Susan Slept Here (RKO, 1954)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Late last night (from 11 p.m. to 12:45 a.m. Saturday and Sunday, December 23 and 24) Turner Classic Movies showed a film I’d had fond memories of the previous time I’d seen it there. The film was Susan Slept Here, a 1954 Christmas-themed screwball comedy co-starring Dick Powell as burned-out 35-year-old Hollywood writer Mark Christopher (so his name combines both mine and my late brother’s!) and Debbie Reynolds as 17-year-old Susan Landis. Susan shows up on Mark’s doorstep as a literal Christmas present from two local vice cops, Monty Maizel (Horace McMahon) and Sam Hanlon (Herb Vigran). They’d worked with Mark as technical advisers on a police drama Mark had written, and they recalled him mentioning that someday he’d like to write a film about juvenile delinquency and he’d want to meet a real juvenile delinquent to interview for research. So they deliver Susan to him because she’s just been arrested for vagrancy and assaulting a cop with a beer bottle, and it’s either take her to jail or find someone willing to take her in. Mark has a sort-of girlfriend, actress Isabella Alexander (Anne Francis), who’s a lot more interested in him than he is in her; she’s the spoiled rich brat of a Senator father and she threatens to use her political connections to ruin his life if he jilts her, especially for a piece of jailbait like Susan. Susan Slept Here was directed by Frank Tashlin; it began life as a stage play by Steve Fisher and former Universal and Warner Bros. producer Alex Gottlieb, and Fisher did the screenplay as well.

While nowhere nearly as anarchic as Tashlin’s vehicles for Jayne Mansfield or Jerry Lewis, Susan Slept Here is a marvelously Production Code-bending comedy in which we’re constantly reminded that Susan is underage (though Fisher and Gottlieb got out of that one via a letter Susan’s mother supposedly left her when she tore off with another man; since Susan’s mom liked Susan’s then-current boyfriend she wrote her a letter giving her written permission to get married). Mark’s attorney, Harvey Butterworth (Les Tremayne, in a departure from his usual role in science-fiction movies as the idiot scientist who wants to reason with the monster instead of joining with the other cast members to kill it; this time he’s playing essentially a Jerome Cowan role and bringing the same kind of dry wit to it), gets more and more exasperated at the possible consequences as Mark’s and Susan’s relationship seemingly gets more serious. Actually, Mark’s original intent in marrying Susan is just so she can stay out of jail over the holidays; after that he plans to have the marriage annulled – only she refuses to sign the annulment papers when Harvey presents them and insists that Mark do it himself. When he does present them himself, she again refuses and insists on either a for-real marriage or a normal divorce. There’s also the rather amorphous character of Virgil (Alvy Moore), Mark’s former commanding officer in the U. S. Navy in World War II (when he introduces himself as such I expected one of the other characters to reply that it’s a good thing that we won the war in spite of his incompetence) turned Mark’s go-fer. The plot reaches its climax when Mark catches Susan breakfasting on a repulsive combination of strawberries and pickles. Though she later explains that she just happens to like that sweet-and-sour mix, he assumes that means she’s pregnant and, since Mark knows he hasn’t had sex with her, he assumes Virgil is the baby-to-be’s father. Mark punches Virgil out for no apparent reason – no apparent reason to Virgil, anyway – but the shock of this makes Mark realize that he loves Susan for real and the two become an actual couple at the end.

There are nice bits of wit in Susan Slept Here, including a scene in which Mark and Susan watch an old movie Mark worked on on TV; Susan complains that she’s never heard of any of the people in it, and Mark says, “That’s because you weren’t born yet.” And there’s a pretty bad song called “Hold My Hand,” sung by Don Cornell (who’s credited in the movie even though we never see him), an appropriately stentorian crooner, that becomes a plot point as well as a musical Leitmotif through the film (it was written by Richard Myers with lyrics by Jack Lawrence; Lawrence also wrote both words and music for the film’s title song, sung by a chorus over both the opening and closing credits). At the end we see it being played on a Coral record (Coral was a subsidiary of American Decca and released the Ames Brothers’ cover of “Ragg Mopp” and Buddy Holly’s solo records) as Mark and Susan commit to making their relationship work. There’s also intriguing references to other movies; Mark Christopher is essentially a comedy version of William Holden’s burned-out writer character from Sunset Boulevard, and there’s an evocation of Dick Powell’s own past in his lament that he’s so good a comedy writer no one will take his ambitions to write a drama seriously, “Oh, like the boy crooner who wanted to play a private detective?” I joked.

And there’s an amusing aspect in that the film’s opening narration is delivered by Mark Christopher’s Academy Award, for which the filmmakers had to get permission from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to depict on screen. The award laments that it was given to a mere writer rather than the supporting actress winner, and also marks the win as the turning point downwards in Mark’s career, an interesting use in a film plot of the so-called “Oscar Curse.” One wonders if the stage version also used an Academy Award as a narrator! There’s also a nice part for Glenda Farrell, Dick Powell’s former studio-mate at Warner Bros., as Mark’s long-suffering secretary Maude Snodgrass, and a big production number representing Susan’s dream (literally) of herself, Mark and Isabella (shown as a six-limbed combination of an evil Hindu goddess and a spider woman). The only touch Tashlin missed was not having Dick Powell make the record of “Hold My Hand” himself – perhaps with Mark Christopher making a few catty remarks about how bad he thinks the singer is.