mark.waltz
Greta Garbo suffers to the max as a poor girl whose unwed mother died right after giving birth to her, leaving her in the hands of her nasty Uncle Jean Hersholt who had hoped the baby would be born dead. As the child grows up (shown in a montage of shadows), her uncle promises her to a lecherous Alan Hale (Sr). He attempts to rape her while stranded at Hersholt's home during a flood-causing rainstorm, and Garbo escapes into the night, eventually running into engineer Clark Gable and being taken in by him. They are instantly in love but their plans to wed after Gable returns from a business trip are dashed when Hersholt and Hale locate her. In true pre-code Hollywood fashion, Garbo ends up in a carnival and when Gable finds her, he incorrectly assumes she is a loose woman. Garbo's fury towards men (previously kept quiet) is unleashed as she vows to be exactly what Gable believed her to be. Like any bad penny, Garbo and Gable keep running into each other as the assumptions become worse and Garbo falls deeper into sin.Long before her riotous laugh in "Ninotchka", Garbo is briefly light-hearted here, playfully teasing Gable in their initial love scenes and showing an engaging smile. However, her transition into a tramp from a broken winged bird really isn't believable. Dozens of these films with stars like Dietrich, Bankhead, Stanwyck, Crawford and Twelvetrees (to mention a few) were made in the pre-code sound era, and this doesn't have any more dimension than they did. Cecil Cummingham is amusing as a tattooed carnival performer, while Gable (minus mustache) is very handsome in his only film opposite Ms. G. Hersholt and Hale play very one dimensional, hiss-able characters. But Garbo is always worth a look, and there are some really nice photographic moments between her and Gable that are perfect for movie stills.
bkoganbing
Or was that the publicity line for some other MGM picture with the king of their lot?Susan Lenox, Her Fall and Rise is taken from the David Graham Phillips novel of the same name and in this 77 minute film hardly any of the story gets to be told. Probably a lot was left on the cutting room floor of MGM and you have to be able to bridge some gaps if you haven't read the book.The book itself was published posthumously in 1917 six years after its author was killed by a disgruntled reader of his work. I'm guessing it was written years earlier because it's attitudes and subject matter were distinctly Victorian. Greta Garbo plays the daughter of Jean Hersholt who wants to sell her in marriage to the local lout played by Alan Hale. One thing that was interesting was seeing both of those players in unlikely unsympathetic parts.She flees Hersholt's farm in the rain and gets taken in by Clark Gable who's renting the cabin on the lake down the road. The romance kindles, but Gable has to make a quick trip to town, meanwhile Hersholt and Hale come looking for Garbo and she flees again.Garbo gets taken by some carnival people including the wolfish owner, John Miljan, whom she submits to. When Gable finds her, his attitude is most Victorian. In fact the rest of the film through their respective ups and downs Gable and Garbo do a lot to hurt each other.Susan Lenox is one heavy handed melodrama and no one would remember it at all today, but for the fact it was the one and only teaming of Gable and Garbo. Being paired with Garbo was a big milestone for Clark Gable. Also he was not paying thugs any longer, charismatic thugs, but thugs nonetheless. He was leading man material after this film.It only gets as much as six stars from me because of the cast.
dbdumonteil
Troubles never come singly,and in the short space of barely 75 minutes,the least we can say is that rain keeps falling over Garbo's head.The director treats of his heroine's childhood as a shadow show,a good idea and a way to sweeten the rather dense and eventful story.So dense it's sometimes hard to keep up with it.GB is a wretch,then a circus artist, a socialite,a hostess in a seedy African cabaret..Well it's melodrama!This is not as good as contemporary Stahl's best works though,because of the unsatisfying cutting. Long before "Ninotchka" Garbo laughs when she sees caviar .(it looks like buckshots!).This is not as much misogynist as they often say.Except for Gable's character and the man in the cabaret,all the males are infamous pigs whose only desire is to get the heroine in their bed.
aurtom-1
Just look at the scene in which she and him go fishing, and look at what she does with the fish she catches , and then just laugh!laugh!laugh!Maybe it was done without malice but, if otherwise, it couldn't have come out funnier than it did!
AD
