A common fun fact about 40th President of The USA Ronald Reagan is that he was first an actor! Everyone’s least favorite president wasn’t just a fascist, he was also union-busting, commie reporting hack at Universal! From here he slowly veered right and started using his platform to plug neo-liberal policies… but were his movies that good?
BEDTIME FOR BONZO
Movie overall: 6/10
Reagan’s performance: 6/10
Personal rating: 4/10
Average group rating: 6/10
Ronald Reagan works through his daddy issues to prove he can be a good father to a monkey. Everyone's character is fairly decent except specifically for Peter who seems to not care for anyone in the slightest (until the very end when he narrowly escapes being arrested over his monkey son stealing jewellery because his parents are divorcing). Probably the only movie on Reagan's roster that can be called a comedy, it's underwhelming to say the least. Reagan's character spends most of the movie not actually caring about anything other than his need to prove a point (ie. his fiance, his reputation, the monkey he's raising like his son) and continually blowing off everyone in favor of nothing in particular. In the happy ending, he leaves his fiance for the woman he was raising the monkey with despite never actually showing any sort of development in his relationship with her. The clip of Peter kissing Jane and then bonzo does a backflip in reaction to this made me laugh unreasonably hard.
SPECIAL FEATURE: RORY REVIEW
If there’s anything Jordan Peele’s 2022 horror/scifi film Nope has taught us, it’s that chimpanzees are 4 foot murder machines with an insatiable taste for human blood. This proposes the following question; who would win in a fight, a chimpanzee, or Ronald Reagan?
Bedtime For Bonzo was Ronald Reagan’s foray into the world of wacky movie primates, in which he hires a nanny to help him raise the titular chimp Bonzo to help fix his daddy issues and prove he can marry his girlfriend. An unnamed imdb user once described it as “...a masterful piece of film-making, an epic in the truest sense of the word and by far the finest gangster film ever shot. Made with finesse, style to spare and a director that elicits pitch-perfect performances from a talented cast, this is movie making as it should be…” this is objectively a sentence that can be said, as a result of free will, regardless of how true it is. In the film, Ronald Reagan’s character Peter spends the majority of the runtime sneaking around with his nanny (Jane ??? I think ???) behind his girlfriend’s back and playing house. Some particularly interesting moments I remember include but are not limited to;
Peter and Jane referring to each other as “Mama” and “Papa” in front of the monkey
Him KISSING HER GOODBYE ON THE MOUTH every morning
Them supposedly sleeping in the same bed ????
Him somehow being surprised that she fell in love with him
Them running off into the sunset to be together at the end of the movie
The obvious highlight of this movie is the funny monkey shenanigans. The two leads will be having a faux marital spat then the camera would cut back to Bonzo, where it’s almost played like this chimp is upset at their argument. He also screams a lot and the mic peaks and that is funny. And he rides a tricycle once, which is funny. He also steals a really expensive necklace but learns the value of doing the right thing and returns it.
This movie taught me a lot about monkeys. And about bedtimes. Hence me falling asleep during the movie with 20 minutes left. I give Bedtime For Bingzoid a 6/10, because even though it lowk made no sense and will not stick with me, it was a funny monkey movie.
KINGS ROW
Roxy and rory score: 3/10
Movie overall: 6/10
Reagan’s performance: 7.5/10
Average group rating: 4.5/10
This movie dragged and it had way too many major plot points. The first major one is that the main character, Parris’s childhood sweetheart, began to lose her mind just like her mother had, so her father poisoned her and then shot himself to prevent parris from being “stuck” with her and losing his chance to be a great doctor. This motivates Parris to become a psychiatrist, so he moves away. There is a very long sub-plot where his grandmother dies and this subplot holds little actual significance other than giving parris a chance to quote her at the end and decide between telling his friend a painful truth or putting a normal woman in an insane asylum for discovering said truth, which is framed as a difficult decision for our protagonist who is a psychiatrist. Reagan’s character, Drake, had a wavering role, becoming very relevant when he's down on his luck after losing all his money and then when he has his legs amputated after a work accident and becomes withdrawn. Admittedly, Drake shows a wide array of emotions not seen in other Reagan movies I've watched where he habitually smolders through every line and hopes that counts as acting. His triumphant laughter, breaking him free from his withdrawal and shame about his disability (though poorly timed and honestly not a great way to wrap up a movie) was sold pretty well so extra points for Reagan on this one. Other scenes such as “RANDY, WHERE'S THE REST OF ME?” came off odd, where i would have expected a visceral panic or disgust he seems to convey the loud but shy fear a child might display after a nightmare– he saves the scene with the way he faints, his body limp and face obscured in darkness. The movie overall, though there are fragments of ideas of morality or insanity or the idea of self, feels oddly pointless despite its themes. This movie is usually used to argue that Ronald Reagan CAN act, and sure enough he could, just not well.
THIS IS THE ARMY
Overall: 8/10
Reagan’s role: 5/10
This movie is a “musical” but not really a story based one so much as it is a compilation of army themed acts and numbers with a bit of story to contextualise the army relief show for the first 30 or so minutes of the movie. The acts themselves are extremely impressive, and it was an enjoyable watch with a fabulous amount of drag, much to my surprise. Unfortunately given the time this movie was released in, there was a minstrel/vaudeville act (which, by the way, was fairly dated even when the movie was released, AND a character in the movie comments on this). Reagan's role occurs in patches throughout the movie with a little arc about his character being drafted and then refusing to marry his lover out of fear of leaving her a widow. Eventually he marries her during one of the “this is the army” acts and it's a happy ending. I begin to understand what people mean when they say Reagan “can’t act”; he isn't a sloppy or overtly bad actor but he shows very little genuine emotion so even though you're convinced he IS the character, you hate the character. Why he was typecast for melodramas I really couldn't say.
I gave up on trying to find some deus-ex diamond in the rough, I think I’ve seen enough here.
To conclude, Ronald Reagan wasn’t so much an actor turned politician, but a born politician who did a short stint union busting while he masqueraded as an actor. I regret self inducing the headache that is Ronald Reagan movies and my only comfort is perhaps that he is looking up at us as his movies continue to be criticised 60 years later. I hope my friends can forgive me for making them watch these with me and vote on them.
