Susan Slade (1961) Let me take a moment to remember the under appreciated director-writer Delmer Daves, whom I hold dear as one of Golden Age Hollywood's best pulp fictioneers.
Daves dabbled in multiple genres.....everything from classic noir ("Dark Passage", "The Red House") to muscular westerns ("3:10 To Yuma", "The Badlanders") to high gloss soap operas featuring new young stars along side seasoned veterans ("A Summer Place", "Parrish", "Rome Adventure")
In all these variety of films, he excelled in putting across overheated melodrama that never let your attention lag for a minute. Like other similar journeymen directors, such as Gordon Douglas, he had no signature style other than to make sure you had a damn time watching his movies.
"Susan Slade" came in the middle of his successful reign as the supreme sultan of Warner Brothers soap operas. Like his "A Summer Place" it starts out drenched in one of composer Max Steiner's lush romantic scores, and later features an impossibly luxurious house nestled by a seaside cliff in Monterey California.
In this sprawling, 'Architectural Digest' Japanese style residence, live a retired mine manager and his loving wife (Lloyd Nolan , Dorothy Maguire) and their sweet, unworldly young daughter (Connie Stevens)......a family soon beset with a terrible dilemma.....
Prior to their moving in, Connie's been rendered pregnant from a head-over-heels shipboard fling with a wealthy smoothie (Grant Williams) who promptly dies while mountain climbing. Convinced the suave self centered Williams really loved her, Connie freaks out and tries a suicide swim in the rough Pacific surf. But wait! To the rescue comes the forever monotone hunk Troy Donahue, who's nursing a crush on Connie and whose stable houses Connie's beloved pet horsie.....
I can't even begin to go into Donahue's backstory here involving his struggles as a novice novelist and his simmering resentment as a Monterey pariah because of his father's embezzlement convictions and subsequent suicide death......Let's back to our primary burning question.....What will poor preggers Connie ever do?
Given this is 1961, there's no legal abortion and an out-of-wedlock baby would stigmatize Connie and her folks in the eyes of their uppercrust friends and neighbors. Horrors! Forced to wear the scarlet "P" for Pregnant.......
Bad timing, too....just as a fledgling romance might be in the cards for Connie and Troy.....
But wait! Mom and Dad to the rescue! Nolan un-retires to run a Guatemala mine, taking Maguire and Connie with him. When they come back in a few years, there'll be a bouncing baby boy alright....but they'll claim he's Connie's new little brother. That's right, they plan to convince the Monterey high society crowd that Nolan and Maguire got busy and pumped out a kid before menopause closed in.......
After a fatal heart attack finishes off Nolan, Connie and Maguire return to Monterey to resume a semblance of normal life, But the soap opera suds pile up sky high. Connie's tormented and frustrated over her forced, phony role as the baby's big sister, as well as Maguire's leaning a tad too heavily into playing the tot's fake mom....(much to Connie's distress...)
On top of all that, a romantic triangle erupts, with Troy still pining for Connie while she's wooed by a rich boy friend-of-the-family (Bert Convy, later to find more fame as a game show host). And once again, we're faced with that eternal question...... Whatever in the world will poor, put-upon Connie do?
Well, that's the fun of watching a movie like this in the first place, so I'll not spill details.....except to say it takes a truly shocking soap operatic event to bring the plot complications to some kind of hopeful closure......
I can't justify 'Susan Slade' as anything other than a BQ guilty pleasure.....and nobody could serve up guilty pleasures like Delmer Daves. I could never resist any of this director's shameless, deep dives into the luxurious but screwed up lives of handsome, beautiful people with loads of cash and homes to drool over.
For those of you who feel the same, "Susan Slade"s a 3 & 1/2 star wallow in technicolored, tempestuous tribulations (***1/2) (Feel free to say that 5 times fast...) But if this genre and all its weepy tropes are a bridge too corny and old fashioned for you.....you'd best pass it by......
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