Tue 30 Jun 2015
Reviewed by Jonathan Lewis: Two 1950s RONALD REAGAN Movies.
Posted by Steve under Action Adventure movies , Reviews , Western movies[9] Comments
THE LAST OUTPOST. Paramount Pictures, 1951, Re-released as Cavalry Charge. Ronald Reagan, Rhonda Fleming, Bruce Bennett, Bill Williams, Noah Beery, Peter Hansen, Hugh Beaumont, Lloyd Corrigan. Screenwriters: Geoffrey Homes, Winston Miller, George Worthing Yates Director: Lewis R. Foster.
The Last Outpost was Ronald Reagan’s first Western film and it’s a darn good one. Directed by Lewis R. Foster, the movie initially feels like it’s going to be just another B-Western about the U.S. Cavalry in the American Southwest. After all, all the stock-in-trade characters are there: the corrupt white man who runs the local trading post; the beautiful girl from back East who’s out of place in the sparsely populated desert; and the newly arrived U.S. Army officer.
But if you’re just a little bit patient, you’ll find that The Last Outpost is a surprisingly charming, funny, and action-packed movie with a plot that’s complex, but never convoluted.
Reagan portrays Confederate Army Captain Captain Vance Britton, a Baltimorean who signed up to fight for the Gray, rather than for the Blue. He’s in charge of a Confederate Cavalry brigade positioned out in Arizona. His task is to harass the U.S. Army posted out in the remote desert country. Things get complicated for the always affable Captain Britton (Reagan) once he learns that not only his brother, Col. Jeb Britton (Bruce Bennett) is now stationed at Ft. Gil, Arizona, but that his ex-girlfriend, Julie (Rhonda Fleming) is there too.
As if that weren’t enough drama for one man to deal with, the Apaches are about to go on the warpath, threatening Whites from both the North and from Dixie.
Can our hero successfully win back the girl, make amends with his estranged brother, and defeat the Apache? I think you know the answer to that one, but getting there is well more than half the fun in this altogether financially successful film from Pine-Thomas Productions.
HONG KONG. Paramount Pictures, 1952. Re-released as Bombs Over China. Ronald Reagan, Rhonda Fleming, Nigel Bruce, Marvin Miller, Mary Somerville. Director: Lewis R. Foster
Before there was Indiana Jones, there was Ronald Reagan.
That’s the impression I had watching Hong Kong, a rather middling adventure film starring the future President as Jeff Williams, an ex-GI turned arms merchant living in China during the Communist takeover. While on the run from the Reds, Williams takes a young Chinese orphan boy under his wing and teams up with the lovely schoolteacher, Victoria Evans (Rhonda Fleming), as the two make their way by plane to Hong Kong.
Williams may not carry a whip and he’s no archaeologist, but he sports a leather jacket and has his eye on a priceless work of art. There are a couple of bad guys hot on his trail too.
But while Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom, another film with a leather jacket wearing hero, a Chinese boy, and a girl, had an edge to it, Hong Kong is a rather plodding affair with little tension and even less adventure.
Reagan is a formidable screen presence, no doubt, but his character is just too nice for his own good. Even when he tries to be rapacious, he just can’t bring himself to go through with it.
It’s not that I necessarily wanted the character he portrayed to be a bad guy or sell the orphan down the river, so to speak, as much as I wanted him to be a little more hard-nosed. It’s supposed to be Hong Kong in the late 1940s after all.
July 1st, 2015 at 5:42 pm
Wasn’t SANTA FE TRAIL (1940) Reagan’s first Western?
July 1st, 2015 at 5:59 pm
Dan,
Technically, you’re right. That was the one where he starred with Errol Flynn. I always thought of that one as more of a Civil War-epic than anything else, though, the John Brown aspect and all. But that always begs the perennial question: what is a a Western?
July 1st, 2015 at 7:34 pm
In spite of the title, SANTA FE TRAIL doesn’t take place any farther west than Leavenworth, Kansas, which is how I opened my review of it way back here:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=28409
It’s an entertaining movie, no doubt about it, but reading my review again was a good reminder of just how many historical facts they got wrong.
But would I call it a western? Borderline, just maybe.
July 1st, 2015 at 8:16 pm
I think since Warner’s was billing Flynn as the “Million Dollar Roy Rogers” anything vaguely in the West was meant to be a Western and they would not have called it SANTA FE TRAIL (which they never get more than 1000 miles from) if not to attract a Western audience.
OUTPOST is his first Western of the modern era, and since it too is a Civil War story you have to count SANTA FE even if it messes up a great lead in (yes, I did copy editing).
RR’s Westerns in this era are usually quite good if only minor A fare, but he works best I think in something like TENNESSE’S PARTNER with John Payne or MAVERICK QUEEN with Barbara Stanwyck with strong star support. He never quite carried an A picture for me without it.
HONG KONG is one of those where they tried and failed to toughen up his image. It’s a bit like watching Mister Rogers try to play Indiana Jones. Even his sometimes acclaimed bad guy in THE KILLERS didn’t work for me. He was a capable light actor who with the right material could do something interesting (KING’S ROW), but he seldom rose above the material as HONG KONG needed.
OUTPOST though is a damn good western with good performances and thanks to Daniel Mainwaring (Homes) a better script than most.
July 1st, 2015 at 8:30 pm
I haven’t seen HONG KONG but your Mr Rogers analogy makes sense to me (and made me smile, broadly). As a bad guy in THE KILLERS, his performance was woefully bad.
July 2nd, 2015 at 10:22 am
In regards to the discussion of westerns, do you consider DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK and THE LAST OF THE MOHEGANS to be westerns? Also wasn’t the recent film JONAH HEX billed as a western even though the story took place in southern states bordering the Atlantic Ocean?
July 2nd, 2015 at 4:39 pm
I’d call those two Frontier Fiction. Don’t know about JONAH HEX. It doesn’t sound like a western to me.
Westerns, to me, are set in a certain time and place, 1850 perhaps and into the 1920s. For some reason, I tend to think of Nebraska and Kansas are not being in the West, but of course both are as far west as the Dakotas, Oklahoma and a good chunk of Texas. I don’t know what to make of that.
July 3rd, 2015 at 3:01 am
Western is also a time period, and while just before the Civil War qualifies the French and Indian Wars and American Revolution do not.
Giving the greatest leeway I will call roughly what Louis L’Amour and Will Henry called Western a Western, which would be roughly a frontier story set in the 19th Century from roughly 1803 to 1918 and including the Mexican Revolution and Pancho Villa. Any earlier than that is not a Western.
However the West at various times included places like Ohio, Indiana, and others most of us don’t think of. At the very least the Texas Revolution of 1836 is within the Western era thought the true old west we think of is only roughly 1867 to 1890 at most.
July 7th, 2015 at 12:53 pm
There are contemporary westerns, or, as WWA and others call them, stories of the west. And since Gold Rush stories in Alaska and Mountie stories have long been northerns, I’ve had no problem referring to THE LIGHT IN THE FOREST and the DANIEL BOONE tv series as easterns.