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Ron Miller
Nancy Davis, Movie Star |
By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
There's a pivotal moment in Ronald Reagan's 1957 submarine movie "Hellcats of the Navy" where a dashing young Navy frogman with a reputation as a ladies' man is caught ogling a picture of the captain's girl friend just before a dangerous mission.
Fortunately, it's not sub captain Reagan who catches the guy drooling over the photo, but rather the sub's No. 2 officer, who warns the frogman he'd better forget all about getting anywhere with that gal.
"This girl is different," he tells the frogman. "She wouldn't fit into a notch on your belt."
Well, she's certainly different, all right. Look closely at that picture and you'll see she's none other than Nancy Davis, an actress who would become much more famous a couple of decades later when her real-life husband, Ronald Reagan, was elected president of the U.S. and she became First Lady.
Essentially a low budget action film, which Columbia Pictures filled mostly with low-rent talent, "Hellcats of the Navy" created no stir when it first came out. It has become much more interesting decades later because it's the only feature film co-starring the future president and his First Lady.
For those seeking early signs of the future Reagan political persona, "Hellcats" is especially rich territory. In the film, Reagan displays an unwavering ability to lead men where he wants them to go -- in this case a risky mission inside the sea of Japan. He's decisive and never looks back. In short, he's "presidential."
As it turns out, the key decision he makes in the film is diving the submarine as Japanese destroyers attack, saving his ship and crew and the information they'd gathered, even though it means death for the womanizing frogman who drooled over Nancy's picture. The poor guy just happened to be outside the sub at the time and earns a watery grave for his trouble.
Reagan-baiters have examined every frame of "Hellcats of the Navy" for years, hoping to find a scene where Nancy whispers something in the captain's ear like, "I'm glad you took her down, Ronnie! That sucker was trying to two-time you behind your back!"
But, alas, Nancy did nothing of the sort. As usual, she was in perfect control of her emotions on screen, doing exactly the right thing at all times.
In fact, Nancy's character, Nurse Helen Blair, is like almost every woman she played in the 11 feature films that make up her Hollywood screen career: Decent, God-fearing and morally incorruptible. In her films, Nancy almost never had a past of any kind, certainly not a sordid one, so when Reagan, the sub captain, tells us in "Hellcats" that, "She was fresh out of a bad marriage when we met," we just naturally assume it wasn't her fault.
Perhaps because her roles were so benign, critics for years have dismissed Nancy Davis as a mediocre actress who achieved little as a movie star and doesn't even merit comparison with Reagan's first wife, Jane Wyman. Wyman certainly had a long and successful movie career, winning an Oscar for her luminous performance in "Johnny Belinda," then becoming a TV star with the popular prime time soap opera, "Falcon Crest" in the early 1980s. In contrast, Nancy Davis was in and out of her movie career in less than 10 years and hardly anyone today ever thinks of her as ever being a real movie star.
In truth, though, that's a hasty write-off that Nancy Davis Reagan doesn't deserve, no more than Ronald Reagan deserves to be branded as a "B-movie actor" who only went into politics because his acting career was on the skids.
First, I need to say that I'm not an admirer of the Reagans' politics. Yet I'm able to separate the people from their politics. I'm the kind of guy who can like an actor like Charlton Heston on screen and not give a hoot if he's also a right wing gun nut on the side. I have no ax to grind against the Reagans when it comes to their movie work.
Ronald Reagan, in particular, has taken a bum rap as an actor from lots of critics who simply don't like his politics. He was much better than he's ever given credit for being. In fact, his final performance on screen, as the corrupt crime boss in Don Siegel's 1964 remake of "The Killers," is that of a gifted pro, finally ready to tackle challenging character roles.
If Reagan hadn't run for office, he might have gone on playing ever more insipid leading man parts in a losing struggle to keep his name above the title. But the Reagan of "The Killers" is a superb actor who surely would have been offered even more offbeat roles if he'd remained an actor.
As for Nancy Davis, too many film scholars dismiss her as a non-entity. They say she landed a few leading roles in minor pictures, failed to demonstrate any real star appeal and left nothing of value behind her when she left the movies to concentrate on raising a family and helping her husband's political career.
Well, naturally, I have a different take on this. I think the roles determine how fast an actor catches on, provided they have genuine talent. Look at Jane Wyman's career before "The Lost Weekend," "The Yearling" and "Johnny Belinda" gave her roles to chew on. Nothing very distinguished until then. The young Nancy Davis I saw in the films of the late 1940s and early 1950s definitely had real talent, but she had few roles that forced her out of her prefabricated image as a loyal wife and homemaker.
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In probably her best film, William Wellman's "The Next Voice You Hear" (1950), she plays "Mary Smith," the pregnant wife of factory worker James Whitmore. She's a typical 1950s suburban housewife in the June Cleaver mold, the hard-working mother of a young son, wife of a disillusioned and disagreeable man. There's absolutely nothing riveting about her. In fact, she seems banal and unreasonably submissive to her boorish husband.
The gimmick of the film is that a voice proclaiming itself to be God comes on the radio in prime time one evening, telling everybody to "take it easy" because he'll be chatting with them over the radio for the next several nights.
Whitmore's "Joe Smith," the film's Everyman, has lost his faith, so he's rather anxious to believe in such miracles. Wife Mary, however, looks for a rational explanation.
"Maybe it's one of those Orson Welles things," she tells him. "Did it sound like Lionel Barrymore?"
Still, for all its simplistic moralizing, the film does do one thing positive for Nancy Davis: It gradually shows her inner strength, the characteristic that most admirers of the present-day Nancy Reagan rate highest among her plusses.
In truth, the strength of Nancy Davis's character shines through some of her most thankless roles, perhaps most notably in the sci-fi classic "Donovan's Brain" (1953), in which she's the strong, loving wife of scientist Lew Ayres. His mind is being taken over by the still-living brain of a tyrant, kept alive by Ayres in his remote laboratory. When he starts to act corrupted, Nancy stands by her man. (Ironically, Ayres also was Jane Wyman's co-star in her Oscar-winning "Johnny Belinda.")
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Somehow the camera captured in the young Nancy Davis, the poise and resolve that would become commonplace for the older Nancy Reagan. But those qualities weren't star-making ones in the 1950s. Nancy Davis wasn't glamorous or chic in the 1950s -- and certainly not sexy. She was a young Dorothy McGuire at a time when producers wanted young Ava Gardners and Marilyn Monroes. With her high necklines and long hemlines, she wasn't getting anybody excited.
Yet the mature, much more self-confident and attractive Nancy Reagan is a character Nancy Davis would have grown into naturally as an actress: A woman of iron will and awesome determination. I think it's fair to say she could have played tough or mean-spirited women quite well as a mature actress, but I wonder what Nancy might have done with more hot-blooded roles, like the Rosalind Russell part in "Picnic" or the Meryl Streep role in "The Seduction of Joe Tynan"?
What the young Nancy Davis needed was a script that required her to let down her hair and show us the fire in her belly. I believe Nancy always had that fire inside. You don't become the imposing woman she is today without plenty of fire to draw upon. But the Hollywood casting people just never saw it. Like her husband, I think she could have created some classic nasty characters on screen if anybody ever dared to try one on her for size.
The movie star phase of Nancy Davis's career ended in 1958 with Columbia's "Crash Landing," a low budget Sam Katzman picture that most critics called a knockoff of "The High and the Mighty." It wasn't exactly a splashy sendoff like her husband's "The Killers" turned out to be six years later.
Nancy continued to act in TV drama through 1962, appearing on such shows as "Wagon Train," "87th Precinct" and "G.E. Theatre," which her husband hosted for many years. (They even co-starred in one episode with the incredibly prophetic title, "Turkey for the President," in 1958.)
Surely, their political allies must be grateful that Nancy, the actress, never did any nude scenes or kinky roles that might have come back to haunt them during her husband's political career. There's nothing about her movie career that ever became a political liability. More likely, that experience was a considerable asset to the Reagans because it must have taught her a lot about living a life under constant public scrutiny.
© 2000 by Ron Miller. The Photo from "Hellcats of the Navy" © 1957 by Columbia Pictures. "The Next Voice You Hear" © MGM/UA Home Video. "Hellcats of the Navy" video box from Columbia TriStar Home Video. Photo from "Donovan's Brain" © 1953 United Artists.
The Films of Nancy Davis
Nancy Davis began her movie career with an unbilled bit part in the classic David O. Selznick romance "Portrait of Jennie" in 1948. The films listed below represent her official screen credits:
"East Side, West Side" (MGM)-(1949) with Ava Gardner, Barbara Stanwyck, James Mason. Director: Mervyn LeRoy
"The Doctor and the Girl" (MGM)-(1949) with Glenn Ford, Gloria DeHaven, Janet Leigh. Director: Curtis Bernhardt
"Shadow on the Wall" (MGM)-(1950) with Ann Sothern, Zachary Scott. Nancy Davis is billed third. Director: Patrick Jackson.
"The Next Voice You Hear" (MGM)-(1950) with James Whitmore. Nancy is co-star billed. Director: William Wellman.
"Shadow in the Sky" (MGM)-(1951) with Ralph Meeker, James Whitmore. Director: Fred M. Wilcox
"Night into Morning" (MGM)-(1951) with Ray Milland, John Hodiak. Director: Fletcher Markle.
"It's A Big Country" (MGM)-(1951) with Gary Cooper, Ethel Barrymore, Gene Kelly, Fredric March. Directors: Charles Vidor, Richard Thorpe, John Sturges, Don Hartman, Don Weis, Clarence Brown, William Wellman. (Anthology film)
"Talk About A Stranger" (MGM)-(1952) with George Murphy. Director: David Bradley.
"Donovan's Brain" (UA)-(1953) with Lew Ayres, Gene Evans. Director: Felix Feist.
"Hellcats of the Navy" (Columbia)-(1957) with Ronald Reagan, Arthur Franz. Director: Nathan Juran.
"Crash Landing" (Columbia)-(1958) with Gary Merrill, Roger Smith. Director: Fred F. Sears.
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