THE AFFAIRS OF SUSAN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 343, 18 January 1946, Page 18

THE AFFAIRS OF SUSAN

| (Paramount)

[Tt is apparently a current conviction among producers that to be good a film must be long, though one would think that experience might have taught

them the opposite. If Susan (Joan Fontaine) had had only two affairs, or at the most three, this would have been an expert, if not distinguished, light comedy. But the effect of four, each occupying roughly 30 minutes of our time, is inclined to be tedious-though I will readily agree that there is much to entertain, and that there are many less agreeable (I won't add edifying) ways of passing time than looking at Joan Fontaine in a variety of make-ups and dresses, most of which are designed to convince us that she has what I think the advertisements describe as "a good development." Despite’ these sartorial revelations, however, the Joan Fontaine who appealed to me most was the early wellclad one in the first of the four "affairs" of Susan: the episode in which she is a sweet young innocent in a lake-side cottage whose sweet young innocence completely turns the head of the famous stage-producer who has gone there seeking sanctuary from rapacious, stage-struck females. And here let me interpolate that the word "affair" is spelt throughout minus the final "e" and therefore is to be interpreted in the respectable, or Hays Office, sense, rather than in the loose, or Gallic, one. Marriage, in fact, is the motivating theme, if a film which meanders along through four episodes can accurately be said to have motivation. But it is because one man, a stuffed-shirt business executive (Walter Abel), wants to marry Susan that he calls together the three other men who have already married or tried hard to marry her, and conducts a sort of matrimonial post-mortem, seeking to avoid the pitfalls of his predecessors. Then we learn that it is a different Susan whom each of these four suitors has known; that she has, in a sense, been all things to all men (within Hays Office limits). To the stage producer (George Brent) who married her and turned her, unwillingly, into a star,

she was a naive child, whose disconcerting habit of always speaking the truth eventually broke up the marriage; to the rich lumberman (Don de Fore) who wooed her next she was a glamorous woman of the world; to the long-haired intellectual (Dennis O’Keefe) whodespite his long hair and intellectwrote best-sellers, she was prim and platonic in horn-rimmed spectacles, tight hair, and severely tailored costumes; and to the businessman who came last on the scene she was patrician and poised, Though I don’t want to spoil your fun if you feel like taking a bet on which of the four suitors eventually wins Susan, the result is really a foregone conclusion -- especially if you bear in mind the fact that, next to Miss Fontaine herself, George Brent is obviously the most highly-paid member of the cast and therefore has a prior claim. It also puts proceedings on a high moral plane to have the heroine finally resume marital relations with her ex-husband. On the score of acting, however, I am not so sure that Mr. Brent has such a good case to be thus rewarded. For that matter, all the men are a@ pretty dull bunch, and the film would be pretty dull too, if it were not for Miss Fontaine. It cannot be said that she sustains her part, because she has actually no part to sustain: her performance consists merely of a series of impersonations, a pot-pourri of light comedy tricks, skilfully done. Other films have already proved that she is a fine actress: all that The Affairs of Susan does is show that she is also a versatile one.