Overview

Kings Row is a 1942 film starring Ann Sheridan, Robert Cummings, and Ronald Reagan that tells a story of young people growing up in a small American town at the turn of the twentieth century. The picture was directed by Sam Wood.

The film was adapted by Casey Robinson from a best-selling 1940 novel of the same name by Henry Bellamann.^[4][5] The film also features Betty Field, Charles Coburn, and Claude Rains. The musical score was composed by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and the cinematographer was James Wong Howe.

In the film, Reagan’s character, Drake McHugh, has both legs amputated by a sadistic surgeon, played by Coburn. When he comes to, following the operation, he gasps in shock, disbelief, and horror, “Where’s the REST of me???” Reagan used that line as the title of his 1965 autobiography. Reagan and most film critics considered Kings Row his best film.^[6] Reagan called the film a “slightly sordid but moving yarn” that “made me a star.”^[7]