by Stephen Vagg
Donna Reed is best remembered today for two things: winning an Oscar playing a sex worker in From Here to Eternity (1953) and embodying the perfect housewife in The Donna Reed Show (1958-66), mocked but also respected by Rory Gilmore on The Gilmore Girls. In between those two career peaks, she also had a stint as a British movie mogul.
No kidding.
Okay, look, if we’re being honest, we should have said “Donna Reed and Tony Owen”, her husband, with whom she ran and owned their production shingle, Todon Productions. And to be even more honest, Owen played more of a role in those British pictures made by Todon than Reed. But men feature enough in this series, so we gave Reed solo billing. Besides, she would’ve been there, making it happen, giving notes and advice – and the fact is, Owen owed his producing career to his wife, so there, call us woke, we don’t care.
For those who don’t know, we should give some background on Donna Reed. She was born in 1921, in Iowa (how all-American can you get?) and moved to Los Angeles to study to be a teacher. While at college, she started acting in plays and, because it was Los Angeles and she was very pretty and talented (with girl-next-door looks perfect for wartime), she found herself with studio offers. Reed signed with MGM, who put her in a bunch of movies, typically playing sweet young things: key early roles included romancing Mickey Rooney in The Courtship of Andy Hardy (1942) and playing an Australian (!) in The Man from Down Under (1943) (a film so random that we will have to write about it one day).
Reed was very likeable on screen and had plenty of work; she even found herself in a few classic movies – The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), They Were Expendable (1945), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). But they were all “Girl” parts – wives, sweethearts, so on. She was ambitious to do more – so when Reed was contacted by her school chemistry teacher Edward R. Tompkins with an idea to make a movie about the creation of the atomic bomb, she followed it up, leading to MGM’s bizarre atomic bomb film The Beginning or the End (1946) (a fascinating companion piece to Chris Nolan’s Oppenheimer). Another mover behind that film was Hollywood agent Tony Owen, who Reed had married in 1945 (it was her second marriage – the first was to make-up legend William Tuttle).
Frustrated with her lack of progress at MGM, Reed moved over to Columbia in 1950. The roles there didn’t really improve (Saturday’s Hero, Scandal Sheet) with one exception – playing Montgomery Clift’s sex worker (sorry, “hostess”) girlfriend Lorene in From Here to Eternity (1953). Reed hadn’t been a frontrunner for the part – director Fred Zinnemann wanted Julie Harris, while little-known Roberta Haynes was tested several times – but, as a contract player, Reed had been doing screen tests with Aldo Ray, which impressed the filmmakers, and she was pushed on Zinnemann by Columbia’s studio head Harry Cohn, who wanted a Columbia contractee in one of the lead roles (the director had rejected other Columbia actors like Aldo Ray and John Derek). Daniel Taradash, who wrote the screenplay, said that during the audition process, “I began to like the idea of Reed because she had given the part something I had never thought of.” Zinnemann admitted, “Donna Reed was not my first choice, but one could not forever say ‘No’ to Cohn. Lorene was called ‘the princess’ by the other girls and Donna fitted that description.” She got the part and won the Oscar.
The success of From Here to Eternity famously rejuvenated the career of co-star Frank Sinatra and did wonders for Burt Lancaster, Ernest Borgnine, Montgomery Clift and Deborah Kerr but it did little for Reed, who continued to play Girl parts, mostly in Westerns (Gun Fury, They Rode West, Three Hours to Kill, the Far Horizons). This was in part because Harry Cohn shoved her in nothing roles – he had a sadistic streak – and Reed left Columbia.
So, it was natural that Reed would seek to expand her horizons. In the early 1950s, she and Owen formed their own company, Todon Productions. They decided to start off with something that wasn’t arty or overly ambitious but a mid-budget adventure film, Duel in the Jungle (1954). They hired two American leads (Dana Andrews, Jeanne Crain) and an American director (George Marshall) but filmed in Britain (well, Britain and South Africa) where costs were cheaper (and conditions more dangerous – a crew member died during the shoot). No doubt it was discussed at some stage that Reed would play the female lead, but she’d just won the Oscar and was no doubt hoping for a better offer closer to home.
Duel in the Jungle is a fun movie and was a solid hit, leading to Todon embarking on a series of adventure movies shot in Britain with American stars. Owen and Reed rarely took screen credit because it was easier to get British subsidies with a local producer’s name on it, but their output was considerable: Little Red Monkey (1955), a thriller with Richard Conte, directed by Ken Hughes; Timeslip (1955), some sci-fi with Gene Nelson and Faith Domergue, again directed by Hughes; Portrait of Alison (1956) a thriller with Terry Moore, co-written by Hughes, directed by Guy Green; Dial 999 (1955), a crime drama with Gene Nelson and Mona Freeman, directed by Montgomery Tully; and The Intimate Stranger (1956), a noir with Richard Basehart and Mary Murphy, written by blacklisted Howard Koch and directed by blacklisted Jospeh Losey under pseudonyms. Many of these films were done in collaboration with Nat Cohen at Anglo Amalgamated.
In 1956, a report said that Todon was “perhaps the biggest Anglo-American company next to Warwick Films”, the company of Cubby Broccoli and Irving Allen, which used a similar formula of American stars in Britain. Owen said that he’d produced six films and “all of them stink but they made money.”
None of them had starred Reed. She was kept busy in Hollywood, raising the kids, and acting in studio pictures – truth be told, her parts weren’t much better than those on offer at Todon Productions, but they were in bigger budgeted productions with more prestigious co-stars (The Last Time I Saw Paris, Ransom!, The Benny Goodman Story.) Thus, Todon seems to have been primarily a money-making enterprise for Reed and Owen, rather than an artistic one – though presumably it gave Reed pleasure to be part of the decision making process instead of being perennially at the whim of producers and directors. We don’t know exactly what she or Owen did on these movies – but Todon was half Reed’s company, she was a college graduate, she was smart… it is likely that she advised at the very least on story selection and casting (they all had prominent female roles). And many of the films were released through Columbia where Reed had been under contract.
Reed’s first and only Todon film as an actor was Beyond Mombasa (1956) directed by George Marshall co-starring Cornell Wilde and Australia’s own Ron Randell. It was a box office disappointment apparently – which is odd, since it’s absolutely fine, and basically remakes Duel in the Jungle. It was also an unpleasant experience for Reed who, according to her biographer, was bullied by a drunken Marshall throughout the shoot.
Perhaps sensing the market was running dry on mid-budget adventure tales, Todon’s films became slightly more ambitious: Town of Trial (1957) was co-written by Hughes and directed by John Guillermin starring John Mills, and imported Americans Charles Coburn and Barbara Bates; The Long Haul (1957) was written and directed by Hughes, starring Victor Mature and Diana Dors; I Was Monty’s Double (1958) was from Guillermin and a script by Bryan Forbes starring Mills. These were all excellent films, incidentally. Reed didn’t star in any of these, but she was in The Whole Truth (1958), an entertaining thriller with Stewart Granger and George Sanders that wasn’t a Todon film but had several Todon connections (shot in Britian, John Guillermin directed, Columbia released).
The Whole Truth was Reed’s last significant feature role: Todon pulled out of movies and went into television. In 1958, Reed explained that she preferred TV because “most movies are not written with star actresses in mind. The women are used as merely window dressing. In TV they have a better chance.”
And thus, Todon created a vehicle for Reed: The Donna Reed Show, a sitcom that was a huge hit, running for eight years. Reed became associated with playing the “perfect housewife” and yes, she was, but there was more going on, just as there was for Reed in real life. Her creative involvement in this show is far easier to ascertain than on the British pictures – her fingerprints were all over it.
In 1962, Reed said that she would like to produce a movie with Carol Burnett, declaring, “I know it’s easier to write stories for men but there was a time when women starred in pictures and they were very good. It seems now that when an actress is starring, she is either playing a domineering woman or is completely addlepated.” She also complained that women over 30 were not allowed to play in love stories.
The Carol Burnett project never came to fruition and after The Donna Reed Show ended in 1966, Reed pretty much retired, and Todon made no other productions (it had tried a few pilots that weren’t picked up). By this stage, Reed was financially secure and had a lot of other things going on in her life – leading protests against the Vietnam War, divorcing Owen, remarrying. She would occasionally act, such as the odd telemovie and a stint on Dallas, but never went back to it properly. And you can’t say it was the wrong decision – honestly, what roles was she missing out on for a woman her age? (If she’d been based in New York or London, it might’ve been a different story). Reed died relatively young, of cancer, in 1986. Obituaries focused on her Oscar, The Donna Reed Show and her famous films – they rarely mentioned the handful of British adventure movies that she helped produce. But she did help make them. A forgotten mogul.
