(4 of 5)
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."
Captain Reagan, kept out of action because of poor vision, never saw hostile fire. Indeed, since he was assigned to the First Motion Picture Unit (jocularly given the acronym FUMPOO) at the old Hal Roach studios making propaganda films for the armed forces, he could usually bunk at home. They also serve who narrate documentaries.
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? Put him in The Girl from Jones Beach (1949), where he's an artist who has assembled the perfect pinup from the comeliest body parts of 12 models.
Virtually every male lead made westerns in the '50s, so Reagan was happily back on a horse in such ordinary oaters as Tennessee's Partner and Cattle Queen of Montana. His big hit of the decade was the silly Bedtime for Bonzo, a parable of cross-species adoption (Reagan and Diana Lynn try raising a chimp as a human child) in which the star spent much of his time with an animal perched in his lap or on his head. Though it gave his detractors much excuse for merriment, Reagan proclaimed himself proud of the film.
His other signal movie of the '50s was Hellcats of the Navy. It is famous as the one film to co-star Reagan and his second bride Nancy Davis. In fact, Davis' role is small and she doesn't distinguish herself in it. But Reagan is impressive as a World War II naval hero with a hint of Bogart's neurotic Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny. In the attempt to discover Japanese sea lanes, submarine commander Casey Abbott makes a decision that kills 60 of his men. He is both firm in his belief that he did the greatest good for the greatest number 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 executive authority--an impression he rarely gave as a seemingly jaunty President.