Introduction to Susan Slept Here by Jimmy Vargas

Tonight Cinematheque presents two laugh-a-rama classics from nineteen fifties Hollywood director FRANK TASHLIN. An auteur who conquered the double realms of cinema: the cartoon and the celluloid feature.

His metier was the creation of animated icons as near human archetypes and weapons of social satire, while reducing his flesh and bone actors to whorling tornados of thirty five mille gel cut-outs. TASHLIN'S style technique can be best described as Cinematicus Lycanthropis, as so perfectly exemplified in tonight's feature.

SUSAN SLEPT HERE..(1954)

A RKO RADIO PICTURES RELEASE.

Directed By FRANK TASHLIN.

Starring DICK POWELL & DEBBIE REYNOLDS.

THE PLOT

On Christmas Eve, Oscar-winning screenwriter MARK CHRISTOPHER (Dick Powell), lauded author of high-brow dramas, is frustratedly working on a script about juvenile delinquency. His pal, a LAPD flatfoot SAM HANLON (Herb Vigran) deposits teenage waif / juvenile delinquent, SUSAN LANDIS (Debbie Reynolds) on Mark's doorstep.

MARK on learning that the only option left to SUSAN is spending Christmas week in jail, on account of an pending assault charge after she decked a sailor, and also the fact of her being penniless means she will inevitably be charged with vagrancy, he makes like the swingin' samaritan and lets the runaway crash in his bachelor pad.

As a result of his viagratic verbal assignation with the milk-shake mademoiselle, MARK finds new purpose and zest-a-rama to his jaded Hollywood existence, but various denouements and dilemnas erupt when his fiancee, the marriage desperate Pasadena socialite ISABELLE ALEXANDER (Anne Francis), finds out about the tomboy runaway staying in his apartment.

SUSAN SLEPT HERE was directed by a FRANK TASHLIN, whose cinematic apprenticeship was originally served as a gagster for CHARLIE CHAPLIN, LAUREL AND HARDY among others at the HAL ROACH studios in the twenties and thirties, but he was more renowned to the American theatre going public as an innovative cartoon director of PORKY PIG Loony Toon loops for Warner Bros / Vitaphone, working under the Leon Schlesinger banner. In SUSAN SLEPT HERE he simply supplants the animated for human visceral, but still leaves the voice-track and plot distractions intact from a Merrie melodies reeler. Known for breaking down the theatrical fourth wall in his Warner's cartoons, with characters like Porky Pig giving witty asides to the camera audience, TASHLIN utilises the same device in SUSAN SLEPT HERE, with an Oscar statue opening the proceedings as narrator.

From a jaundiced post modern eye SUSAN SLEPT HERE could be dismissed as a dizzy drawing room soap opera. A standard 'meet cute' build-up so reminiscent of the standardized 30's and 40's screw-ball comedies.

It is mostly definitely not.

SSH is a social morality tale of fifties America, as whose subject matter that Francois Truffaut of the 'Cahiers du Cinema' would gleefully describe as the triumph of “Vulgar Moderne Americaine”. And it's this brazen bawdy epistle that TASHLIN would continue to pitch and pummel onto the American public, as director of "THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT", "ARTISTS & MODELS" “WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER and eight of JERRY LEWIS' subsequent solo pictures from the mid fifties into the sixties.

SUSAN SLEPT HERE burlesques romantic ideal, marriage as career move, the bartering of American female virtue for the sanctic attainment of a Westinghouse deep freeze Jello security, as well as taking the shovel to Hollywood's self obsession, psychiatry and fame.

The only thing that TASHLIN left out in the movie was a couple of reels of DICK POWELL crooning "You make me feel so Jung" to the bug eyed DEBBIE. Said footage is rumored to have actually existed.

SUSAN SLEPT HERE was a seminal cinematic foray itself leading the charge on social satire and the dismantling of sex taboos in the fifties. Other movies in its wake that glided through on its breezy wings, was SEVEN YEAR ITCH (1955), THE MOON is BLUE (1957), and that desolate paean to the bartering and whoring of innocence LOLITA. (1962).

From the start of SUSAN SLEPT HERE it is not only the battle of virtue that the two are combating. With POWELL playing the roue Hollywood screenwriter, while the apparent surface style REYNOLDS alternatively pixies it up with a perky punky virgin / brazen career bride from okie sticks-ville, their mutual seduction / stand-off can be read to be more a representation of the continual class and moral warfare between Middle America's God, Little League and white bread values, as identified by REYNOLDS and their distrust of the Los Angeles' fast and loose 'my wife is your wife 'Sunday swap-a-rama' sensibility so typified by POWELL's caste.

REYNOLDS personas are many however. She may well be so regarded as a schizoids love child. In SSH she also can be viewed as the poster girl for the new fifties. A razor lipped minx, barbarically storming Hollywood at the fall of the old studio system of DICK POWELL, who with her bland blonde ambition was out to get fame and a limitless charge card, either in front of the camera, or as mogul's wife, peddling her virtue as the ticket, usually always claiming victory, and inevitably cold-decking and cuckolding her benefactor before he could claim his rewards.
Think "12 year old card shark with the googoo voice" as her rival in love, socialite ANNE FRANCIS most aptly pins her. REYNOLDS great skill, however in not over tipping her hand in this direction, keeping empathy with both her audience and her besotted older suitor.

With that set up intact, castration gags inevitably run a plenty. Most memorable is when REYNOLDS uses POWELL'S 'Oscar' as a nutcracker for some peanuts she's attempting to shell.
A joust to his phallic vulnerability, a precursor of female castration via marriage, not overlooking the 'nouvelle vague ' slattitude to Hollywood totems and traditions. Their bedroom negotiation card game too, is a sly saucy vignette in which would be best best described as, a reverse seduction.

TASHLIN also raids other cultural elitisims, going for the jugular of Jung and psycho analysis. Best exploited in Susans Dream Sequence. Using Freudian / Daliesque psycho furniture of vaginal tear mirrors, gilded bird cages as subliminal chastity belts, they serve as emblems of American 50's pentecostal repressed sexuality and addiction to it's own image. The Dream Sequence has TASHLIN de-constructing MGM fantasia, and transports, super-glueing it with ACME adhesive onto a Loony Toon sound-stage.

Visually, the vignette sparkles, glazing with a glorious gaudiness, and over saturated sacharina, that could well bring the viewer an unexpected diabetic attack. In this pivotal scene ,TASHLIN pillages Hollywood memory, cribbing scenes from American in Paris / Singin' in the Rain / The Bandwagon and Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, recasting Gene Kelly as a benign sailor suited Sylvester the Cat ( in the guise of POWELL) and Cyd Charisse is given a schizophrene benzedrined make-over as a Tweetie Pyed DEBBIE REYNOLDS in a gilded cage with her nemesis ANNE FRANCIS, vamp pa-powin' it as a Marvel Comic inspired Spider Lady / Circe.

All this carried out on the wah-wah-wah-wah mistral of bawdy grind-house blues.

A little known insider story going around the hipper bars of Hollywood in the early fifties was that ALEX GOTTLIEB the writer of SUSAN SLEPT HERE had based his story on mogul HOWARD HUGHES and his peccadilloes with underage runaways (a polite term in the 40s and 50s for jail bait). Hughes' pimps Johnny Meyer and private cops would literally pick up suitable quails and bug eyed starlets from the Greyhound station on Los Angeles and Sixth, or the swanky cocktail bars of Hollywood Boulevard in the forties and fifties, to be canary caged, in various love shacks around Hollywood, until bidden to service his royal HH, in one night of gratuitous sexual homage. DICK POWELL of course played the HH role, his employment status in the movie declassed from producer to mere scriptwriter.

The DEBBIE REYNOLDS character was based on ingenue starlet TERRI MOORE and the plot twist centred around HUGHES and MOORES rumoured marriage in 1949 off the coast of Mexico. MISS MOORE was only nineteen years of age. HUGHES was forty four at the time. MISS MOORE received the rumored sum of 30 million dollars as a payoff hush-hush money from the Hughes estate in 1984.

HOWARD HUGHES' own studio RKO was the conglomerate that financed and released SUSAN SLEPT HERE in 1954. HUGHES himself never suspected that his coin was financing the slander and the cinematic mutiny happening on RKO sound stage 2 in late 1953. ALEX GOTTLIEB, the scriptwriter won the coveted WGAW the Writers Guild of America award, for best written American Comedy of 1954.

(C) JIMMY VARGAS 1947 / 2008