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Gipper scores on film

Hollywood credits ran gamut from melodrama to screwball comedy

Star of film and screen: Reagan acted in both film and television. In 1955, he was host of and occasionally acted on "G.E. Theater."

By John Krist
Scripps Howard News Service

The presidency may have been the role of Ronald Reagan's lifetime, but it was only one of many.

Like all good movie studio contract players of the '40s and '50s, Reagan spent plenty of time in the cinematic trenches, acting in 53 films, most of them forgettable.

Reagan, a baseball announcer, had his first brush with Hollywood in 1937, when he was sent to Catalina Island by radio station WHO from Des Moines, Iowa, to cover the Chicago Cubs' spring training. The Cubs were sent there to train because chewing-gum magnate and team owner William Wrigley Jr. believed the invigorating sea air would turn them into pennant winners.

Big score: Reagan loved the role of doomed Notre Dame halfback George Gipp in 1940's "Knute Rockne - All American."

While on Catalina, Reagan met Joy Hodges, a former WHO employee who had become a Hollywood singer and actress. She introduced him to her agent, who arranged a screen test at Warner Bros. Reagan was offered a contract at $200 a week.

His first role, fittingly enough, was a radio announcer, in "Love Is on the Air" (1937). In his second film - "Submarine D-1- (1937) - Reagan's performance wound up on the cutting-room floor.

'College' try: Reagan starred with Virginia Mayo in the 1952 musical "She's Working Her Way Through College."

After that, however, he fared better. Although Reagan never attained the rank of top star, he had a solid career as a dependable, second-tier leading man.

"Within a particular range of characters he was quite a credible performer with a pleasing personality - a normal, healthy boy, more playboy than lover, incapable of malice," wrote critic Mitch Tuchman of actor Reagan.

Reagan left the movies after two decades on the silver screen. His flagging acting career was revived by television, where he was host of and occasionally starred in the "General Electric Theater" anthology series from 1954 to 1962, and then the popular "Death Valley Days" western anthology in 1965 and 1966."

On learning Reagan was considering a presidential run, studio boss Jack Warner summed up Reagan's screen career, saying, "That can't be right. Ronald Reagan for best friend. Jimmy Stewart for president."

Marshaling his talents: Reagan enters with guns blazing in the 1953 horse opera "Law and Order."

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Ronald Reagan: A selected filmography

"Brother Rat" (1938) Reagan plays a Virginia Military Institute cadet who woos the daughter of the institute's commandant. The daughter is played by Jane Wyman, who married Reagan a year and a half later.

"Dark Victory" (1939)
Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart star in a classic tear-jerker, in which Davis plays a dying socialite determined to meet her end with bravery and style. Reagan is among the suitors she rejects in favor of her doctor. (Available on video.)

"Knute Rockne - All American" (1940)
Reagan's first real break came in this biography of the great Notre Dame football coach. Reagan plays George Gipp, a player who dies young from pneumonia. Gipp's deathbed words - "Win one for the Gipper," used by Rockne (Pat O'Brien) to inspire his team to victory - became one of the touchstones of Reagan's life. It represented the way a bunch of average people could pull together and achieve something great - to Reagan, that was football, and that was America. (Available on video.)

"Santa Fe Trail" (1940)
Errol Flynn has the lead in this dubious historical melodrama in which Reagan plays George Armstrong Custer. The movie presents Custer as a friend of Confederate cavalryman J.E.B. Stuart, and a fellow 1854 graduate of West Point. In reality, Custer was 15 years old in 1854, and he and Stuart never met. (Available on video.)

"Kings Row" (1942)
Reagan agreed with critics who labeled this his best performance. As a womanizing ne'er do well, he gets to utter one of the great lines in movie history - "Where's the rest of me?" - after a mad surgeon amputates both his legs in revenge for his seduction of the surgeon's daughter. Reagan would later use the line as the title of his autobiography. (Available on video.)

"Bedtime for Bonzo" (1951)
Psychology Professor Peter Boyd (Reagan) is in love with the dean's daughter. The dean frowns on the relationship because Boyd's father was a habitual criminal and he fears the son has inherited the same tendencies. Boyd borrows a chimp and raises it as a human child, intending to prove environment is more important than heredity in determining behavior. When Reagan ran against Pat Brown for California governor in 1966, Brown sponsored late-night TV showings of "Bonzo" in a futile attempt to make Reagan look silly; the Democrats tried the same strategy during the 1980 presidential race. (Available on video.)

"Cattle Queen of Montana" (1954)
Although Reagan is popularly thought of as a cowboy, he made only four real Hollywood westerns. This one is the best, with Reagan playing a hired thug who falls in love with his employer's enemy, Barbara Stanwyck. In the end, he turns out to have been a government agent. (Available on video.)

"Hellcats of the Navy" (1957)
Although he would play a corrupt land developer the next year in a made-for-TV movie called "The Killers" - released theatrically after the networks deemed it too violent - "Hellcats" was Reagan's last feature film. He stars with second wife Nancy Davis. Reagan is a submarine commander who "inadvertently" causes the death of his rival for Nancy's affections. Director Nathan Juran (aka Nathan Hertz) is known to midnight-film buffs as director of "Attack of the 50-foot Woman" and "Brain From Planet Arous." (Available on video.)

Sources:
"The Film Encyclopedia," by Ephraim Katz (1979); "Movies on TV and Video-cassette," by Steven H. Scheur (1990); "The Filmgoer's Companion," by Leslie Halliwell (1978); "The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film," by Michael Weldon (1983); "5001 Nights at the Movies," by Pauline Kael (1982); "Cult Movies," by David Peary (1981).