Cinema: The New Pictures: Jul. 1, 1940

Susan and God (M. G. M.) explores the situation that develops when a giddy Long Island matron takes up with something resembling Dr. Frank Buchman’s Oxford brand of confessional Christianity, tries hard to talk her husband and her friends into it and to death.

In the latter enterprise Joan Crawford at first comes too close to succeeding. But when the film gets under way and Susan wakes up to find that her patient husband

(Fredric March) — sick of the way she has been treating him and their ugly duckling daughter (16-year-old Rita Quigley) — is about to fly the coop, Cinemactress Crawford conies into her honest own. The result is a moving marital drama, which, although it talks more than most cinemas, also has more to say. It also demonstrates that Buchmanism is a bore, at least in the movies, and that Joan Crawford, Fredric March, Rose Hobart, Nigel Bruce and Bruce Cabot are not.

Like all Metro specials, Susan and God is trademarked by expert direction (George Cukor), lavish mountings, best camera work and lighting in the business, and gowns by Adrian. Since Hollywood’s only rival as the world’s fashion centre was Paris, since Hollywood’s No. 1 stylist is Adrian, and since broad-shouldered, boy-hipped Joan Crawford is one of Adrian’s favorite models, Susan and God is no mean fashion event. Feminine movie goers and scouts who remembered such nationwide Adrian clicks as the puffed sleeves Crawford wore in Letty Lynton, Garbo’s Eugenie hat in Romance and jaunty pillbox in Mat a Hari, ogled Miss Crawford in a quilted bed jacket and chiffon wimple, a severe black frock with white loops sprouting from one shoulder, a striking evening gown suspended from a white cord (see cut), 13 other Adrian changes.

Tall, twittering Gilbert Adrian began to draw shortly after he was born 37 years ago, the son of a Naugatuck, Conn, milliner. His first success, a costume designed for his companion at a Paris ball, caught the eye of guest Irving Berlin, got Adrian a job dressing the Second Music Box Revue. Rudolph Valentino’s wife, Natacha Rambova, took him from Broadway to Hollywood to make her husband’s clothes, and Adrian has been dressing movie folk ever since. At M. G. M. he inhabits an oyster-white office, works furiously chewing gum, deep in an over stuffed chair which is disconcertingly set on a dais to keep him from dropping paint on the oyster-white carpet. In the groove, he can turn out a sketch in 20 minutes. Dresses like those in Susan and God cost M. G. M. between $150 and $350 apiece, but when Adrian spits on his hands and lets go in a costume piece, his creations may cost the studio as much as $4,000 to execute. Somewhat frustrated by having to work without color, Adrian compensates himself by taking a high hand with his temperamental charges. He forbade Norma Shearer the frills she liked, had the idea of turning Joan Crawford from Judy O’Grady into Colonel’s lady, overcame a troublesome Garbo trait by observing: “It is difficult to have an evening gown fit properly with the right lines when the person wears low heels.” At parties Adrian keeps a keen eye peeled for signs of dowdiness, can be convulsing about it afterwards. Of Tallulah Bankhead he once remarked: “She can wear one more silver fox than any other woman and still look underdressed.” Adrian affects not to know the difference between one Paris couturier and another, to dislike ordinary women who copy movie styles. He recommends that the average woman should limit herself to the costumes worn by the heroines of light comedies laid in moderate-sized towns.

Adrian sleeps in one of the biggest beds in Hollywood under a vaulting canopy, has 12-ft. divans in his house, coffee tables sizable enough for billiards, gives his friends as many as a dozen Christmas presents, keeps three pet monkeys and a macaw. Last year he married tiny Janet Gaynor, having previously styled her with bright carrot-colored hair (and her mother with blue hair). He recently popped a surprise by announcing that he was designing maternity clothes for his wife, a nursery wing for his sprawling Spanish house.

The Mortal Storm (M. G. M.). More than a year ago, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer bought Phyllis Bottome’s The Mortal Storm, a straight-talking best-seller about Jewish persecution in the Third Reich.

The non-Aryan professor who gets in the way of marching events in 1933 is played with back-bending restraint by Frank Morgan, who once more reveals that his bag of tricks includes far more than his usual movie titter. The swastika soon crosses the romance between daughter Freya (Margaret Sullavan), and her boy friend Fritz (Robert Young). Fritz’s transformation from a windy but amiable young donkey into an expert instrument of hatred remains awesome even in a world where it has happened so often. Gradually father, mother, sons, see their world wavering around them, its old, familiar outlines dissolving into the crazy settings for a hideous fairy tale. Freya finds a prince charming in her friend Martin (James Stewart), a fairy godmother in his gentle old peasant mother (Maria Ouspenskaya). But when the time comes for a white charger, all prince and godmother can furnish is a pair of skis.

The skis do not carry Freya quite far enough. A bullet beats her to the border.

As the picture ends, Martin crosses it alone, sadly rejoicing in his escape—to Austria.