James Agee wrote for The Nation:
I would like to be able to make "The Affairs of Susan" sound half as bad as it is, but I know when I'm licked. In this interminable film, which might be described as a Make's Progress, Joan Fontaine is photographed as Joan of Arc; the Maid looks as if she were testifying, for a handsome fee, to every nice thing the Voices told her about Lysol.
Miss Fontaine also appears as a lake-shore innocent, in trousers and a thinly knit jersey; in a series of gowns and negligees which are still more earnestly calculated to refute the canard that, if the Hays office permitted, she would be ashamed to make a clean breast of her "development" (I think the word is); and in a collection of horn-rims, tight hair, ties, and sharp tailoring which, if they suggest nothing admissibly human, may at least roughly approximate Mayor LaGuardia's mental image of "Trio".
Thihs sort of thing makes me all the angrier because Miss Fontaine has proved that she is an actress worth building a good picture around -- or even worth using in one that doesn't build around anyone.
About Dennis O'Keefe's characterization of a writer, I feel less kind. He achieves it purely by letting his hair get rather long behind the ears. In objecting to this, I am probably the only living writer who has to cast his stone through a glass house; and much as I loathe haircuts, I have been trying ever since I saw this picture to brace myself to enter a barber shop.
I would like to be able to make "The Affairs of Susan" sound half as bad as it is, but I know when I'm licked. In this interminable film, which might be described as a Make's Progress, Joan Fontaine is photographed as Joan of Arc; the Maid looks as if she were testifying, for a handsome fee, to every nice thing the Voices told her about Lysol.
Miss Fontaine also appears as a lake-shore innocent, in trousers and a thinly knit jersey; in a series of gowns and negligees which are still more earnestly calculated to refute the canard that, if the Hays office permitted, she would be ashamed to make a clean breast of her "development" (I think the word is); and in a collection of horn-rims, tight hair, ties, and sharp tailoring which, if they suggest nothing admissibly human, may at least roughly approximate Mayor LaGuardia's mental image of "Trio".
Thihs sort of thing makes me all the angrier because Miss Fontaine has proved that she is an actress worth building a good picture around -- or even worth using in one that doesn't build around anyone.
About Dennis O'Keefe's characterization of a writer, I feel less kind. He achieves it purely by letting his hair get rather long behind the ears. In objecting to this, I am probably the only living writer who has to cast his stone through a glass house; and much as I loathe haircuts, I have been trying ever since I saw this picture to brace myself to enter a barber shop.