Suzy Reviews

Funny thing about the Studio Era of Hollywood, they were the best at crafting films built entirely around a star’s persona, using each release to craft and hone that image and play with its various limitations and expansions. On the reverse of that, you also end with films that were crafted for one star, but ended up with an entirely different one in the lead. Suzy has a bit of an identity crisis.

It’s not a bad film; it’s just wildly unsettled and can’t decide which version of itself that it wants to be. Is it the sweeping romance with Harlow on one end and two different men on the other? Or is it the WWI espionage war-time thriller, complete with spies and scenes of aerial combat? Both of them could work, but they don’t work together. The espionage material feels rushed and tacked on, the love triangle is a soggy mess.

Jean Harlow was clearly not the first choice for the title role, as the film frequently handicaps her madcap erotic energy into a dressed down, good girl role that she plays well, but it doesn’t highlight her strengths as an actress. Any number of actresses from the era could have played it, and done it just as well. It’s just another role in which Harlow’s innate gifts for screwball comedy, or cracking wise and posing tough are watered down to give her image a cleaner appeal. Personally, I miss the Pre-Code motor-mouth with the zany eroticism.

Cary Grant and Franchot Tone are the two men in her life, one a scoundrel who feels like a wrong fit for Grant’s more dream-lover charms, and the other a thought-dead nice guy. It’s refreshing to see Tone not give in to pouty, rich, daddy’s boy mannerisms that hampered his earlier roles, and he and Harlow still generate a pleasing romantic chemistry and play off of each other well. Allegedly, Grant’s role was originally intended for Clark Gable, and the rougher, alpha-male party boy feels like a perfect fit for Gable’s sensibilities. Grant’s never terrible, but he feels ill-suited for this role at this time.

It's a shame that Suzy is the lone pairing of Harlow and Grant as this is not the ideal scenario for the pair to try and generate some chemistry. Grant was not an irredeemable cad, and Harlow worked best against men who either matched her carnality (Gable), humor (Powell), or against her class (Tone). He's too stiff here and missing that delightful sense of queerness that appears in his better pairings like with Katharine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell. Still, since this is their sole pairing, that does mean Suzy is worth checking out to see two of American cinema's greatest stars acting opposite each other.

Suzy is mostly notable for its dynamic dog-fight scenes, which were leftovers from Hell’s Angels, Harlow’s big break. These aerial sequences are fluid and adventurous in a way that much of the rest of the film is not. They stand in high contrast to the stately production of the rest of the film. As if every problem with it could be summarized in the back and forth between the kinetic views of planes in tailspin, then the quick cut to Harlow trying to keep a happy home and worrying about the men in her life.