Ronald Reagan's Top 10 Movie Roles
Hellcats of the Navy, 1957
Divorced from Jane Wyman in 1948 and sprung from his Warner contract a few years later, Reagan made a bunch of 1950s westerns (The Last Outpost, Tennessee's Partner, Cattle Queen of Montana). So did every other Hollywood leading man, but the genre particularly suited Reagan, who loved horses and often insisted on doing his own stunt-riding. He then teamed with his second wife, Nancy Davis, in Hellcats of the Navy, a World War II drama about a Navy commander who, in an attempt to discover Japanese sea lanes, makes a decision that kills 60 of his men. He is both firm in his belief that he did the greater good and flooded with remorse for sending sailors he knew to an early death. The movie is unusual, and mature, in dramatizing the burdens of power. Reagan's face seems graven, his body made ponderous by his authority — an impression he rarely gave as a seemingly blithe, untroubled President.