G-Man! (1953)

D. Richard McCarthy
Brutal, torn from the headlines, B&W

Here's a film strangely neglected in Ronald Reagan's oeuvre, which is peculiar as it’s clearly and utterly so perfectly him. In fact it's so amazingly and absolutely him that this is probably what his wet dreams looked like.

Here he is as John ‘Duke’ Calhoun, a tough and uncompromising FBI agent running a hard-nosed operation against vicious gangsters in some unnamed American city. These gangsters are evil with a capital EVIL. You can tell from the way they sneer, or menace shopkeepers, or casually gun down one of their molls. Or you can tell by the way they run jazz clubs and sell reefer to further corrupt the wastrel patrons. Or you can tell by the way they have a comic book factory where soulless, conscience-less artists turn out violent and filthy comic strips to corrupt the young. Or you can tell by the truly damning fact that each night they salute the hammer and sickle and say thanks to their beloved Mother Russia.

Yes, Ronald Reagan is taking on communists, gangsters, jazz musicians (a couple of years later it would have been rock'n'roll) and comic books all wrapped up in one tight little bundle. Yes, he is on a crusade against everything a good right winger hates.

Part of that of course needs unpacking, as how could organised crime ever really be perceived as a communist activity? Surely the mafia is all about the profit margin, all about the bottom line, all about ruthlessness to keep their cash flow gushing. The cosa-nostra is really not interested in some higher principle or changing the world, they just want to be shady little capitalists and make lots of dough. If anything Ronald Reagan (government employee taking a paycheque from the state) is much more of a communist than they are. But it’s indicative of the muddy thinking of this film that everything bad has to be put into one pile, and everything good has to take one incredibly righteous Ronald Reagan shape. So even though these mobsters are clearly into gambling and prostitution, and obviously being creative with their revenue streams by publishing “disgusting and cruel” comic books (Reagan’s character’s description), they are still somehow men of the far left who despise the free market. They are working to destabilise all that’s good in America, i.e. capitalism, in the aid of communism, and they’re doing it by being the best capitalists they possibly can be. Please, don’t hurt your head by trying to get all this to make sense – it really, really doesn’t.

Ronald pushes the whole thing along – from every raid on a seedy nightclub, to the numerous interminable self-righteous speeches about the glory of America – in what is irrefutably one of his angriest and most committed performances. I can't say it’s a work of acting art, or even really that good, but evidently he believed furiously and wholeheartedly in it.