The Gipper's dark side

Reagan played the villain in his last movie -- a cynical gangster flick called "The Killers" -- and it's a perfect antidote to the deluge of adoring media coverage.

By Charles Taylor

Jun 8, 2004 | "I believe in larceny. Homicide is against my principles."

That's Ronald Reagan speaking, in his last film role as mobster Jack Browning in Don Siegel's 1964 "The Killers." It was the only time Reagan ever played a heavy, and according to costar Clu Gulager, he despised the film. "Ronnie is a nice man," Gulager quickly adds.

A nice man would despise this movie (made for NBC and then released in theaters after the network turned it down for being too violent). Cold, mean and unrelievedly brutal, "The Killers" radiates cynicism and contempt and cruddiness. It's a movie that opens with blind people being slapped around by a pair of hit men (Lee Marvin and Gulager who, in a touch that feels like a sick joke, wear dark glasses) and ends with every major character dead. Forty years later, it also works as a prophetic shadow history of Ronald Reagan's political career and the America that career brought forth. "The Killers'" window on Reagan's dark side may be the best antidote to the Reagan hagiography.

Over the course of "The Killers," the idea of watching Ronald Reagan as a brutal mob boss seems at first a thrilling act of self-desecration on Reagan's part; by the end of the movie, it seems perfectly reasonable. Throughout the movie, the familiar and predictable break free of their moorings. You feel as if you should be able to dismiss it as just another cheesy gangster movie. And yet its sordidness adds up. By the early '60s, the classical Hollywood studio filmmaking of the '30s and '40s had become mummified. Made on the cheap at Universal (as nearly everything at the studio was then), "The Killers" reeks of that calcification. There isn't a breath of fresh air or reality in "The Killers." The movie is filled with obviously phony rear projection and cardboard sets that can't convince you for a second that you're seeing real streets, hospital rooms, hotels, flophouses. No place in this movie seems like anywhere that anyone real could actually exist. And Universal's notoriously cheap color processing renders everything washed-out, sickly, flat.

In other words, its relation to the Hollywood films that had preceded it is exactly the relation of Reagan's white-picket-fence vision of America to the real thing -- a false, shallow copy stripped (thanks to Don Siegel's brutally efficient direction) to its basest motives. The movie may be shallow, but it's not dead. In fact, it's obscenely alive. Like the America Ronald Reagan would bring about, this is a place where ruthlessness is business as usual, and the line between enterprise and thuggishness has blurred. By the end of the film Reagan's Jack Browning is heading his own development corporation. Essentially, he's still in the same business. But if a Contra can become a "freedom fighter," a hood can become a respectable businessman. "Somewhere in California," is how one of Browning's flunkies answers Marvin and Gulager's hit men when bullied to reveal his boss's whereabouts. It's as if Browning had simply disappeared into the Golden State, the way the man who plays him nearly had.

Next Page: His heart, challenged by the facts

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