Susan Slept Here (1954)

(On Cable TV, December 2020) On paper, Susan Slept Here sound revolting. After all, the story has a 35-year-old screenwriter fostering, then immediately marrying a 17-year-old-runaway. It gets even woooorse when you realize that star Dick Powell was 50 and Debbie Reynolds was 22 the year the film was released. Even calibrating by 1950s standards, this is far beyond the frontiers of creepy. But everything is in the execution, and excuses can be found in details. For one thing, the film is built to be a comedy examining the age difference between the leads and often acknowledges the repellence of the situation. What’s more, the younger woman is clearly the dominant partner in Susan Slept Here – her desires are what drives the film, and her street-smart personality clearly outshines that of the older, somewhat boring man. This is even reinforced in a dream sequence ballet in which she sees her crush being seduced by a four-armed spider woman and chokes someone to gain the key to her freedom from a cage. If that’s not weird enough, consider that the film is narrated by an Academy Award statuette. Oh, yes, there’s a lot going on here – pretty good dialogue, Powell turning in a swan song of sorts (it was his final film appearance) and Reynolds being very good in a tricky role. The predictable ending will still make everyone uncomfortable, except that “uncomfortable” is still a great deal better than “aghast,” which may have been a possibility had lesser talents had handled Susan Slept Here’s built-in creepiness.