Cinema: For Crying Out Loud

Susan Slade (Warners). “We’ve been sinful!” gasps a pretty young mouse (Connie Stevens) to a sly young tomcat (Grant Williams). In cinema sin,as everybody knows, it’s the moviegoer who pays—in this case for 116 minutes. But to the masochistic (and largely female) millions who use movie houses as self-torture chambers, Susan Slade will come as a genuine treat for the tear ducts. It is the lachrymasterpiece of the cinema year, a truly elephantine sniffle.

The sniffle starts when the heroine, after playing house for a couple of days, gets pregnant. It gets louder when her lover tries to climb Mount McKinley and is killed. Rescued from suicide, the heroine spills the secret to her mother and father, who spirit her away to Guatemala.

When the baby is born, the unwed mother’s parents pass it off as their own. “Remember, darling.” says Mother, “for the rest of your life you must act as if your baby were mine. For the rest of your life you have to think: This isn’t my son, it’s my little brother.” The heroine buys that pea-brained proposition and its chuckleheaded corollary: she can never wed because she could never leave her brother. For this problem the script provides a solution that has at least the merit of originality. The baby catches fire—no kidding, the dear little fellow really catches fire and blazes away on the screen for quite a while. But somehow, after two hours of watching the trouble he’s made, it’s hard to be sorry for the little bastard.