OVP: Kings Row (1942)

Film: Kings Row (1942)
Stars: Ann Sheridan, Robert Cummings, Ronald Reagan, Betty Field, Charles Coburn, Claude Rains, Judith Anderson, Maria Ouspenskaya, Harry Davenport
Director: Sam Wood
Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Picture, Director, Cinematography)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Ann Sheridan-click here to learn more about Ms. Sheridan (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We are only two films into the career of Ann Sheridan as our January star, and I'm already starting to note a really strange pattern-Ann Sheridan gets top billing when she probably shouldn't.  I'm hoping, since I'm trying to learn about her as a leading woman, that this doesn't continue for our final two pictures, but last week she received second billing for The Man Who Came to Dinner when really the star of the film was the then-unknown Monty Woolley.  This week, while she's again one of the leads, few would argue that she's actually the lead of this film where she receives top billing, instead the film focuses more on up-and-coming actors Robert Cummings and Ronald Reagan.  Kings Row is the best-known Sheridan film we're going to profile this month (give or take Angels with Dirty Faces, it's her best-known film period but I couldn't easily get a copy of that 1938 film), so I was excited to investigate to learn more about Sheridan (as well as to take a look at what is widely considered to be Ronald Reagan's best performance), and left kind of floored-Kings Row is a pretty sordid melodrama, one based on an even more scandalous book, that for 1942 comes across as quite shocking.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is a soap opera with a lot of plot, but here's the gist of it.  Essentially it's two alternating tragic love stories, both started in childhood and then continued into adulthood.  The first, that takes up the top half of the movie is between Cassie (Field) and Parris (Cummings), and the back half is dominated by the relationship between Drake (Reagan) and Randy (Sheridan).  Both have a lot of intrigue and mystery behind the relationship.  With Cassie & Parris, she is largely ostracized by her classmates for having a strange mother (who clearly suffers from some sort of dementia), and is pulled out of school/society as a young girl, though she never stopped thinking of Parris as her first love.  Parris, as an adult, tries to gain the respect of her father (Rains), and secretly starts to see Cassie, but she's now nervous, frail, and constantly paranoid about being found out and about seeing the world.  At the halfway point of the movie, she is killed by her father in a murder-suicide after she makes plans to run away with Parris.  At this point, Parris flees to Vienna to become a well-respected doctor, and the plot shifts to his lothario best friend Drake, who is engaged to the doctor's daughter (Nancy Coleman), but her parents (Coburn & Anderson) disapprove of such a man dating their daughter, and as a result he ends up in the arms of the (literally from the wrong side of the tracks) Randy.  After a freak accident, Drake's legs are amputated by the doctor, and he is forced to deal with being crippled & broke (oh, right, his money was stolen by a banker-forgot to mention that).  Eventually, now a psychiatrist, Parris finds out the doctor had been a Mengele of sorts and there was no need for Drake's legs to be amputated (he had done this to anyone in town he considered "dirty"), and he must tell Drake the truth.

Following so far?  If you are, you're doing better than I did.  Kings Row is, despite being just over 2 hours long, probably 2 hours too short to accomplish this level of plot.  For example, the film's most harrowing scene (Reagan screaming after seeing that his legs are gone "Where's the Rest of Me?!?", a line he would later title his 1965 memoir), pairs really poorly with the jolly-good moment where Drake finds out that his legs were not stolen by an accident, but by the father of a scorned daughter.  Looking to the book, we find that there's a lot seedier explanations for what in the movie comes across as intentionally veiled.  For example, it's pretty clear in the book that the relationship between Cassie and her father is incestuous, and that both Parris & Cassie and Randy & Drake consummated their relationships before marriage.  In the movie, they managed to slyly sneak in that Cassie is pregnant if you look below the surface, but in the book it's not entirely clear whether or not she's pregnant with Parris's baby or her father's.  They entire cut out a gay character from the novel who tries to put the moves on Parris, and it's pretty glossy over the sadistic surgeon, framing him more as a "father scorned" than as a true monster of the community.  Watching Kings Row, I realized it's that rare classic film that would be primed for a more modern telling that's loyal to the book-HBO, if you want me to get writing it, let me know.

The film received three Academy Awards, for Best Picture, Director, and Cinematography, none of which feels quite right but is understandable given the circumstances.  The movie isn't exactly good even if it's usually entertaining, throwing in too much plot and overstuffing with a lot of clutch-the-pearls moments to keep the audience entertained.  The cinematography feels relatively standard, though some of the closeup shots and especially the way that James Wong Howe frames Betty Field's face is intriguing.  Still, it doesn't feel like particularly inventive work, especially the year after Citizen Kane.

Sheridan, our star of the month, literally doesn't show up in the movie until we're 64 minutes into the picture.  I want to say Dev Patel probably takes that long to get into Lion (I haven't taken out a stop watch there, but it feels about right), but otherwise can you think of another film where the top-billed star doesn't show up until we're an hour into the movie?  Sheridan, for her part, is not as much fun as she was in last week's The Man Who Came to Dinner.  I liked her scenes where she tries to justify the casualness of her fling with Drake (it's pretty clear she doesn't consider him a potential-husband, but he's good in the sack so she's keeping him around), but once she becomes the doting girlfriend/wife, she loses all sense of personality with Drake and her performance suffers as a result.  Reagan (and I don't know that I'll ever say this again considering his abilities as an actor) is the best part of the film, particularly as a fun-loving rake in the first half of the movie, and it's easy to see how he became a star.  It's a pity he couldn't have translated this into some of his other performances, and we might have been spared his political career.