The Killers (Don Siegel, 1964)

Cast: Lee Marvin, John Cassavetes, Angie Dickinson, Ronald Reagan, Clu Gulager, Claude Akins, Norman Fell. Screenplay: Gene L. Coon, based on a story by Ernest Hemingway. Cinematography: Richard L. Rawlings. Art direction: Frank Arrigo, George B. Chan. Film editing: Richard Belding. Music: John Williams.

Kings Row (Sam Wood, 1942)

Ann Sheridan and Ronald Reagan in Kings Row

Cast: Ann Sheridan, Robert Cummings, Ronald Reagan, Betty Field, Charles Coburn, Claude Rains, Judith Anderson, Nancy Coleman, Kaaren Verne, Maria Ouspenskaya, Harry Davenport, Ernest Cossart, Ilka Grüning. Screenplay: Casey Robinson, based on a novel by Henry Bellamann. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Production design: William Cameron Menzies. Film editing: Ralph Dawson. Music: Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

Fifteen years before the producers of Mark Robson's version of Peyton Place tangled with the enforcers of the Production Code, the producers of Kings Row went through a similar ordeal. Like the Grace Metalious novel on which the later film was based, Henry Bellamann's Kings Row was a sensational picture of small town sordidness and hypocrisy that had to be sanitized against the pecksniffery of the censors. Screenwriter Casey Robinson had to eliminate incest, a gay character, and any hint that the young residents of Kings Row were actually having sex and enjoying it. Robinson's evasions were artful, though sometimes at the expense of the characters: Dr. Tower's murdering his daughter, Cassandra, and then committing suicide seems a little less credible when the incestuous relationship of father and daughter is excised. Still, Kings Row holds up well enough, thanks in large part to solid production values, especially James Wong Howe's cinematography and one of Erich Wolfgang Korngold's best scores. Today, the movie is probably most remembered for giving Ronald Reagan one of his best roles, one that he was so proud of that he borrowed his most famous line from the film, "Where's the rest of me?", as the title of his autobiography. He's well supported by Ann Sheridan, and the cast also includes such always watchable character actors as Claude Rains, Charles Coburn, Judith Anderson, and the hammy but lovable Maria Ouspenskaya. Unfortunately the film's leading role went to Robert Cummings, never the most skillful or charismatic of actors. He's not terrible, but he brings no credibility to the role of Parris Mitchell, supposedly a gifted medical student and amateur pianist. It's this void at the center of the movie that perhaps makes people remember it as a Ronald Reagan film.

Dark Victory (Edmund Goulding, 1939)

Geraldine Fitzgerald and Bette Davis in Dark Victory

Cast: Bette Davis, George Brent, Humphrey Bogart, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Ronald Reagan, Henry Travers, Cora Witherspoon, Dorothy Peterson, Virginia Brissac. Screenplay: Casey Robinson, based on a play by George Emerson Brewer Jr. and Bertram Bloch. Cinematography: Ernest Haller. Art direction: Robert M. Haas. Film editing: William Holmes. Music: Max Steiner.

Absurd but hypnotically entertaining, Dark Victory is one of the essential Bette Davis movies, if only because she has a great character arc to follow: from spoiled rich brat to repentant dying woman. It was nominated for three Oscars (picture, actress, score) but won none of them -- it was 1939, of course, the Hollywood annus mirabilis dominated by Gone With the Wind. This is the one in which Humphrey Bogart plays an Irish stablemaster with the hots for Davis's Judith Traherne and Ronald Reagan plays an alcoholic playboy whom a later audience would easily spot as her gay best friend. In the end it's her brain surgeon, played by George Brent, who wins her, but not before the brain tumor he has failed to remove kills her. Geraldine Fitzgerald is the faithful friend who sees her through at the end, and together she and Davis make the moment more moving than mawkish.