Dressed for Duress

Studios would take still photos of their actors in costumes to test the look of the wardrobe; here, we see Jane Wyman in one such test as Warner Bros. decides on dresses for her character, Ann Kincaid, in the Raoul Walsh-directed Cheyenne. Wyman, then Mrs. Ronald Reagan and an Academy Award nominee for The Yearling, came to Sedona in April ’46 to film under duress. A year later, she was a Best Actress Oscar winner for Johnny Belinda, he was in his first elected post as president of the Screen Actors Guild, their marriage would be ending – and Cheyenne was still unreleased.

You Can’t Please Everyone

Claiming Warner Bros.’ Mission to Moscow “is a lie by the GPU” (the Soviet state security organization), members of the Socialist Labor Party picket in front of Chicago’s Roosevelt Theater on June 16, 1943. Four years later, Mission to Moscow was one of three Hollywood films targeted as pro-Soviet propaganda by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. It was produced by Robert Buckner, who also made the filmed-in-Sedona Cheyenne with Jane Wyman, who was married at the time to Ronald Reagan. Ironically, it was testifying in October 1947 before HUAC investigating communist influence in the motion picture industry that Reagan began developing the political persona and contacts that would lead him to the California governorship in 1966.––Joe McNeill