Kings Row (1942)

Kings Row was a nominee for Best Picture of 1942. Ostensibly, it's a film about five children in a small town whose lives have taken some remarkably different paths as they grow up. However, the main focus is on two of those children, the ones played as adults by Robert Cummings and Ronald Reagan (yes, the two men). Cummings plays a man named Parris studying to become a doctor with a specialization in psychiatry; he is, perhaps unsurprisingly, in love with the daughter of the specialist he studies with (played by Claude Raines with his usual gusto) in his home town. Reagan is a sort of playboy, a guy named Drake who dates a lot of different women while waiting for his full inheritance so he can become a businessman.

Much of the plot is about the interactions of these two characters with three women in the town, all of them women the men have known since childhood. One is, of course, the daughter of the strange psychiatrist, and she's locked away in her father's mansion for most of the movie without a full explanation as to the reasons for her confinement. (There's always something suspicious going on when a girl has to be locked away, isn't there? Too bad we never quite know what it is in this case.) Another is a girl who loses her virginity to Reagan's bad boy; her father is the local quack doctor (hold that thought for just a moment). The third is a girl from the "wrong side of the tracks" (no, quite literally, in this case). After Drake is forced to take a menial job on the railroad, the two of them fall in love, and she stands by him even after a work-related injury leads to the doctor (yes, that one) amputating both of his legs, perhaps out of anger for Drake's treatment of his daughter years before. Sounds a bit like a potboiler, doesn't it? However, thankfully, Parris returns after studying psychiatry in Vienna (where else does one study psychiatry around 1900 if not in the hometown of Sigmund Freud?) to help everyone begin the healing process. It plays much better than I've made it sound here.

I want to single out Reagan's performance, in particular, as one of the best things about this movie. He's quite charming during his earlier scenes, and after tragedy befalls him, he manages to make the audience feel the depth of his suffering. This was probably his best role, and it's credited as being the one that made him a star. The look on his face when he realizes that he has been swindled out of his fortune demonstrates that he was indeed a good actor. And his scenes at the end of the film reveal just how emotionally and not just physically wounded Drake is. I was never that fond of Reagan's politics, but you can see in a film like Kings Row why he was so popular even as a politician. He has a likable quality to him that seems genuine.