This movie shocked me. I have been studying film noir for a while, and they all touch upon madness to one degree or another. However, hardly any film noir of the 1940's and 1950's reached this far down into madness. I think until David Lynch's 1986's "Blue Velvet" there really wasn't such a nightmarish vision of small town America in mainstream film.Unlike many of the reviewers here, I thought Robert Cummings performance was terrific. He was able to suggest a homosexual relationship between himself and Drake (Ronald Reagan) without making it too explicit and he also shows a genuine deep love for his childhood girlfriend Cassie. Cummings shows intelligence and passion and real anguish when gets hit with a sudden tragedy.Betty Fields as Cassie was amazing. She captured insanity about as well as any actress I have ever seen. Her abrupt exit from the story is as disconcerting as Janet Leigh's abrupt exit from "Psycho".The biggest disappointment was Ronald Reagan. His character of Drake is an idiot and Reagan can certainly be credited with playing him as an idiot very well. He is totally bland and forgettable through the first half of the movie.He has a catastrophic accident that makes him a cripple and his reaction is bizarre. It is hard to believe that anyone would say "Where's the rest of me?" under such circumstances. He says the line almost as if saying, "where's my underwear?" or "where's my socks." Reagan's character doesn't really change after his catastrophic accident, he does go from being cheerful to depressed for a while, but his depression seems as much related to his losing his wealth, and his homosexual lover Parrish leaving him, as to his becoming handicapped. When he regains his wealth through a real estate scheme, he more or less regains his cheerful demeanor.We're supposed to like Reagan because although he is wealthy, he is even willing to marry Randy (Ann Sheridan), a girl from a working class family. He does not believe in class distinctions. He even shows respect for the girl's parents. He's a rich young romantic and when he loses his wealth and becomes handicapped, we do feel sorry for him, as we would for anybody in those circumstances. Yet his range of emotions remains limited and rich or broke, athletic or crippled, he remains a simpleton.Ann Sheridan is charming playing the faithful Randy, although one never believes she really loves Reagan or would marry him after his accident. She's not really given much chance to show or explain her love.. Its not a showy part for her. Betty Fields and Nancy Coleman as girls driven insane by their doctor fathers really had the meatier roles in this one.This film is the flip side of "Our Town" and shows the demented inner side of an American Town. I like to think that Grover's Corners was more like life for most Americans in the late 1800's and early 1900's than Kings Row. If it had not been for the extreme Catholic/religious censorship in Hollywood, we probably would have seen more Kings Row type towns. The mean townsfolk of Cape Briton, Nova Scotia we see in "Johnny Belinda" are sweethearts compared to the townspeople of Kings Row.There was a ban on showing Ronald Reagan films during the presidential campaigns that Reagan participated in. This was lucky for Reagan, I'm sure if this film had been shown anybody who watched it would have voted against him.

KINGS ROW is a very good but uneven movie. However, the overall film is well worth seeing despite its shortcomings.The film is set in the fictional town of KINGS ROW towards the end of the 19th century. It begins with several children and shows their adolescent dreams and friendships. Soon, the story jumps ahead a decade and you see them as young adults--noticing how they have changed for the better or worse.Parris Mitchell (Bob Cummings) is the star of the film--especially the first half. He has grown up with a reasonably wealthy family and has a dream of going to Vienna to study with the greatest doctors in the world. However, he needs to work with a local doctor, Dr. Tower (Claude Rains) to study to have any hope of passing the entrance exams. At the same time, he's infatuated with Tower's daughter, Cassandra (Betty Field)--though they've seen little of each other since they were young. This is because, oddly, Dr. Tower took Cassandra out of school at about age 10 and has kept her as a recluse of sorts in their home. Later, Parris and Cassandra begin seeing each other secretly--with hopes of marrying.Drake McHugh (Ronald Reagan) is a brash young man with a trust fund. He's Parris' best friend and he seems to live only to have a good time. He's not particularly serious but also a generally likable fellow. However, he's fallen for Dr. Gordon's daughter--and Gordon (Charles Coburn) absolutely refuses to allow his daughter to see him. As for Gordon, he's a a sanctimonious and judgmental old man who seems to have little regard for his patients--particularly the ones he finds morally "objectionable". With these despised patients, he often refuses to use anesthesia when operating--a way to pay them back for their wickedness! Later in the film, Doc Gordon has a chance to treat the hated Drake.Only around the middle of the film do we get to see Randy Monaghan (Ann Sheridan), though oddly she gets top billing. While Ann Sheridan did great in the film and you couldn't help but admire her performance, she was not the star of the movie. Instead, she and Drake begin dating and after Drake suffers a horrible accident, she is his strength and support.The movie is a very long and involved soap opera. I heard it once described as being a lot like PEYTON PLACE, though KINGS ROW seems to have less of an emphasis on sex (at least in the movie). Oddly, the first half of the movie or so is almost like a separate film. It's good, but the second half is much more exciting and emotionally charged. The first half is mostly devoted to Parris and his relationship with the Towers. The second half is more devoted to Drake, though Parris is still an important part of the film. There are many interesting plot elements I have not mentioned because getting into the plot with any more depth would spoil the film.As for performances, although the focus was mostly on Bob Cummings, his role was relatively unexciting to watch. He was a very good man and you liked him, but his emotional range didn't need to be great. However, despite receiving third billing, Ronald Reagan really stood out in the film--even more than Sheridan's fine performance. Although initially a rather dull character, later in the film his life underwent many tragedies and Reagan displayed a very believable emotional range--much greater than you'd see in his other films. Frankly, here he is great--whereas in most of his other films he's wooden and less than appealing. It's interesting to see that when given excellent material and direction, he was a fine actor.At the beginning of the review, I said that this was a good but uneven film. Part of this I have already alluded to--how it's like two separate films and the first one is far less compelling than the second. However, the real serious unevenness is because sometimes the director handled dramatic moments beautifully--such as the scene with Reagan in bed after his accident. This and many other moments were done with such deftness and grace that they really pull you into the film. I know I was nearly ready for a box of Kleenex at these moments! Sadly, though, there were some moments here and there that were just sappy as well. In particular, the very end was just terrible. As Reagan has his big dramatic breakthrough, you hear swells of almost angelic music and this huge burden disappears INSTANTLY!! This scene was done in about one minute--and should have been done in at least five to ten. The entire ending was rushed and sloppy. Perhaps since the movie had already gone on for over two hours they felt a need to do this. I would have been much happier had they either trimmed some off other parts of the film instead or just lengthened the film more. It was upsetting to invest this much time in the movie and just have a cheap and manipulative ending.Overall, despite my many complaints about the unevenness, the great moments are so many and the film is such a wonderful showcase for Reagan and Sheridan that I strongly recommend it. My teenage daughter usually doesn't love these sort of films but she watched it with me. In the beginning, she was a bit critical but towards the end, I could see her interest increase tremendously. She also said the movie was good but uneven--that's a chip off the old block!

Besides providing Ronald Reagan with his career role and the title of his pre-presidential autobiography, Kings Row is a finely crafted piece of film making by director Sam Wood. The film got Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director and Best black and white Cinematography for James Wong Howe.Incredibly though, the rich musical score that Erich Wolfgang Korngold did was overlooked by the Academy. That's the thing you will take away from watching the film, even more so than Ronald Reagan's anguished cry of 'where's the rest of me'.The story takes place at the turn of the last century with an interlude of ten years from 1890 to 1900 where we see the leads as children first and then as adults. Despite Ronald Reagan getting all the notice here, he's actually third billed in the cast. Above him are Ann Sheridan and Robert Cummings and it's really the Cummings character whom the film is centered around.King's Row is the town these folks inhabit, purportedly based on Fulton Missouri, the hometown of author Henry Bellamann. This may be set in Missouri, but don't expect no Tom Sawyer like story. If in fact the novel is based on Bellamann's experiences growing up, he must have had one Gothic childhood.Sam Wood assembled an incredible cast of supporting players, like Claude Rains, Judith Anderson, Charles Coburn, Harry Davenport, Minor Watson, Nancy Coleman, and Kaaren Verne. Coburn and Anderson are the parents of Coleman and they don't like the fact she's keeping company with Reagan who's playing the entire Kings Row field. In addition Coburn is a doctor who is also a sadist, he does things like perform operations without use of anesthetic. I'm sure he had heard of Dr. Morton and his successful use of ether by this time.The best in the cast though is Claude Rains, something he usually was in a lot of films. He's another doctor, totally different from Coburn. He's a famous medical practitioner who has chosen to hide himself away in this small and obscure town. He's got a wife who never comes out and a daughter who grows up to be Betty Field who is suddenly and abruptly taken out of school as a child. It's with him who Robert Cummings studies medicine with to pass the examination and go to school in Europe to become a doctor.Rains's tragic story is what sets in motion the rest of the story that climaxes with Reagan's anguished cry. Rains creates such a mysterious and sad air about him that you think about him more than anyone else in the movie. Kings Row begs comparison to Our Town which is partly set in the generation where the Cummings, Field, Reagan, and Sheridan characters all grow up. Grover's Corners has its share of tragedies as well as happy times.Kings Row and Our Town should be run back to back in order to see what I'm referring to. It's not a bad double bill, in fact quite a literate one.

Two boyhood pals from the 1890s grow into young adults with tumultuous lives: Robert Cummings is the studious kid who moves away from small town America to study psychiatry in Vienna (!), while Ronald Reagan loses all his money in a bank swindle and has to find work on the opposite side of the tracks. Intelligent, if melodramatic, adaptation of Henry Bellamann's novel isn't particularly well-directed (nor is it sharply edited, as the scenes and transitions could use more verve and snap); however, it does have Reagan at the peak of his acting charms, and his strong performance really carries this a long way. Cummings, whose make-up job causes him to resemble an actor from the silent era, is less interesting, and the supporting performances are variable, but film is still quite absorbing and entertaining. Excellent music score by Erich Korngold, handsome cinematography by James Wong Howe. Though a Best Picture nominee for 1942, the movie was originally set for release the year before, with Warner Bros. getting cold feet and putting it on ice. Once they did release it, the film failed to find much of an audience. **1/2 from ****