Movie of the Week: Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1931) and Sporting Blood (1931)

This week, Clark Gable loves Greta Garbo in Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise and Madge Evans in Sporting Blood (both 1931).

Susan Lenox is a fine little pre-code film, mostly notable only because his co-star is the Great Garbo.

Garbo is Susan (born Helga), an illegitimate orphan raised in shame by her aunt and her cruel husband, who treats her like a slave. He picks a man for her to marry “so you won’t be without a wedding ring like your mother”. When the man tries to rape her, she runs away in a rainstorm, seeking shelter in a barn owned by architect Rodney (Gable). Rodney lets her stay with him and soon they are in love. When he leaves for a business trip, her uncle finds her and she runs away again, to Lenoxville, where she happens upon a traveling circus. She adopts the new name of Susan Lenox and becomes part of the act and can’t fend off the advances of the circus manager. When Rodney finds her, he is furious that she has become a fallen woman and leaves her. They run into each other again in New York, where she is now the mistress of a politician. Susan becomes determined to get Rodney back and prove to him she can be a one-man woman.

The premise of this hasn’t aged well. Poor Greta is treated poorly from the second she is born, all because her mother “didn’t have a wedding ring.” Her mother died in childbirth and her evil uncle even demands that the doctor stop trying to save the baby–that it’s better if she dies too because she’s illegitimate. Good lord. Greta is then treated like a slave by her uncle and passed off to marry a man she doesn’t know because “what’s in the blood is in the blood”–in other words, your mother was a slut so you will be too. Good lord.

Clark appears to save the day; he is a Boy Scout in every sense of the word.

“You’d better take off your clothes,” he says after he invites her in from the pouring rain.

“No,” she says immediately.

“Oh, I didn’t mean it that way!” he says.

The film has a hasty ending–Clark spends the first 20 mins of the film loving her and the rest hating her for turning cheap. Their chemistry is better than expected but still, you wonder why his short dalliance with a random girl he finds hiding out in his garage in the rain is really worth throwing away his whole life and career?

He goes from prim and upstanding good boy to disheveled and disillusioned jerk in about an hour!

But don’t worry, Greta just says, “I’ll make you believe in me.” and all is forgiven!

Full review is here

Nutshell review is here

Sporting Blood isn’t much in the way of a Clark Gable movie. He doesn’t appear for nearly 45 minutes into the film and the action is really all about the horse, his dalliance with Madge Evans being just a side story. It is the story of Tommy Boy, a colt cherished by his breeder who ultimately sells him when an offer is presented that he can’t refuse. The horse changes hands a few times before landing in the hands of a mobster that Warren “Rid” Riddell (Gable) is working for and whom Ruby (Evans) is entangled with. The mobster drugs the horse and mistreats him until finally the horse just wears out and loses a big race. The mobster’s friends all bet on the horse based on his assurance of a win and are none too pleased to lose their money. Thus the mobster ends up dead. Ruby takes ownership of the horse and gets him back in racing form by taking him back to the breeder’s farm. But does he have what it takes to win the Kentucky Derby?