Although King's Row is lately remembered for Ronald Reagan's famous line, “Where's the rest of me?", it is a classic film totally lacking in camp value, and unforgettable for its depiction of mad cruelty in small-town, turn-of-the-century America. The wickedness portrayed in Henry Bellamann's novel has been somewhat tidied up for the screen, but the film still presents sadistic doctors (performing unneccessary amputations), venal businessmen, and murderously incestuous parents as the adult world into which a bright young generation will grow. King's Row, Michael Rogin notes, “is a classic in the American gothic form...an art of dualism, of haunted characters, violence and horror. Though it claims to stand for good, it is fascinated by evil....” James Wong Howe's stunning cinematography, sets by William Cameron Menzies and a score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold underline the powerful contrasts between innocence and horror in this strange piece of Americana.
Ronald Reagan chose his most famous line as the title of his autobiography, in which he writes of deciding to “find the rest of me...I came out of the monastery of movies into the world.” Michael Rogin writes that King's Row “is the film that, on the evidence of Reagan's childhood, his autobiography and his subsequent political career...speaks most intimately to his sense of himself and his world.”