Ronald Reagan's Top 10 Movie Roles
Murder in the Air, 1940
Reagan made 33 films in his first five years at Warner, or an average of one every eight weeks. Some of his most confident and efficient work was in a quartet of B movies made in 1939-40 detailing the heroics of Brass Bancroft, Secret Service agent. In the first, Secret Service of the Air, he sets out to foil an airborne smuggling racket. The second, Murder in the Air, earned camp luster with its secret weapon, the inertia projector, which is able to destroy bombs aimed at the U.S. — a primitive forerunner of President Reagan's Star Wars plan. These breezy Bs might not have been film literature, but they were the equivalent of expert speed-typing: they crammed fights, chases and brisk machismo into an hour's running time. In them, Reagan proves himself engaging, snappy and in command. When he figured no one was looking, he could be well worth watching.