Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise) *** (1931, Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, Jean Hersholt) – Classic Movie Review 3538

Director Robert Z Leonard’s 1931 MGM drama is notable for starring the king and queen of Thirties Hollywood in their only screen pairing.

Naturally Greta Garbo and Clark Gable make a must-see team in this enjoyable emotional drama about Helga Ohlin (Garbo), an illegitimate woman who runs away from her abusive poor father Karl Ohlin (Jean Hersholt) and loutish arranged fiancé Jeb Mondstrum (Alan Hale). Helga meets a sympathetic man in the form of an architect called Rodney (Gable) renting a cabin near her family’s farm.

[Spoiler alert] But Rodney leaves the cabin and they part. Her father and Jeb find her but he runs away again. Helga joins a circus troupe as a dancer under the name of Susan Lenox. Susan yearns to meet up with Rodney and finally they get together again.

The warm and charismatic Gable is able to make the chilly ice queen Garbo even more magnetic than usual. And there are some smart and persuasive scenes among others that belong to Victorian melodrama.

However, MGM must have thought that the spark wasn’t there and never re-teamed the stars. Or perhaps it was just that the two were so huge as stars that they never needed each other’s box-office support again.

Based on David Graham Phillips’s novel, the screenplay needed 14 writers, though only four were credited: Wanda Tuchock, Zelda Sears, Leon Gordon and Edith Fitzgerald.

Also in the cast are John Miljan, Russell Simpson, Hilda Vauhgn, Hale Hamilton, Cecil Cunningham, Ian Keith, Helene Millard, Marjorie King, Jack Baxley, Lee Beranger, André Cheron, Wallis Clark, Bess Flowers, Eddie Kane, Edward LeSaint, Pat Moriarty, Larry Steers, Charles Sullivan and Nella Walker.

The notoriety of the novel was enough for British censors to ban the movie from release until it was cut, finally approved and released in the UK with a new title, The Rise of Helga.

Garbo says to a suitor: ‘This time I rise … and fall … alone.’

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3538

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