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Susan Slept Here
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Sex Positions 2: Play (Notes from a 1982 lecture in this series) In the first “Sex Positions” lecture, on Hitchcock's Suspicion (1941) [these lecture notes have been lost, but see related talks on Rear Window and Shadow of a Doubt], I looked at the question of power. Today, we flip the sex script to look at play. And, therefore, at the vast genre of comedy. Let’s talk first about games – and films considered, speculatively as a game space, especially in the relationship that is established between the screen (and the ‘player’ behind it, i.e., the auteur) and the spectator. (1) Let’s think of a film proceeding like a card game: there are rules and positions, a system in place … but also reversals, transformations, bluff manoeuvres. Comedy is, after all, the genre of disguises, poses and masks. Every serious cinephile needs to attend to the great historic line that proceeds from Ernst Lubitsch, Preston Sturges and Frank Tashlin through Billy Wilder and then on to Jerry Lewis and Blake Edwards. This forms a tradition in which fiction (‘storytelling’) is regarded by such auteurs as a game space. The line returns, in later film history, in unexpected moments and places: the films of Alain Resnais or Raúl Ruiz, or Marguerite Duras’ immortal Destroy, She Said (1969) with its incredible (literal) card playing set-up. With what pieces is this game generally played? Cultural tokens or stereotypes: of masculinity and femininity (gender), youth and old age, the sexy and the sexless, ‘the major and the minor’ (a Wilder title). Stereotyping is always a game of positions – you are fixed here, the Other is over there … Factors of power – status, dominance/submissiveness, deceit – are never entirely absent from such comedy. In fact, they are everywhere inverted and subverted – in what has come to be known, through cultural studies, as the carnivalesque gesture. Tashlin is a very special case in this historic line. Everything – and I do mean everything – in his films is the stuff of cliché, stereotype, quoted reference; a “universe of pure representation”, as the brilliant critic Roger Tailleur called it (as translated in the indispensable Edinburgh Film Festival book of 1973 devoted to this director, co-edited by Claire Johnston & Paul Willemen). (2) Think of it as the truly popular Pop Art of America in the 1950s (although Tashlin’s career began in animation in the 1930s and extends to end of the ‘60s; he died in 1972) – just look at the amazing colour schemes, Felliniesque before Fellini adopted colour (his almost feature-length episode The Temptation of Dr Antonio in Boccaccio ‘70 [1962] is, in fact, very Tashlinesque). It’s too easy to label Tashlin’s work as simply either (within the pantheon of comedy) parody or satire, both of which offer relatively comfortable positions of knowingness for the spectator. While touching on both modes, Tashlin’s style of pastiche resulted in something cooler, flatter, stretched out of shape, ambiguous; he was at once inside and outside of the industrial and entertainment formulae he picked up for use. There’s both sincerity (or, at least, complicity) and critique in his stance. Susan Slept Here is a comic assault on certain social norms and prevailing conservative attitudes – especially in relation to sex and age (older man/younger woman – let’s note that, in 1954, Dick Powell [in his last film role] was 50 – over the hill for a romantic male lead! – while ingenue Debbie Reynolds was 22 but still successfully playing teenagers). (3) It’s a film which knowingly skirts transgression, while also (sort of) playing it safe, according to (sometimes creaky) Hollywood rules of narrative resolution. The cheekiness begins right in with the opening theme song, which plays (complete with ‘shhh’ whispers!) on the intrigue of someone ‘sleeping’ somewhere – and is picked up later in a far more risqué, although teeny-bopper-sounding, number about travelling “straight through the portal now”. Everything thus gathers around a ‘forbidden’, indeed unnameable, act of sex. Can marital consummation be delayed enough to be entirely avoided? – that’s the central plot motor of Susan Slept Here, worthy of Preston Sturges. A special complication ensues when a sign announcing pregnancy – Susan eating strawberries with pickles – appears in the field of vision. Game space comedies, from at least Lubitsch on, are all about signs and their (conventional) interpretation, whether correct or misguided; The Lady Eve (1942) explores this matter in depth. See how Tashlin does it: in dance gestures, codes of bodily pose and facial expression (see discussion of dream sequence below), the treatment of a kiss … (It’s worth checking in on the Tashlin section of Raymond Durgnat’s 1969 book on American film comedy, The Crazy Mirror, where Susan Slept Here is described as the first volley of a “hypochondriac” trilogy, and hailed as the “swallow prefiguring a summer”. Durgnat also pursues the comparison between Tashlin and Pop Art, specifically Andy Warhol.) In Susan Slept Here, all signs point, in one way or another, to sex. Mark wants to be a ‘serious’ screenwriter – think of Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950) as a point of dramatic comparison – but his most recent success comes from having his name attached to Jane Russell’s starring body. Even the statue that narrates the story (see below) Oscar has – as is made clear in the opening narration – a libido, indeed a breast fetish. Tashlin both revels in and knocks sideways the gleefully ‘adolescent’ nature of all this sex-obsession. In interviews, he mocked the all-American male ‘Momism’ of breast-worship – a phenomenon of which his films provide the absolute best examples, like in The Girl Can’t Help It (1956)! He remarked to Peter Bogdanovich in 1962: “There’s nothin’ more hysterical to me than big-breasted women”, a fad-phenomenon which he counted among “the nonsense of what we call civilization”. We can relate the cast to other stars of the time, and some similar (usually less outrageous) comedies of amorous age mismatch: Powell is on a continuum with Cary Grant and Gary Cooper in this regard (see Wilder’s Sabrina aka Love in the Afternoon, 1954), while Reynolds belongs to a troupe of supposedly fresh-faced innocents including Tuesday Weld (who later starred in Tashlin’s Bachelor Flat [1962]). Sue Lyon as Kubrick’s Lolita (1962) introduced a new wrinkle into that game of types … Other stereotypical Hollywood figures swim around the central intrigue. There is the Best Buddy (who is usually a ‘sexless’ non-rival for the star/hero), here Alvy Moore as Virgil, ‘assistant’ to Powell as Mark – but, as in the original play, ‘demoted’ from his former role as Mark’s Navy boss, and hence needing to regain his manliness; the ever-droll (and always vaguely lesbian) Female Advisor (in Eve Arden mode), in this case secretary Maude (Glenda Farrell). There’s also the cold-hearted, suspicious Vamp, here Mark’s fiancée Isabella (Anne Francis); and a few Friendly Cops with slightly strange agendas (they drop Susan on him so he can use her to model a fictional juvenile delinquent character – and so they don’t have to lock her in jail, a little like the diversion/pause-mechanism in Mitchell Leisen’s immortal Remember the Night [1940]). At its 72-minute mark, Susan Slept Here brings on (entirely hitherto unannounced, genre-wise) one of the greatest ‘musical dream sequences’ in American film history. All pink-flushed, 6 minutes of it are told in dance – like many such scenes in the 1940s and ‘50s films of Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, meanwhile calling back to Powell’s origins in Busby Berkeley extravaganzas. But it’s also ghosted by the ‘Freudian wave’ of films that Marc Vernet has analysed so well: dreams that more or less spell out the forbidden, transgressive content of the characters’ desires and ‘true selves’. Mark here is himself as a young, military man; Susan is his miniaturised, manically acrobatic ‘bird in a cage’. Their power-differential idyll is broken by the appearance of Isabella as a literal Spider-Woman (with the appropriate turn in Leigh Harline’s score into sultry jazz styling), multiple arms (cleverly done in the choreography) included. She is, for Mark, the herald of ‘adult’ sexuality; he literally dumps Susan on the floor for the sake of his forthcoming (Oedipal?) initiation. Can Susan successfully escape and ‘grow up’ twice over, in size and age/experience? Now, in blue, along comes Virgil as the Cop-Guardian, carrying the (unavoidably giant-phallic) key to the cage; Susan’s expert mimicry of jazz-seduction (yet mimicry always announces its comical distance from the ‘real thing’) ensues, despite Mr Castrated Sexless’ repeated negations. Susan gets free (Virgil, strangled unconscious, simply disappears from the frame); but a transitional shot of her in bed sleeping registers a new twist. When Susan passes a mirror, she sees herself as a bride in dazzling white, not the Vamp she wishes to replace in Mark’s libidinal affections. How to square this intriguing complication/contradiction, so typical of the Hollywood-Text? (4) The editing goes wild – shots of Susan from both sides of the mirror, plus hallucinatory views of Isabella: the latter with bridal accoutrements, the former provocatively hitching up her wedding dress and swivelling her hips (while the “Wedding March” tag plays on the soundtrack). Susan again in bed, shakes her head “No! No!”, then “Yes! Yes!”. Back in the dream, now two brides in waltz-rivalry with adult-suit Mark – amidst a line of weird neo-classical columns. As the sequence ends, Susan has lost her man, and so she furiously flings his bedside photo to the floor, then (curiously tender gesture) beats the pillow (his, of course) in order to settle back into sleep. Fade out. What a scene! Condensation and displacement, the marks of the dream-work … You will have immediately noted, as the film launches, one of its central strategies: it’s narrated by ‘Oscar’, an Academy Award statuette! Brechtian defamiliarisation? Why not! Tashlinesque Pop comedy and Modernism are kissing cousins. So, Susan Slept Here is told ‘impossibly’, from an impossible place, with impossible omni-access to the story’s events; in this sense, it is simply an amplification of a standard Hollywood convention. But weirdly so! Other games of narration follow on: a play on spectator guesses, expectations, assumptions … There’s the paradigm idea of two ways to go (Mark’s Freudian ‘choice of object’). There’s the use of retroactive knowledge: motel, card game, the strawberry-pickle combo … A final word on sex. Very typically for classical American cinema, Susan Slept Here is a story of Desire and Law (note this prevalent cop & guardian business). The act of sex – really getting to do it – unfolds within a deadline, a race against the clocks of contract (legality, once again) and age (still too young, almost too old). Sexuality is, in short, under the sign of Taboo – finally, legally resolved via marriage and an elaborate ritual of ‘pairing’ (see also Vincente Minnelli’s Gigi [1958], and Raymond Bellour’s exacting analysis of it, for an extraordinary example of how this ritual works in film-textual terms). As already indicated, the ‘primal scene’ of sex is endlessly skirted, yet ceaselessly alluded to and evoked in virtual (‘maybe’) forms: the night spent together, the motels, the card game, sleeping on the couch … all surrounded by stern warnings from the Law! From there, we proceed to the prospect of an actual, physical, marital consummation that is fled by a nervous Mark and must be won at all costs by Susan – the becoming of a woman, and the re-becoming of a man. But – this is an extremely important principle to bear in mind – such resolutions in Tashlin are always excessive, ‘over-performing’ as we say today, arbitrarily pairing off anyone with anybody for the sake of a Happy Ending. Melodramas do this more solemnly; Tashlin lays it all out obviously, artificially, comedically. Ultimately and unavoidably, lurking underneath all this too-and-fro of the sexual encounter, there’s an incest fantasy, guaranteed by the age-difference variable and the recourse to ‘family’ symbolism. Think of those glorious Fred Astaire musicals – Minnelli’s The Band Wagon (1953), Daddy Long Legs (1955), Donen’s Funny Face (1957) – where he’s always partnered by a younger (sometimes highly ‘innocent’) woman. But this is not a simple – or merely ‘ideologically pernicious’ – matter; read Dennis Giles, who really penetrates to the heart of this fantasy’s meaning in his landmark mid ‘70s essay, “Show-Making”. The maestro is more than a sexual partner, more than a teacher. In the role of parent, both functions are combined. […] In all senses (world mastery, sexual power) the parent has been where the child will go. […] I firmly assert the principle that the musical deploys a conquest plot which seeks to annul the temporal process in order to display the permanent show of love. It denies the decay of erotic passion. The pre-Fosse musical drives towards the moment of metaphoric orgasm in order to freeze the moment of jouissance into a permanent text of pleasure. (5) As Giles rightly asserts, show-making requires show-work, akin to the dream-work. And that’s the kind of work we need both to understand and to (re)perform in our acts of critical analysis. MORE Tashlin: The Disorderly Orderly, Who's Minding the Store? NOTES
(2025) 2. A later and heftier book, even better, also published as accompaniment to a festival retrospective, is Roger Garcia & Bernard Eisenschitz (eds), Frank Tashlin (Éditions Yellow Now/BFI/Locarno Film Festival, 1994); Susan Slept Here is handled there by Noël Simsolo on p. 165 (“the key note is elegance”). Note also the perceptive 2016 review of the film (on its Warners Archive DVD release) by Darren O’Donoghue for Cineaste magazine, online at https://www.cineaste.com/fall2016/susan-slept-here. Another contemporary account by archivist Ariel Schudson, stressing Harriet Parson’s role as producer, appears at Tarantino’s Beverly Cinema website to accompany a 2017 screening: https://thenewbev.com/blog/2017/11/susan-slept-here/. back 3. Around 20 years after giving this lecture, I stumbled upon a second-hand copy of the playscript, co-written by Steve Fisher and Alex Gottlieb. Although it was originally titled Susan in 1951, the 1956 edition I have ($1.00 from Samuel French, Inc.) is Susan Slept Here (subtitled “a comedy in 2 acts”), presumably because of the film’s release in ’54. One can fairly safely assume that Tashlin – judging from the fact that he entered live-action features as a screenwriter, and from anecdotal evidence in his interviews – extensively reworked the screenplay (credited to Gottlieb) for his own purposes; the most Tashlinian elements (such as Oscar’s narration, and the dream sequence) have no equivalent in the play, and almost all the dialogue is different. (Simsolo, see note 2, asserts the exact opposite, but it seems only to be conjecture or assumption on his part.) The basic plot is the same, however; and some matters sprinkled into the play – such as the fate in Hollywood of serious writers “from Mankiewicz to Mankiewicz” – are briskly dealt with by the film. In truth, the play is an odd object (and seems to have been scarcely ever produced on stage): both its writers were well-known by the ‘50s for their contributions to Hollywood crime thrillers (Fisher wrote the 1941 novel I Wake Up Screaming, filmed that same year) and other popular genres (Gottlieb provided some of the gags for Hellzapoppin’ [1941]). Susan seems to have been their attempt at crafting a “sophisticated” theatrical comedy (for which medium neither seem to have written anything else), heavy on supposedly witty, name-dropping dialogue full of knowing cultural references (eg., in the play, the hero, named Joe, is said to have worked for “WPA Theatre” [i.e., the Federal Theatre Project with which Orson Welles was associated, closed down by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1939] and penned a book about his wartime service in the Pacific titled Memory of Hell). Clearly, a study of ‘Tashlin and Adaptation’, in all the contemporary senses of that term, would be something well worth doing. back 4. ‘Hollywood-Text’ was the name of an ambitious analytical project that I nurtured in my notebooks for several years, beginning in the late 1970s; it was to proceed by selecting, at random, an image, moment or scene from a classical-era American film, describing and evoking it in prose, and then jumping to a similar ‘figure’ treated completely differently in another film (perhaps of an altogether different genre, for instance) from the same loose period. The idea was to keep it going … indefinitely, infinitely! In order to show the deep interconnection of all these films, and how they endlessly rework each other. I never got terribly far with realising that project but, in some senses, I’ve never given it up, either: the audiovisual essays I’ve been making with Cristina Álvarez López since 2012 pursue the notion across a broader field of cinema, and in another, mixed register of critical expression. And ‘intertextual’ networks of comparison – well before I had yet encountered that word! – have long informed my critical writing. back 5. For a lengthy consideration of Dennis Giles’ legacy as scholar and critic (he died in 1989 at age 45) – a sadly neglected legacy, in my view – see my essay with Cristina Álvarez López, “To Attain the Text. But Which Text?”, in Julia Vassilieva & Deane Williams (eds), Beyond the Essay Film: Subjectivity, Textuality and Technology (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), pp. 49-73. “Show-Making” appears reprinted (with an interesting Afterword, partly quoted above) in the classic Rick Altman anthology, Genre: The Musical (BFI/Routledge, 1981), pp. 85-101, as does Bellour’s analysis of Gigi. An online resource gathering Giles’ published and unpublished texts is available at the Cleveland State University website: https://academic.csuohio.edu/kneuendorf/gilesvitae-gilesvitae-pdf/. (My immense gratitude goes to Giles’ colleague Kimberly Neuendorf for maintaining this archive.) back © Adrian Martin 13 July 1982 (+ notes January 2025) |
