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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 at the U.S.--a primitive forerunner of President Reagan's Star Wars plan.
These breezy B's, terrestrial siblings to the Buck Rogers serials, might not have been film literature, but they were the equivalent of expert speed typing. In them Reagan proved himself engaging, snappy, in command. When he figured no one was looking, he could be well worth watching.
Reagan still had to prove himself in A material, and just before the war he got a few chances. In the fluffy 1941 comedy Million Dollar Baby, he's Peter Rowan, a rebellious composer who's "got a sour disposition and a mouth to match." He calls himself "just a student of history. Civilization's rotting away." (Back then, he didn't mean the Soviet Union.) Reagan is pretty persuasive as a fellow spoiling for a fight with the world.
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.
Gipp has no interest in joining Rockne's rookies; baseball is his game. But when Rock sees him kick a football over the grandstand, he asks Gipp to try out for the team. "All right, if you insist," Reagan almost snarls. Throughout, teacher and student crack wise with each other like two newspapermen in a screwball comedy. Reagan's casual, almost flirtatious insolence is instantly attractive, and very modern for a 1940 rah-rah epic.
Reagan is just as brash, if more naive, in Kings Row. The film touches, daintily, on sexually possessive fathers, insane children, vindictive doctors, the hatred of the rich for the poor and, in the relationship of Reagan's character Drake McHugh and his friend Parris (Robert Cummings), a hint of homoeroticism. Reagan flawlessly navigates Drake's descent from rube bonhomie to maturing resolve to blackest despair, then up to a final splash of sunlight. Reagan considered the film his top accomplishment and never tired of screening it. In 1948 Wyman sued for divorce, charging extreme mental cruelty. But she had another complaint: "I just couldn't stand to watch that dismal Kings Row one more time."