Donna Reed

She was the symbol of gentle femininity through 40 movies, most of which were B efforts.  Donna Reed had good parts in two incredibly famous films, one of which would see her win an Academy Award for best supporting actress, and the other is a national treasure.  As the 1950's were winding down, she made the transition to television and put that gentle femininity to good use as one of TV's most famous moms.

I think there were several reasons she never made a great go of it in films.  At the top, perhaps, is that she was about as bland an actress as there ever was.  I am sure I could count on one hand the number of times she ever showed any fire.  Granted, the films she was assigned to frequently didn't allow for much fire but there were exceptions and she rarely went the distance.

Secondly, she never really had that drive in her gut that would propel her to the top of Mount Hollywood.  She'd never given acting much thought until she had small parts in a couple of city college stage productions.  The fact is she never sought out acting, never studied, never had any dreams.  She got an MGM contract as a result of winning a beauty contest and someone at the studio thought she'd be a good fit.

Finally, and this could very well be the main reason she never got beyond Miss Goody Two Shoes roles, she was very outspoken, even disrespectful about Hollywood in general and her directors in particular.  Yes, Donna Reed!  Now there's the fire she should have shown on the screen.  She got a reputation as being hard to please, mouthy, and that won't cut it unless you're a top-tier star.

On the up side, I thought she was beautiful and the public always seemed to like her.  I might never have been as aware of her as I was except that she sassed a vengeful studio head one day and he retaliated by dumping her in one western after another and we know I didn't miss my shoot-'em-ups.

She was born an Iowa farm girl in 1921 and she remained as corn-fed and unsophisticated as they came for all of her young years.  She would always credit those years as an ideal way to begin life.  I couldn't agree more.  After high school graduation, she went to live with an aunt in Los Angeles.  It was shortly after that when she won that beauty contest and an MGM contract.

Like a number of young, untried starlets at MGM, she was thrown into small parts in franchises... The Thin Man, Andy Hardy, Dr. Gillespie.  She got a small role in the very popular The Human Comedy (1943) but all the attention went to Mickey Rooney.  She was the ingenue love interest in the little-seen but entertaining The Man from Down Under (1943) but it was all Charles Laughton.

In 1943 Reed married MGM makeup artist William Tuttle but divorce came two years later.  A few months later she married an actor's agent, Tony Owens, with whom she would have four children and a 26-year marriage.

She secured her first lead and her first real attention as Robert Walker's wife in the military rom-com See Here, Private Hargrove (1944).  Today, of course, it's dated and silly.

Two good films came in 1945.  The horror-fantasy, The Picture of Dorian Gray, got good notices and has held up well over the years but Reed is rarely mentioned.  She carped that she didn't get the showier role played by Angela Lansbury.  John Ford's They Were Expendable with Robert Montgomery and John Wayne was a very well-received war film but again, not a lot of attention was paid to our subject.

With Jimmy Stewart in It's A Wonderful Life

A goldmine of riches came her way in 1946 when director Frank Capra asked to borrow her for his RKO production of It's a Wonderful Life.  The film was not popular upon its release and it  took some time for it to gather the momentum to become the holiday classic that it is today.  It's been said actresses were not exactly clamoring for the role of Mary Bailey.  It was finally hoped Ginger Rogers would say yes but then she, too, backed out saying the role was too bland.  Hmmm.  Obviously it was not too bland for Reed.  No matter what one thinks of her career or her acting, she could thank It's a Wonderful Life for providing her with movie immortality.

What should have happened at this point, of course, was that the momentum of Reed's career would have shifted into high gear.  Instead she had sister roles to two glamorous MGM stars.  First was with Lana Turner in the less-than-stellar Green Dolphin Street (1946) and in 1954 as Elizabeth Taylor's rigid sister in The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954), which I very much liked.  It was a good role and a stretch for her.

And how else did MGM reward her... by loaning her out to Paramount for a pair of Alan Ladd movies, Beyond Glory (1948) and Chicago Deadline (1949).  Both were good films... for Ladd.  Reed is miscast in the second although she and Ladd look good together.

MGM did not renew her contract and she didn't care.  She never had a lot of good things to say about the studio.  Her husband hired on at Columbia Pictures as an executive assistant to mogul-terror Harry Cohn and then Owens got his wife a contract as well.  Cohn immediately assigned her two lightweight John Derek movies, Saturday's Hero (1951) and Scandal Sheet (1952).  She was five years older than Derek but looked 10 years older and was totally wrong for both movies.

She was reunited with Duke Wayne in Trouble Along the Way (1953) about a football coach trying to get custody of his daughter.  Reed is the love interest.  A cute film but one that didn't make a great splash.

The Oscar-winning role in From Here to Eternity

Cohn wanted to cast her against type as the prostitute in From Here to Eternity (1953).  Director Fred Zinnemann was against it but eventually gave in because he had won Cohn over on some other casting ideas.  In time Zinnemann, too, was won over, claiming that she gave him what he wanted.  I thought she was good, perhaps as good as she had ever been, but have never been convinced she deserved an Oscar.  Of the five principals, I always thought Reed was the least impressive.

Once again, how was she rewarded for being in such a classic film and winning an Oscar, no less?  She got the female lead in a Martin & Lewis comedy, The Caddy (1953).  The actresses in their films were either on their way up or on their way down.

If one is questioning which direction Reed was going, consider that she said this around that time... Most movie directors are a bunch of hackneyed craftsmen.  They're scared to death of actors and even more scared of actresses.  And they hate women which is why they make the female characters in their pictures as unpleasant as possible.  Funny, but I don't have a scintilla of agreement with any of that and I suspect few others did either.  It must have infuriated Cohn and soon Reed was relegated to those westerns.

With bright new star Robert Francis in They Rode West

Those she made in the 50's are Hangman's Knot with Randolph Scott, Gun Fury with Rock Hudson, Three Hours to Kill with Dana Andrews, They Rode West with Robert Francis, The Far Horizons (ridiculous as Sacagawea) with Fred MacMurray and Backlash with Richard Widmark. 

Universal was no doubt trying to capitalize on the rollicking success of 1954's The Glenn Miller Story so two years later they opted to see if lightning would strike twice with The Benny Goodman Story.  Steve Allen has a good role as the famed clarinetist and Reed is fine support as his wife.  The real star, of course, is the music.  

Reed showed some of that fire I was always looking for from her in Ransom (1956) as a wife and mother whose son has been kidnapped.  Most of the attention, however, went to Glenn Ford as her husband.  

With her career not going the way she wanted, she turned to television.  She and Owens developed The Donna Reed Show, a family sitcom about the Stone family, which went on the air in 1958 and lasted for eight years.  It was highly successful and I may be the only person in America, alive at the time, to have never seen a single episode.  Interestingly when the series ended, America's favorite mother said she would take time off to get to know her own children.

During a hiatus from the series in 1960, Reed appeared in the all-star cast of Pepe playing herself.

Three years after she divorced Owens in 1971 she married a retired army colonel and immersed herself in politics.  Although a registered Republican, she was passionately opposed to the war in Vietnam, a champion of nuclear disarmament and she supported Democrat Eugene McCarthy for president.

She had been out of the limelight for a spell when in 1984 she signed on to replace Barbara Bel Geddes on the nighttime TV soap Dallas.  Bel Geddes had taken ill and it was assumed she would not return.  Reed was hired, oddly, to play the same role, Miss Ellie.  But a year later Bel Geddes was well enough to return and Reed was let go.  She sued the producers and came away with a million dollar settlement.

She probably didn't get to spend much of it because in January of 1986 in Los Angeles she passed away from pancreatic cancer.  She was 13 days short of her 65th birthday.



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A good 50's film