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What occupied Reagan in the postwar years was Hollywood union politics. "I was a near hopeless hemophilic liberal," Reagan said later. "I bled for causes. I had voted Democratic, following my father, in every election. I had followed F.D.R. blindly ... " By 1947 he was president of the Screen Actors Guild and found himself embroiled in the union wars ravaging Hollywood. Reagan came to believe that the bitter strikes in 1945 and 1946 by stagehands of the Conference of Studio Unions represented a communist attempt to take over Hollywood, and that belief changed his political views forever. In the subsequent...
Reagan also lacked the true performer's love of being minutely scrutinized. Bluffly outgoing, infallibly at ease in large groups, he seemed inhibited by screen intimacy. He had trouble sustaining an emotion in close-up, as if he couldn't wait for someone, anyone, to yell, "Cut!" You can almost read the fear on Reagan's face. Only his eyebrow was cocky...
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...
...last film (really a TV movie released in theaters because it was deemed too rough for the small screen) was The Killers in 1964. It's a bit of a cheap thrill to watch Reagan play a crime heavy and do his professional best in a scene where he has to slap Angie Dickinson. The Killers, violent and cynical, was a curious coda to Reagan's career. But, in a way, he had only been moonlighting as a movie actor ever since his Army days. He was moving into politics, graduating from Hollywood in the '40s to Sacramento...
Reagan served as president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) from 1947 to 1952. He negotiated the first contract that gave actors royalties for films but not for television work (a boon to his old friend Wasserman, who would run the largest TV production company). He also applied grease to the wheels of the anticommunist witch hunt. Reagan had been reflexively left-wing in the '30s and '40s. Edmund Morris, his authorized biographer, believes the story that Reagan had tried to join the Communist Party but was rejected on the grounds that he would be more valuable as a fellow...