Miss Susie Slagle's (Paramount, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 9 p.n, yesterday I ran a quite engaging movie from one of my grey-label sources – it was obviously dubbed from a VHS tape of a commercial TV station: I could tell because whoever recorded the tape had tried to edit it on the fly – called Miss Susie Slagle’s. It was one of Paramount’s attempts to make a major star out of Bowen Charleston Tufts III, professionally known as Sonny Tufts, who had originally trained as an opera singer and had been good enough to audition for the Met (though that’s hard to believe based on the brief bit of warbling he does here), Then he had a brief career on Broadway and was scouted by Paramount, who put him in an all-star wartime melodrama called So Proudly We Hail! (with the exclamation point), produced and directed by Mark Sandrich (best known for having directed five of the 10 Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies) from a script by Adrian Scott based on the indignities visited on American Army nurses by the dastardly Japanese when they invaded and conquered the Philippines in the early days of World War II. Tufts played a GI named “Kansas” and was sufficiently hunky that Paramount got letters from moviegoers asking them to show more of him. Paramount obliged with a series of awkwardly thrown-together vehicles, and when audiences got tired of him and his marriage to actress Barbara Dane broke up, his career descended ti dreck like the 1953 film Cat Women on the Moon. He eventually drank himself to death at age 58 in 1970.

Tufts’ name became a running gag for Johnny Carson in his years hosting The Tonight Show, and he was so synonymous with bad acting that in their 1979 book The Golden Turkey Awards, authors Harry and Michael Medved (back when Michael was still writing intentionally silly books about bad movies instead of unintentionally silly books about how Hollywood had been taken over and corrupted by liberal elites) devoted an entire chapter to “The Worst Performance by Sonny Tufts.” I first heard of Miss Susie Slagle’s from a Films in Review article in 1971 on its director, John Berry, who was blacklisted as part of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951 and went to France to continue his career, though unlike fellow expat Joseph Losey, Berry did occasionally return to the U.S. to work once the blacklist was lifted in the early 1960’s. Berry was a protégé of Orson Welles and John Houseman – reportedly Welles encouraged him to take up directing instead of (or as well as) acting and Houseman is named as an associate producer on this film – and Miss Susie Slagle’s was his first feature film as a director. It was based on a novel by Augusta Tucker called Miss Susie Slagel’s – obviously the spelling was changed for the film because World War II was still going on and Paramount’s “suits” wanted a less German-sounding name for a sympathetic character.

The film was scripted by Hugo Butler, Anne Froelich and Adrian Scott (the last of whom was one of the “Hollywood 10” and a fellow blacklistee of director Berry), and was set in Baltimore in the year 1910 (though my husband Charles noticed an outdoor scene in which palm trees are clearly visible). An opening title tells us that Miss Susie Slagle herself (Lillian Gish, whose presence adds dignity to this movie even though she’s playing a pretty standard nice old materfamilias) was the object of concern among her neighbors when her parents died and left her that big old house, but she responded by turning it into a boarding house for male medical students at the newly opened medical schoon just down the street. As the film opens she’s in her 40th year of operating the boarding house and she takes great pride in the quality of the medical students who have passed through her doors on their way to becoming doctors. She also takes great pride in the fact that no one who lived at Miss Susie Slagle’s has ever flunked out. Miss Susie Slagle has a Black manservant who cooks for her and her residents, and makes sure to call them all “Doctor” even though they keep pointing out to him that they haven’t earned that title yet.

The film focuses on three medical students in particular: Elijah Howe, Jr. (Bill Edwards), whose father Dr. Elijah Howe, Sr. (Ray Collins, another person involved in this movie besides director Berry who had an Orson Welles connection), is the medical director of the college and casts an insufferably long shadow over his son; Ben Mead (Billy De Wolfe), who has lived his entire life in China as the son of a white missionary and as soon as he has his medical degree wants to go back there and practice; and St. George “Pug” Prentice (Sonny Tufts), whose father, also a doctor, left him alone with a terminally ill four-year-old boy and gave him a phobia about being around sick people because he watched the kid die and could do nothing to help him. Needless to say, this causes him quite a few inconveniences being a medical student, including one bizarre scene in which he bolts in the middle of an operation Dr. Faber (Morris Carnovsky – imdb.com lists his character as “Dr. Fletcher” but I distinctly heard the name “Faber” on the soundtrack) is performing in one of those preposterous amphitieatres in which surgeons do operations on real patients while medical students watch and hopefully learn. In this case Pug bolts the room because he’s convinced the patient will die, and he only learns she didn’t when the fellow medical students return to Miss Susie Slagle’s excited by the miraculous recovery Dr. Faber pulled in that operating room.

Pug also meets his girlfriend Margaretta Howe (Joan Caulfield), Elijah, Jr.’s sister, when Elijah gets drunk on a post-school outing to a bar (it’s hard to watch this movie and not think that within a decade all the bars and saloons would be forced to close due to Prohibition) and Pug and Margaretta run into each other for a classic Hollywood “meet-cute.” Meanwhile, Ben Mead falls for woman medical student Nan Rogers (Veronica Lake, reunited with Tufts from the cast of So Proudly We Hail! even though there’s virtually no interaction between them, and since this film takes place in 1910 Lake is obliged to wear her hair swept up rather than over one eye, as was her trademark in films with contemporary settings).One wonders where she is training and also where she is living, since Miss Susie Slagle’s is strictly stag. Ben and Nan even get married along the way despite the unwritten rule that medical students are not supposed to marry until they get their degrees and become full-fledged doctors. That proves to be a key plot development as a diphtheria epidemic sweeps through the community, and Ben gets a lachrymose death scene while Pug, true to form, walks out on him – and even though her husband has croaked, Nan determines to go to China anyway and do whatever she can to bring Western medicine to the benighted Chinese (at least by the plot assumptions of this movie – don’t get me started on traditional Chinese medicine and the things I think it gets right that Western medicine gets wrong, as well as the things Western medicine gets right that Chinese medicine gets wrong).

Meanwhile, Elijah Howe, Jr. has stormed out of his father’s house and moved in at Miss Susie Slagle’s, where the supportive camaraderie has a wonderful effect on his grades: while still living under Daddy’s roof (and thumb) he was on the verge of flunking out, but once he’s in a less pressured environment his grades take a turn for the better even though he disappoints his father by opting to specialize in pathology, presumably so he wouldn’t have to deal with any living patients. And Pug gets his redemption when as part of the medical school’s on-the-job training, he’s sent out on a call to a desperate mother who’s about to give birth to her third child – in perhaps the best line of the film she glumly tells him that no matter how often she gives birth, the experience never gets easier. Of course she has a crisis on the table (actually in her own bed), and Pug has to overcome his fears to bring both her and her newborn out safely. Miss Susie Slagle’s is actually a pretty good movie – its plot is a collection of interlocking story strands (a structure we’ve become almost too familiar with from modern TV shows) and all of them are pretty clichéd and predictable, but they move effectively to their predestined resolutions.

One thing about this movie that isn’t surprising is the quiet dignity of Lillian Gish’ who even in this trite story that no doubt had her wishing that D. W. Griffith were still active (he was alive in 1942 but no longer making movies, though Gish’s perception of his importance to her career is indicated by the title she chose for her autobiography: The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me), carries the dignity and grace that were part of her on-screen personality and gives the role a quiet strength. One surprise I wasn’t expecting was the capable acting of Sonny Tufts: the man whose name has become a synonym for bad acting here turns ini a quite reasonable performance. Yes, there were people around in 1945 who could have played this role better – like John Garfield (who was still a Warner Bros. contract player, though later he would become independent and John Berry would direct his last film, He Ran All the Way) or Paramount’s own Alan Ladd) – but Tufts, who in some of his close-ups has a striking resemblance to the young Elvis (also a movie performer who got a lot of unfair dissing, though in Elvis’s case it was mostly due to the crappy roles Col. Tom Parker kept putting him in), delivers a perfectly reasonable performance. He doesn’t light up the screen the way Garfield or Ladd would have, but he’s not embarrassingly bad either – and anyone whose total knowledge of Tufts’ acting skills is based on Cat Women on the Moon and the other trash he did after Paramount let him go is due for a surprise here.