Word: warner
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...Warner, a six-day-a-week studio, kept its actors busy. Reagan made 33 films in his first five years, averaging one every eight weeks. Some of his most confident work was in four B movies made in 1939, detailing the heroics of Secret Service Agent Brass Bancroft. In Secret Service of the Air, he foils an alien-smuggling racket and, during a fight, executes a smooth backflip over a cantina table. Murder in the Air earned some later camp luster with its secret weapon, the Inertia Protector, which is able to destroy hostile bombs aimed...
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...
...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...
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...
Reagan tipped Jack Warner's prophecy on its end, persuading most Americans that they were being governed by their best friend. So it is Jimmy Stewart who was the great actor. Was Ronald Reagan a great President? Well, he brilliantly played one on TV. And where's the best of him? In the easy authority he projected--the image of an American hero he rarely got to play in the movies...