Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [73]
Murder in the Air, which Reagan began shooting a few days after the war started in Europe in September 1939, was originally titled The Enemy Within and briefly retitled Uncle Sam Awakens before its release in early 1940. It was the fourth and last in a series in which he played Brass Bancroft, a nonchalantly heroic Secret Service agent who defends America from smugglers of illegal aliens, international counterfeiters, foreign sabo-teurs, and home-grown subversives.122 These were the films in which he earned his self-described reputation as the “Errol Flynn of the Bs,”123 with
“one fight per every 1000 feet of film.”124 To promote the third in the series, Warner Bros.: 1937–1941
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Smashing the Money Ring, Warners filled theater lobbies with fingerprint booths, wanted posters, and “crime clue boxes,” in which patrons were encouraged to drop the names of suspicious neighbors.125 Murder in the Air introduced a futuristic weapon that could shoot enemy aircraft out of the sky, and the trailer beckoned: “Join Ronald Reagan battling 20,000 unseen enemies to protect . . . the most deadly weapon ever known to man . . . a death ray projector . . . the greatest force for peace ever discovered.”126
International Squadron, the other Reagan movie cited by the Clark committee, actually opened with an on-screen dedication to the men of the RAF and, like all Warners war movies, was made with the full cooperation of the Department of Defense. “I was a rascal who ferried Lockheed bombers to London, joined the R.A.F., and squared all my sins by taking a suicide mission,” Reagan would describe his role as a bomber pilot in this “timely production about the Battle of Britain. . . . Twin engine Lockheed planes were rolling off the line a few blocks from the studio and being flown directly to England. If we needed one of those in our picture, we’d jolly well use it in a Lockheed hangar from 8 p.m. until 4 a.m. and then it was on its way to a real war.”127
According to Stephen Vaughn in Ronald Reagan in Hollywood, “Warner Brothers estimated in 1940 that it based a fifth of its movies on newspaper headlines.”128 Historians have suggested that this was where Reagan’s tendency to blur fact and fiction, to dramatize the political with the anecdotal, began, and point to the death ray projector as the model for his Strategic Defense Initiative, commonly known as Star Wars, forty years later. Yet as his description of the use of U.S. military planes in International Squadron indicates, Reagan was quite aware of the difference between the fake and the real, and of the ironies that grew out of basing the former on the latter.
Lest anyone miss International Squadron’s pro-British message, Warners flew Bebe Daniels and Ben Lyon from London for the splashy premiere in Dixon. This American comedy couple had become immensely popular in England for continuing to broadcast their weekly radio show during the darkest days of the Blitz. In Dixon they gave interviews to the local press in which they spoke of the fear and bravery of the English people, who had lived through nine months of nightly air raids by the Luftwaffe during the previous fall, winter, and spring.129
It’s clear which side Reagan was on—that of his bosses at Warners and his idol in the White House. As someone who avidly followed the news, he was keenly aware of the desperate situation in Europe—Hitler’s troops 1 2 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House had laid siege to Leningrad, and German submarines were blockading Britain, trying to stop American supplies