Morgan had a natural spontaneity and winning charm. As he kissed Jane’s hand, he said, “What a bonny lass. I know that sounds corny, but Jack Warner has ordered me to act more Irish.”
“Actually, I was born in Wisconsin to a Swedish father and a Scottish mother. But Warner plans to cast me Irish.”
“Your secret is safe with me,” she said.
“For keeping it secret, I’ll sing ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’ one night to you.”
“I can hardly wait for that moment,” she said, flirtatiously.
“I’m supposed to be the new boy on the block at Warners,” Morgan told Jane. “I’m hot, at least according to the publicity, but you may not agree with my build-up.”
“But I do,” she said. “You look like a dream walking. I hope I’m not being too forward. I just blurted that out without thinking.”
“I love hearing that from you, Button Nose,” he said. “I might even belt out a song for you right now.”
“I know what a great voice you have,” she said. “Ronnie took me to see The Great Ziegfeld (1936). You were dazzling when you emerged dressed to the nines and looking gorgeous, surrounded by a birthday cake of the most beautiful women in the world. I practically swooned when you sang ‘A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody.’”
“I hate to disappoint you,” Morgan said, “but those idiots over at MGM dubbed my own singing voice and substituted that of Allan Jones instead. I can sing so much better than he can.”
“I’m sure that’s true,” she said. “That won’t happen at Warners.”
“Already, the attacks on me have begun,” he said. “Today I read that I’m being referred to as a ‘muscle-bound canary.’”
“We have to expect that in this business.”
“I’d like to get to know you better,” he said.
“For you, I’ll be an open book,” she said. “But for now, you’ve got to go. If you stick around for another minute, I’ll fall madly in love with you. After all, I’m only flesh and blood.”
He kissed her on the cheek, but hadn’t gone far until he glanced back at her, promising, “I’ll be back!”
Flight Angels opened to predictably bad reviews, Variety claiming, “It’s as obvious as the nose on your face and a typical Grade B second feature.”
Another critic, Clive Hirschhorn, wrote, “The corn is high as an elephant’s eye (8,000 feet, to be precise) in this soap opera of the air, which zeroes in on the private lives and public duties of air stewardesses and the men who pilot planes in which they serve. Romance, drama, and excitement cohabit shamelessly in Maurice Leo’s familiar screenplay.”
Years later, Morris recalled fondly his working on that picture and on other films with Jane, Reagan, Eddie Albert, Priscilla Lane, and Jane Bryan. “We were the ‘One-for-All and All-for-One’ Society of Busy Bees. ‘B,’ of course, for B pictures. But those days were fun.”
***
After Lewis Seiler directed Jane Wyman in Flight Angels, he helmed her husband, Reagan, that same year in Murder in the Air (1940). This would be the fourth (and last) film in which Reagan would star as secret agent Brass Bancroft.
He was reunited with his friend and confidant, Eddie Foy, Jr., who had starred with him in Smashing the Money Ring. John Litel, who had interpreted the role of his boss in the first Bancroft film, returned to the series in the same role of Saxby. The British actor, James Stephenson, was a familiar face, having co-starred with Reagan in Cowboy from Brooklyn, Boy Meets Girl, and Secret Service of the Air, each of the three released in 1938.
“Hello Sailor.” Brass (Reagan) Bancroft with Foy, embarking on his secret mission.
In their latest endeavor, Stevenson would interpret the role of the spy, Joe Garvey, who speaks with an intentionally indeterminate foreign accent. He directs an allegedly patriotic society with hints of Fascist bad-guy overtones, “Loyal Naturalized Americans.”
With a length of 55 minutes, Murder in the Air was the shortest of the Bancroft films, but also the best for fight scenes and aerial combat on the screen. Reagan’s increasing number of female fans, as well as his gay ones, thought he looked “really cute” in his sailor uniform and swooned when he appeared shirtless.
As the war deepened in Europe, the United States was still not officially involved, although the FBI and other agencies were arresting alleged saboteurs and ferreting out spies on the home front. Even though he fully recognized the commercial value of releasing a film about the spy industry into espionage-crazed America in 1940, Jack Warner accused the producer, Bryan Foy, of “stretching a five-paragraph story on page eighteen into five or six reels.”
To beef up the plot, Bryan Foy had obtained footage of a dirigible crashing into the ocean. Scriptwriter Raymond Schrock was ordered to configure that footage into the film’s dramatic climax.
After a well-known spy is killed in a train wreck, Reagan, as Brass Bancroft, is ordered to assume his identity and penetrate the inner circle of the spy ring. That part in the film turned out to be a bit of a stretch for his acting ability. One reviewer found his impersonation of an America-hating tough guy unconvincing. “Reagan is just too clean-cut and patriotic to be a Nazi spy.”
Brass Bancroft’s goal in the film involved preventing the spies from obtaining a new super weapon, a death ray projector that could destroy any airplane within a distance of four miles. [It was widely speculated in some quarters that Hitler already possessed such a weapon.] In the film, the death ray was called “The Inertia Projector,” the ownership of which will determine the outcome of the war.
Of course, as anticipated, our hero, Reagan, will save the day and bring down the plane in which the chief bad guy—assisted by his use of the death ray—is making his escape.
Future historians have noted that in the 1980s, President Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative”— more commonly known as his Star Wars plan—was inspired by memories of the death ray, whose concept he had been so closely involved with during his crafting of Murder in the Air.
Reagan, as Brass Bancroft, on the verge of both a scary discovery, and an attack from James Stephenson.
Prior to Reagan’s involvement, the film’s title had been renamed twice. Previous names had included both The Enemy Within and Uncle Sam Awakens before they were declared as not commercial enough. The title that eventually stuck was Murder in the Air. According to Jack Warner, “‘Murder,’ the audience understands, and ‘In the Air’ makes it all the more intriguing.”
Long before it became notorious to liberals, HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee) was presented favorably in the film, a life-supporting voice that warned about the dangers of saboteurs and spies who operated destructively within the fabric of the American infrastructure.
The film’s attack on “Reds” and “Wobblies” (a pejorative name for labor unions) provided a preview of Reagan’s future as a conservative politician.
Among the many studios in Hollywood, Warners had become anti-Nazi before MGM, Fox, or Paramount. In 1939, Warners’ had released Confessions of a Nazi Spy, starring Edward G. Robinson. Because America was supposedly neutral at the time, that film had set off a wave of protests.
“Jack had a lot of balls to make this anti-Fascist film,” Reagan said after seeing the movie.
Some congressmen had accused the Warners, especially Jack and Harry, of “warmongering.” Immediately after its release, Murder in the Air was banned in Germany, Japan, and in some Latin American countries, including Argentina.
Months before its script went before the cameras, Jack’s brother, Harry Warner, had delivered a blistering speech before the American Legion. He called upon Legionnaires to “fight unwelcome un-American forces. Drive them from their secret hiding places, destroy their insidious propaganda machines, and drive out the ‘Bunds’ and their leagues, their clans and Black Legions, the Silver Shirts, the Black Shirts, and the Dirty Shirts!”
After the release of Confessions of a Nazi Spy, the censors at the Breen Office wanted to
avoid another controversy about America’s neutrality. In an early draft of Murder in the Air, a coven of saboteurs, obviously German, were ripping apart railroad tracks as a means of derailing an oncoming train. Censors demanded that the scene be reshot and the saboteurs reconfigured as members of “mixed nationalities.”
The months before America went to war represented a troubled time, with opinions sharply and rancorously divided. German Americans were raising loud objections against an unfavorable depiction of their homeland. Irish Americans opposed Lend Lease, America’s initiative that sent supplies and equipment to a battered Britain, Ireland’s long-standing oppressor. Many U.S. senators remained firmly isolationist, urging Americans to stay out of “Europe’s War.” Reagan learned that the Breen office was often, at its core, anti-Semitic, blaming Jews, not Hitler, for the troubles in Europe.
Even at that early stage, Reagan was aware of the dangers of Fascism. He was firmly committed to the belief that America was in imminent danger of an attack. He endorsed the first draft of Murder in the Air, with the full realization that it was obvious pro-American propaganda. Within a relatively short time, he would be making propaganda films for the War Department.
Originally Murder in the Air had opened with stock footage of goose-stepping Nazis on (malevolent) parade. The chief of the Secret Service proclaimed in a voice-over, “Once again, the world is rushing headlong into a maelstrom of death and destruction which would wipe civilization from the face of the earth.”
After depicting the horrors of Europe, the screen turns peaceful, showing America going about its daily pursuits, feeling secure in its policy of isolation. But warnings are sounded that espionage agents are seeking to paralyze American industry, bomb its defense plants, and destroy its natural resources.
The Breen office demanded that these anti-German scenes be removed. However, some of the footage of the original version remained, wherein against a backdrop of fires and explosions, a headline reveals the gravity of the situation—PRESIDENT PLANS NATIONWIDE DRIVE ON SPIES AND SABOTEURS.
Reagan was already familiar with Lya Lys, the actress cast as Murder in the Air’s leading lady. He had already seen her performance in Confessions of a Nazi Spy. In this newest film, she’d been cast as the scheming and crafty Hilda Ryker, who exposes Brass Bancroft’s cover when he is on the trail of the spies.
Although he played a villain in Murder in the Air, Stephenson, in Confessions of a Nazi Spy, had been cast as a British Military Intelligence Agent. In Confessions, Lys had been cast as Erika Wolff, the mistress of Dr. Karl Klassel (Paul Lukas) who arrives in America to rally support for the Nazi cause among German Americans.
When Reagan met Lys, she had just married John Gunnerson, a Chicago vending machine manufacturer who had once been married to the famous silent screen star Anna Q. Nilsson. During the shooting of Murder, Lys used Reagan as a kind of Big Brother confidant, pouring out her woes. “After being married to John for only three days, I realized it was a mistake.”
He found Lys an intriguing woman, originally thinking she was German, having been born in Berlin. But she told him she was actually French and Russian.
Three years older than Reagan, she was among a group of French actors who had arrived in Hollywood in the late 1920s to make French language versions of American films. Their members included the future matinee idol Charles Boyer.
Lya Lys, a European actress, fled the Nazis, refusing to make propaganda films for Josef Goebbels.
Lys told Reagan that in the 1930s, she had returned to Paris to star in the surrealistic film by Salvador Dalí and Luís Buñuel, L’Age d’Or, delivering her finest performance.
She returned to Paris during the late 1930s, and was appearing there in a play entitled The King’s Dough when war broke out. “I was among thousands of refugees fleeing Europe,” she told Reagan. “But I couldn’t get passage on a ship sailing from France. I was told to use a Scandinavian port. On the way to Denmark, I was detained for three days by the Nazis, even though I had become an American citizen. It seems that Josef Goebbels wanted me to stay in Berlin and make propaganda films for the Nazis at UFA Studios. Like Marlene Dietrich, I refused. They finally let me go, warning me never to return to Germany, telling me that if I did, I would be imprisoned.”
Rightly thinking that Murder in the Air was a timely film, Warners geared up a massive publicity campaign, unusual for a programmer. In real life, Reagan had a morbid terror of flying, but in Warners’ publicity releases, he was depicted as an ace pilot with a reputation for daring parachute jumps.
His friend, Foy Jr., asked him if he were embarrassed, in spite of his aversion to flying, at being promoted as a modern day Charles Lindbergh.
“It’s all fantasy, my dear friend,” Reagan said. “You forget we slave every day in a dream factory. Since when did Hollywood ever concern itself with telling the truth?”
Warners’ Publicity Department devised a marketing plan wherein young boys across the country, for a fee, could join the Junior Secret Service. Membership included an 8” x 10” autographed photo of Brass Bancroft, signed by Reagan himself.
Ads across America asked countrymen to join Reagan in battling what was defined as “A Fifth Column of up to 20,000 secret and concealed enemies” seeking to sabotage America’s infrastructure and to steal America’s secrets. Schools were urged to set up essay contests, addressing the question of, “What steps do you think government must take to combat espionage and spying?”
Variety wrote that Murder in the Air “is strong on novelty in the Buck Rogers vein,” and The New York Tribune pronounced Reagan “a dashing hero and a two-fisted man.” But despite their patriotic preachings, Brass Bancroft movies did not routinely receive good reviews. One critic interpreted Reagan as “a heroic youngster playing Bancroft with vigorous conviction as he faces danger.”
As Reagan moved into the 1940s, his increasing popularity was reflected in an avalanche of fan mail. Warners’ mail department claimed that he was receiving almost as much fan mail as Errol Flynn.
[Writing in 2010, the Memphis-based film critic John Beifuss said, “The Warner archive collection of Brass Bancroft films raises a question. Why aren’t these movies better remembered today? Is it because Reagan was a bit too immature and (even then) square to appeal to kid audiences, while also a bit boyish (and the films too juvenile) to interest adults? Whatever the reason, they’re worth rediscovering for old movie buffs in general and for Reagan fans in particular.”]
***
Carole Landis no longer called, especially after Reagan got serious about his relationship with Jane Wyman. He figured that the sexy blonde starlet had moved on with her life, although he’d always been attracted to her.
Variety had reported that she’d landed the female lead in an A-list picture, One Million B.C. (1940), opposite a muscle-bound newcomer, Victor Mature. It appeared that he was being groomed for stardom. Reagan had seen pictures in the newspapers of this actor, with his muscular frame, thick lips that opened to a toothy smile, and slick waves of dark hair. Variety also noted that in One Million B.C., Mature as a skin-wearing caveman would battle giant lizards while projecting grunts at Landis.
One night, when Jane was involved in an evening shoot, Reagan called Landis, who agreed to meet him at an out-of-the-way club. He signaled that now that he was married, it would not be a romantic date, but a “chance for old friends to catch up.”
She agreed to meet with him with the understanding that she’d have to leave before nine o’clock, for an important engagement.
Over drinks at the Blue Parrot, she told him how thrilled she was to be starring as the lead in a new movie. “I think it’s going to make me a star. Of course, I have to wear skimpy animal skins and show off my body, but what the hell. Today, Victor Mature and I had to shoot a scene in this tree where a fifteen-foot python slithers down to join us. I nicknamed it Pete. The film is being directed by Hal Roach, Senior and Junior. They had to film a dozen takes because Vic is deathly afra
id of snakes. I’m sort of a tomboy and wasn’t scared. However, I wasn’t quite prepared for my closeup with Pete when the god damn reptile darted his tongue out to give me a kiss.”
Rather abruptly, he asked, “How’s your love life?”
“Now that you no longer come around, I’ve found a beau or two. Of course, as anticipated, Vic comes on strong with me. He’s the son of an Italian-speaking immigrant knife sharpener from Kentucky. Roach has signed him to a contract at $250 a week. When one of his talent agents discovered him, Vic was living in a tent on the bank of a small river in San Fernando Valley, where he bathed every morning. Getting fucked by him is like having a log shoved up you.”
“That doesn’t sound like much fun,” Reagan said. “Are you and Zanuck finished?”
“Not at all,” she said. “He keeps promising to make me a star. I still come running whenever he calls me and summons me to his office for love in the afternoon. All business at Fox slows down between noon and 2pm, when he takes his conquest of the day.”
“I gathered you’ve moved,” Reagan said.
“I rented this little bungalow at 1130 South Clark in Los Angeles. It’s a neighborhood filled with underpaid studio employees and young actors hoping for the big break.”
At the end of their meeting, Landis wrote down her new address and phone number. “One night when there’s a full moon, why don’t you drop in?”
“I love seeing you, but it doesn’t seem that you have any night free.”
“You’ve got a point there, gorgeous,” she said. “What the hell! For old time’s sake, you can at least give me a lip-lock before we depart.”
***
After making eight B pictures in 1939, Reagan had grown impatient with producers or directors who never cast him in quality movies. He knew his days as the King of the Bs were numbered. Since no one would offer him a good script, he decided to write one himself, although he was not a writer. Jane volunteered to help him, but since she was far less well educated, her writing skills were even worse than his.
Love Triangle: Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman, & Nancy Davis (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) Page 35