The plot of Crime by Night focuses on private eye Sam Campbell (Cowan) who is on vacation with his secretary-partner, Robbie Vance (as played by Jane). They become involved in a murder investigation. Harvey Carr, the father-in-law of Larry Borden (Stuart Crawford), is found dead from a blow by an ax. Borden’s promising career as a concert pianist had ended in a fight with Carr, who had chopped off Borden’s hand with an ax. Therefore, Borden was a prime suspect in Carr’s murder, perhaps as an act of revenge for destroying his musical career.
Borden is Campbell’s friend, and he and Robbie (that is, Jane), arrive to help. Eleanor Parker was cast as Irene Carr, the daughter of the murdered man and Borden’s ex-wife. She arrives on the scene as another dead body, that of the gardener, turns up.
Irene shows up with Paul Goff (Charles Lang), a singer whom she intends to marry. He also arrives with his agent, Ann Marlow (Faye Emerson).
Complications ensue in the thickening plot, which spins around a Nazi spy ring. Carr, the murder victim, owned a chemical plant. At first, Goff is a suspect until he is also murdered.
SPOILER ALERT: Ann Marlow (Emerson) turns out to be the culprit, a Nazi spy. Ironically, at the time, after her marriage to Elliott Roosevelt, Emerson was set to move into the White House, the nerve center of the United States’ War direction against the Nazis.
As a reviewer in The New York Times asserted, “The real crime in Crime by Night are the people who made it, forcing the audience to sit through 72 minutes of tedium. At my viewing, many patrons walked out after the first thirty minutes.”
***
Leaving Fort Roach, based on wartime orders from his superiors, Reagan returned to Warner Brothers. He later wrote, “It was a thrill for me once again to be a part of the picture business.” His assignment involved playing a key role in a feature film, This Is the Army (1943), a sometimes bizarre wartime musical produced by Hal B. Wallis and Jack Warner. The screenplay was by Claude Binyon and Casey Robinson. Robinson had written the script for Kings Row.
The movie was based on Irving Berlin’s hit Broadway musical of 1942. He had produced a roughly equivalent show as a morale-booster during World War I called Yip, Yip, Yaphank. Money earned for the 1943 movie version, eventually totaling some $12 million, would be donated to the Army Emergency Relief Fund.
At the time, Reagan was drawing a monthly stipend from the Army of $250. He was told that even though he was starring in the film, he would get no additional salary from Warners. However, the non-enlisted civilian star of the movie, song-and-dance man George Murphy, would draw around $28,000.
In addition to Murphy, other major stars would be cast in the film, along with some 300 Army men and sailors from the U.S. Navy. Before the war, most of these had been singers or actors in civilian life.
For the most part, Reagan was impressed with the cast which the film’s director, Michael Curtiz, had assembled. Although he considered Curtiz temperamental and difficult, he had gotten along with the Hungarian when he’d helmed Errol Flynn and him in Santa Fe Trail.
Jane claimed, “I was seriously pissed off when I didn’t get to play Ronnie’s girlfriend in This Is the Army.” Instead, the part went to “sweet little Joan Leslie,” depicted above.
If Jane had gotten the part, she could have worn her own uniform. In the summer of 1942, as a public relations statement partly based on her success in selling War Bonds, she was commissioned in the Army Air Corps as a 2nd lieutenant. Jane was proud of it, however, and insisted, “I deserved the part.”
In addition to Murphy and Reagan, Curtiz had cast “sweetheart sweet” Joan Leslie, plus supporting players who included George Tobias (Reagan’s co-star in Juke Girl) and Alan Hale, Sr. (Reagan’s co-star in Tugboat Annie Sails Again).
Other veteran performers included Charles Butterworth, Rosemary DeCamp (the mother of the character portrayed by Reagan), Una Merkel, Stanley Ridges, Ruth Donnelly, and Dolores Costello, once hailed as “the goddess of the silent screen.” Personalities who included Kate Smith, Frances Langford, Gertrude Niesen, Victor Moore, Joe E. Louis, and Berlin himself appeared as themselves.
On his first day back at Warners, Reagan was ushered into Curtiz’ office, where he was concluding an acrimonious phone conversation with an irate Bette Davis. Curtiz slammed down the phone. “The patriotic bitch wants to be in my movie. She can’t sing or dance. She’s no soldier. When I cast bitch in Cabin in the Cotton (1932), I called her a ‘goddamn nothing no good sexless son of a bitch.’ But we made up when I lick pussy. She likes pussy licked. We made five more films after that, but not this one, god-damn it.”
At some point, Reagan asked Curtiz, “Exactly what type of boy is Johnny Jones, the one I’m to play?”
“Who gives a fuck?” Curtiz exclaimed. “No one cares about character. I make it so fast nobody notices. Don’t argue with me. I’m Best Director.” He pointed to a table where his Oscar for Best Director rested. He’d won it for the 1942 Casablanca, with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. “Bogie’s a shit. Bergman fuck him, she fuck me, she’ll fuck any round object.”
“Your role no special shit,” Curtiz continued. “Any actor at Warners under thirty-five can play it. You run around calling people to stage and turning down offers of Joan Leslie who wants to marry you so she can get fucked. You want to wait until war’s end. You claim you don’t want to make her widow. She finally wins and you get fuck. You don’t actually fuck her on screen, fool. You and Leslie can stage private exhibit for me. I like to watch. Usually, I hire a big black buck to fuck young blonde gal. That’s my favorite.”
Curtiz told Reagan their film meant a lot to him. “I escaped from the Nazis. Members of my family not so lucky. They die at Auschwitz.”
“Right now at Warners I ride high. Tomorrow, I might fall off horse. You no make dough at box office, you are tossed into gutter with garbage.”
Actors who became career politicians: Reagan with George Murphy in a scene from This is the Army. Murphy steered Reagan from left to right.
Then Curtiz summoned Joan Leslie into his office and introduced her to Reagan. A latter-day film historian would write: “Sweet, perky young things were a dime a dozen in Hollywood’s heyday, but Joan Leslie stood out as a highly appealing and engaging young actress with some flashes of genuine talent.”
George Murphy, who had tap-danced his way to fame in 1930s and early 40s musicals, was cast as Reagan’s father. “And I never let him forget it,” Reagan said. Actually, he was only nine years older than Reagan, having been born a “Connecticut Yankee.”
This Is the Army opens in 1917, with Murphy portraying a fast-talking vaudeville performer who gets drafted. In World War I, after a severe injury to his leg, he can’t perform any more, although he can walk around with a cane. As Reagan admitted, “It took a lot of makeup and a gray dye job to make George look like my father.”
Although the two men had known each other for years, Murphy became president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) in 1944. It was during this time that the two performers bonded.
[Reagan later referred to Murphy as “my own John the Baptist,” whatever that meant. In time, Murphy became a politician, serving as a Republican in the U.S. Senate from 1965 to 1971, representing the State of California. He became the first notable U.S. actor to make the transition from the movies into politics, predating both Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, each of whom served as governor of California.
Beginning with This Is the Army, Reagan and Murphy became lifelong friends. “When I met Ronnie, he was a nearly hopeless hemophiliac liberal. But I changed his mind, although it took a lot of talking. As a liberal, he backed all the wrong causes. It was a struggle, but I eventually turned him into a benighted Republican. I made him realize that our Republican philosophy of self-reliance, as opposed to the welfare state, was in keeping with his own ideals and not those of mad-dog Democrats who like to give away the store.”]
Reagan experienced an embarrassing moment when he stood on a replica of a Broadway stage with
Murphy and Curtiz. The director was stridently demanding the beginning of the movie’s big number, which included the singing and dancing of dozens of soldiers.
[In those days, the military was segregated.]
“BRING ON THE WHITE SOLDIERS!” Curtiz bellowed.
After the men were in place, Curtiz yelled, “BRING ON THE NIGGER TROOPS!”
Murphy politely corrected him, telling him that N word was offensive, not only to blacks but to him.
“I’m sorry,” Curtiz said. “BRING ON THE COLORED NIGGERS.”
During the first week of filming, Reagan was introduced to Irving Berlin at least five times, in as many separate venues. “He never seemed to remember that we’d met before. One day, he sat through the rushes and greeted me with, ‘Young fellow, I just saw some of your work. You’ve got a few things to correct—for example, the huskiness in your voice—but you really should give this business some serious consideration when the war is over.”
Reliable, stalwart and solid: Reagan as the competent but unflashy announcer for the frequently bizarre military/theatrical revue This Is the Army.
Cast in a very minor role was Craig Stevens, who was seven years younger than Reagan. Like Jane, he was from Missouri. Since 1939, he’d been cast in minor parts, although he and Reagan would co-star in a film together after the war.
As Reagan privately confessed to Murphy, “I was starting to worry a bit about Craig. I invited him to share my dressing room, but he praises my body and my looks too much, whether I’m in or out of my clothes. He also brings me gifts as if he’s courting me. I was going to confront him. How wrong I would have been.”
“How so?” Murphy asked.
“One day, he introduced me to this beautiful actress, Alexis Smith,” Reagan said. “He’s going to marry her. I’m now so comfortable with Craig that I even piss with him at the urinal without suspecting him of checking out my dick. He’s definitely not a homo.”
“My boy, you can be rather naïve about some things,” Murphy said. “Haven’t you ever heard of a bisexual?”
“Frankly, I don’t believe such a thing exists. You’re either straight or you’re a homo. Guys who pretend otherwise are just bullshitters.”
For their appearances in This Is the Army, Curtiz asked many of the soldiers—“I selected only pretty boys”—to appear in drag. “Many guys seemed only too eager to dress up like gals,” Curtiz told Reagan. “Do you think it’s possible that the Army is infested with homos?”
“Definitely not,” Reagan said. “It’s against Army policy to enlist homos. They weed them out at induction centers.”
“So you say,” Curtiz said. “I think many of them slip in anyway.”
Reagan never recovered from the day Hale appeared on the set of This Is the Army in a blue dress with long blonde curls inspired by something from a silent Mary Pickford movie. He was not too happy being in drag. “Alan, would you go out on a date with me after the show?” Reagan asked.
“Why don’t you go fuck yourself?” Hale suggested.
“Wait till Ward Bond and John Wayne hear about this,” Reagan said. “I want to be the first to tell them.”
With some other soldiers in drag, Hale performed in a number called “Ladies of the Chorus.”
When the Breen office saw the film, wherein U.S. soldiers danced merrily together in drag, they exploded in fury and violently objected. They demanded that such scenes be cut. Jack Warner refused.
Breen also interpreted many of Berlin’s songs as “too suggestive.” Again, Warner refused to eliminate them from the film, and contacted the War Department, which warned the Breen office “to take a hike.”
“There’s a war on, in case you bluenoses never heard that,” General Hap Arnold told Joseph Breen during an angry phone call. “I’ll decide what our boys can see or not see, and I want them to see this picture.” Then he slammed down the phone on Breen.
Not politically correct in today’s terms, the film also included an unfunny minstrel number entitled “Manny,” in which dozens of white soldiers, about half of them in drag and all of them in blackface, performed a “coeducational” song and dance number that by today’s standards seems surreal.
Reagan found himself the butt of the song, “This is the Army, Mr. Jones.” He had not one memorable scene, but acquitted himself well, although outclassed by the massive array of stage talent surrounding him.
All the dancing white soldiers were shown up by the film’s showstopper, the black troupe of the James Cross Company performing a fast-moving and ultra-energetic number entitled “That’s What the Well-Dressed Man in Harlem Will Wear,” a reference to Army khaki.
At the revue’s end, the soldiers learn they are being immediately shipped, that very night, to Europe. They march through the theater with rifles and full military gear, hurriedly kissing their (weeping) mothers, wives, and girlfriends adios, and moving out and into a waiting convoy of trucks.
The film was a big hit, earning some $12 million for the Army Emergency Relief Fund.
In spite of his lackluster performance, Reagan fitted in perfectly with the patriotic mood of the country. For the first and only time in his life, Box Office Record, in reference to the 1942-43 season, gave him the highest ranking of any male star in Hollywood. With 195 points, he topped a list that included runners-up James Cagney at 186, Bing Crosby at 176, Clark Gable at 171, and Cary Grant at 169.
“I’m king of the hill,” Reagan shouted into a phone at Jane when notified of his standing.
Although he would hardly have believed it at the time, that moment in his life represented his peak as a Hollywood movie star. In terms of what pertained to his career as an entertainer, everything after that would run downhill.
***
Doughgirls: Ann Sheridan (left), Alexis Smith, Jane Wyman.
For her final film of 1944, Jane Wyman found herself reunited with her friends, Ann Sheridan and Jack Carson, in The Doughgirls, a wartime bedroom farce about the housing shortage in Washington. Also cast were the Reagans’ newly minted friends, Alexis Smith and her handsome boyfriend (soon to become her second husband), actor Craig Stevens
Carson, in the role of Arthur Halstead, has married his girlfriend, Vivian, and he books a honeymoon suite for them. But he soon learns that Jane has moved in her friends, Edna (Sheridan) and Nan (Smith), who can’t find lodgings elsewhere. Not only that, but they, too, have newly minted husbands, Sheridan having hooked up with John Ridgely and Smith with Stevens.
The young women—Jane, Smith, and Sheridan— soon face complications when, for somewhat contrived reasons, the marital status of each of them is unexpectedly defined as illegal by the authorities When Vivian learns that she is unmarried, she boots Carson out of their quarters. In his frustration, he refuses to pay the hotel bill unless Vivian moves out her girlfriends. Subsequently, she is forced to pawn her earrings to settle the bill.
Doughgirl: Eve Arden as a gun-toting Soviet socialist.
In the meantime, Arthur’s boss, Stanley, played by Charles Ruggles, pursues Jane, although the mating of the pixie-like comic and Jane seems preposterous. He was fifty-eight at the time.
Eve Arden was cast as a Russian guerilla fighter, Natalia Moskarova, who is sent over from the Russian Embassy as yet another roommate. Although miscast, it was obvious to the other stars that Arden was a major threat as a scene stealer. She played the role in its broadest sense, lacking the subtlety of Greta Garbo’s performance as a die-hard Soviet communist in Ninotchka (1939).
A play by Joseph Fields, The Doughgirls, had been a hit on Broadway in 1942, running for 688 performances. The brother of the famous lyricist, Dorothy Fields, Joseph was both a playwright and director, having scored two previous Broadway triumphs, My Sister Eileen (1940) and Junior Miss (1941).
Although Jack Warner was willing to bid only $40,000 for the screen rights to Gone With the Wind (1939), he put up an astonishing (for the time) $250,000 for the movie rights to The Doughgirls.
Of course,
he knew that the Broadway script was “too spicy” for the movies, and that he’d have to remove any suggestion that the couples were living together and having pre-marital sex. Much of the racy dialogue of the play would also have to be rewritten into something much more bland.
James V. Kern was hired to write the screenplay with Sam Hellman. For some unknown reason, Warner also designated Kern as director of this prestigious project, even though he’d had no experience in that field.
Jane expressed at the time her disappointment with Kern both as a writer and as a director. [Later, however, she changed her mind about Kern, a New Yorker. “I met him when he was still green. He’d been a lawyer, ditching that career for show business. He really found himself when he became a director of TV series in the 1950s, doing hundreds of shows, including the I Love Lucy series with my friend, Lucille Ball, and in the early 60s, My Three Sons, with Fred MacMurray.”
At the time of her involvement with Kern in The Doughgirls, however, Jane complained to him about the way he’d written her character of Vivian. “You’ve made me a little harebrained, witless figure. I mean, some of the lines I’ve been given make me squirm. When I hear that Alexis and Craig are going to have lunch at the White House with FDR, I make the ridiculous claim, ‘I enjoyed the president in Princess O’Rourke.’ As you well know, I was the co-star of that movie. The President didn’t appear in the film. I read the script for the Broadway play. My character of Vivian had far more spice.”
Jane also complained to Mark Hellinger, the producer. “I noticed you billed me in fourth position, under Alexis. I’ve been a star at Warners, and Alexis is the new girl on the block.”
“Sorry, Jane, but my billing stays,” Hellinger said. “Case closed.”
Love Triangle: Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman, & Nancy Davis (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) Page 59