Released from his Warner contract, he signed a contract at Twentieth Century-Fox, but was released after only a handful of films, one of which was the Charlie Chan movie "Dead Men Tell". Twentieth Century-Fox loaned him to producer Alexander Korda to co-star with Merle Oberon in "Lydia", a box-office failure. He freelanced, looking to find work in westerns. His friend Teddi Sherman introduced him to her producer father Harry Sherman, who asked Reeves to do a screen test with Teddi for the Hopalong Cassidy films. Reeves and Sherman impressed the casting director by performing seven pages of script without pause in a single take. Reeves appeared in five Hopalong Cassidy westerns before being cast as Lieutenant John Summers opposite Claudette Colbert in "So Proudly We Hail!" (1942), a war drama for Paramount Pictures, who signed Reeves up for two films a year.