Today is the 87th birthday of Nancy Davis Reagan, the former actress who became the wife of actor Ronald Reagan and stayed with him all the way to the White House and beyond.  Mr. Reagan passed away in 2004, and Nancy is more or less out of the public eye, but it’s hard for a woman with a Hollywood resume to escape her public.  An actress who was the daughter of an actress, Nancy Davis had a nice — that’s probably the most appropriate word for it — screen career mostly with MGM, including making a strange little film with director William Wellman entitled The Next Voice You Hear.

If you’re a fan of post-WW II suburban mysticism, The Next Voice You Hear is for you.  Partially filmed on a real Culver City street just a few blocks from the MGM studios, it’s the story of a man’s family and how they are affected by an unusual event — the voice of God is heard over the radio.  Of course it shakes everybody up — is it a prank?  a hoax? — and no one more than Joe Smith, played by James Whitmore, whose wife Mary (Nancy Davis) is pregnant and very nearly about to give birth.  They have a young son named Johnny, a typical American kid in blue jeans, and the kind of hard-working, middle-class existence that was being enjoyed by many real-life Americans.  And then that God thing happens.

You won’t find anybody less religious than I am, but this movie appeals on many levels, not the least of which is as a anthropological study of life in 1950s Los Angeles.  As a product of 1954 Los Angeles, it’s a place I find fascinating and familiar, and as you can see from the two photos here, things haven’t changed all that much in the burbs from then until now.  (Thanks to Google Maps we can do our sightseeing virtually sometimes!).  So you have a snaphot, not nearly as Hollywoodized as it might have been, of a certain time and place.  That’s interesting in itself. 

And you can glean a lot from the onscreen relationship of Joe Smith and his wife.  Whether we now think that it was a heavenly or a hellish way to live, pretty much the husbands worked and the wives stayed home and kept house.  You couldn’t get away with that now; it would take at least two paychecks to pay the mortgage on that house, which is worth very much north of half a million or so bucks today.  So kiss away that idyllic, almost fairy tale-like (to modern families contemplating their own domestic arrangements) life, except at least we can see how things were back then for a guy who was a factory worker and carried a metal lunch pail to work. 

You also get a tantalizing premise of the unknown colliding with the very known, kind of like a good Twilight Zone episode, which is what this movie might be most like.  The Next Voice You Hear has a tinge of the apocalyptic about it; I mean, would God turn up on the radio just to say “Hiya!” to the world?  And by the way, we never get to hear the actual voice of the deity.  (We do however get producer Dore Schary narrating, and in Hollywood that’s as close to God as it gets.) 

I’m always up for the idea of mankind teetering on the precipice of judgment, or annihilation, or what have you, whether by asteroid, aliens, nuclear war, global warming, giant ants or a god.  Nothing like putting the fear of the latter into a harried populace, but please, only onscreen.  There’s also a moving score supplied by composer David Raksin, who also wrote music for Laura and The Bad and the Beautiful, to name just a few.

As for the actors, James Whitmore, known sometimes as the poor man’s Spencer Tracy, is down-to-earth, unglamorous and flawed, but also decent and awfully darn sweet to his wife.  Nancy Davis is almost plain in The Next Voice You Hear, but also agreeably no-nonsense and honestly looking not unlike real mothers I’ve seen in home moves and snapshots from the period.  She doesn’t look nine months pregnant though, but that could have been just a tad too much realism for 1950 movie audiences.  The kid is a kid, rambunctious but not obnoxious like one of today’s kid characters.  You can understand why she’d want to have another, maybe, since he turned out okay. I am also always struck by the kind of grim aura around her giving birth; a happy outcome does not seem to be assured and it’s kind of unsettling.  Kind of different, right? 

The Next Voice You Hear is a relic of sorts, probably too quaint for some folks, but there is a sincerity and even charm that makes the premise seem entirely plausible for the time.  I recall hearing a few years ago, was it, that Steven Spielberg wanted to remake the film.  There’s still enough suspense and what-the-hell…er, heck–is-happening-here spooky vibes that the premise might stand up to a new version.  In terms of people hearing God movies, I’ll take Michael Tolkin’s 1991 The Rapture, if for nothing more than the crazy scenes where the Four Horsemen gallop down desert highways or a football game on TV is interrupted by Gabriel’s horn.  Now that’s how you spook people, even non-believers!  

But this post started with it being Nancy Davis Reagan’s birthday today, and no matter your politics you’ve got to give a hand to somebody who managed to survive both Hollywood and Washington.   Happy Birthday, Mrs. Reagan!