"Susan Slept Here": 1954 comedy shows when a screenwriter needs to have his own skin in the game

The 1954 romantic comedy “Susan Slept Here”, directed by Frank Tashlin and based on the play by Steven Fisher and Alex Gottlieb, might just barely fit into today’s controversy over hosting people.

Dick Powell plays Mark Christopher, a struggling screenwriter, who lets the authorities leave him in charge of a female juvenile delinquent in his apartment, with his motivation to use her story as subject matter for a movie script.  Is that a good reason to support someone, to have your own skin in the game?



He winds up marrying her in Las Vegas (imagine this in today’s gay context, maybe with immigration or asylum seekers) and the movie winds up in the Sierras.

It was a garish Technicolor production that I barely remember seeing with my parents at age 10 (in the days when movies had short subjects first, and had to come to the neighborhoods).