SUSAN AND GOD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 78, 20 December 1940, Page 16

SUSAN AND GOD

(M.G.M.)

COUPLE of years ago, Dr. Frank Buchman, leader of the Oxford Group’ movement, discovered America, and many Americans, for their part. dis-

covered what a thrilling thing it was to be on conversational terms with God.

While "Buchmanism" did not exactly sweep the States, or even achieve the spectacular publicity that has always attended Aimée Semple McPherson and Father Divine, the movement served to bring home to a vast number of Babbits that the Almighty (as Aimée would say), was still on the job. Perhaps "Buchmanisms’s" greatest triumph was when Mae West was gathered into the fold. The film "Susan and God," which was adapted very closely from the stage play, is the story of a skittish American society woman who goes to England and is swept off her feet by a movement (obviously the Oxford Group movement), and returns to find that the task of filling the lives of sophisticated playboys and playgirls with sunshine isn’t as easy as it should be. Susan (Joan Crawford) has had her life changed almost as deeply as it had been the previous season by that thrilling new card game; but the effect is slightly

more _ dangerous in that Susan is imbued with an ardent missionary spirit. Having publicly confessed about the Great Change that has come over her ("The first, time I was asked about God

I was so embarrassed . . . but eventually I confessed, and admitted that I had had my hair touched up in Paris"), she sets about changing other people. Arm in arm with God, as it were, she flits from couple to couple at a swanky house party, distributing pamphlets and airy aphorisms. (Interrupting a couple at distinctly the wrong moment,’ she observes brightly, "These awful moments when we know we have come in at the wrong time .. . but how much worse to go out again.") But Susan has apparently forgotten that she has a husband (Frederic March), and a growing daughter (Rita Quigley). And the husband, who has drowned his loneliness for many months, isn’t easily "Buchmanised." And it isn’t easy to be bright and loving and full of sunshine (even with God’s assistance), when you have a drunken husband in the background. But trapped in a hard bargain, Susan does go back to husband and daughter, and, as you've prdbably guessed, she eventually finds out that that particular brand of God doesn’t work. "Susan and God" is quite obviously a stage show, and quite obviously the director, George Cukor, found entrances so right and situations so tight, that he didn’t fool around with them, Just to show that this is a movie and that George Cukor is up to all the tricks, however, he trots out some good, if occasionally obvious cinema. But it isn’t the direction, and it isn’t Joan Crawford or Frederic March that will bring women along to see "Susan and God." It’s what Miss Crawford wears. A life is being remade in the crucible of God, but you ‘can be sure that when the new life is poured out, it will emerge in a breathtaking gown. However, in spite of all attempts on the part of Adrian, M.G.M.’s fashion designer, to steal the show, Crawford and March remain the stars — as, of course, was intended. March is excellently malevolent when drunk, . and handles his part easily and competently.

As for Joan Crawford, T’ll admit she’s not everybody’s favourite star, but personally, I find something sufficiently irresistible about the sight of that beautiful face emoting across three quarters of the screen to take me away from the fireside on a wet night.