Gene Reynolds started as a boy on a crutch in Boys Town. Behind the camera he became something else: the producer and director who kept MASH* funny while insisting it also tell the truth about war.
Fi1m perspective
In Boys Town (1938) Gene Reynolds is Tony Ponessa, a boy who gets about on a crutch and is there, as our review put it, to be brave. The film gives him one thing to do and he does it. Sixteen years later he turns up as Larry in The Country Girl (1954), a part so small our review did not stop to mention it. That is roughly the whole of his acting we have looked at. The work that matters was done on the other side of the camera.
The child parts under contract to MGM, Captains Courageous (1937) among them, ran on into television acting in the 1950s, and then he stopped performing and started directing episodes instead: Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Hogan's Heroes, The Andy Griffith Show. By 1969 he was producing Room 222, a high-school series with a conscience. In 1972 he and Larry Gelbart developed MASH, and over five years Reynolds produced 120 episodes, wrote eleven and directed twenty-four, with Burt Metcalfe producing alongside him. When he left in 1977 he co-created Lou Grant* with James L. Brooks and Allan Burns, a drama spun off from a comedy, and he went on directing episodes for other people into the 1990s.
He described what he wanted more plainly than most directors manage: "In directing, I'm always looking for the little humane touch. Something that is real. It could be very, very small. It could be a hand on the shoulder." That is the thing to watch for in MASH*. We laughed at the series more than we expected a war comedy from 1972 to allow, and what stopped the laugh, more than once, was exactly what he describes: a reaction held a fraction longer than the joke needed, so that the joke turned out to be about somebody. He wanted the medicine and the army to come from people who had been there, and he wanted the comedy to sit next to the waste of the war rather than in front of it. On the whole it does.
Not always. Our review of MASH* found dated jokes and occasional lectures, and the lectures are partly his. The networks pressed for something lighter and funnier; Reynolds and Gelbart pressed back for the serious material, and when their side won outright the result is sometimes a speech where a hand on the shoulder would have done. It is the failing of a man who cared about the right things and occasionally said so out loud.
The two films he acted in are on this page because he was in them. The reason to click through is the series.
Biography
Gene Reynolds, born Eugene Reynolds Blumenthal, was an American actor, writer, director and producer. He began his career as a child actor, appearing in the 1934 Our Gang short Washee Ironee and films such as Captains Courageous (1937) and Babes in Toyland (1934). He served in the US Army during the Second World War before transitioning to directing and producing television.
Reynolds co-created the CBS series MASH (1972) with Larry Gelbart and produced 120 episodes, writing 11 and directing 24. He later co-created Lou Grant (1977) and worked on series including Room 222 (1969), The Andy Griffith Show (1960) and Hogan's Heroes* (1965). He received six Primetime Emmy Awards and multiple Directors Guild of America Awards.
