchorus girl, inthirty or so pictures by the time they started dating.A
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