Bob
This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.
Scarlet
The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.
Francene Odetta
It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.
GManfred
This was an interesting story. It was also very hard to swallow, almost as though it was edited beyond intelligibility. They fall in love too quickly, then later in the picture she tracks him down without any clue as to his whereabouts. She falls in with a circus troupe and writes him to meet her despite becoming the mistress of the circus owner - and she's shocked when Gable drops her on the spot. How could she not anticipate rejection in this circumstance? Though it borders on fantasy it works due to the efforts of the two stars. There was good chemistry between Garbo and Gable, and she is chiefly responsible for it. I am in a minority here, but I always fail to see Garbo's 'indescribable charm and allure'. I guess I am too young. Nevertheless, it is she who makes the film work, and raises a poorly written and ultimately inferior movie to my rating of six.
judy t
Long-suffering womanhood – the turf of Ruth Chatterton - is NOT what I want from a Garbo film. And to hear her called Susie – good grief – this is Garbo, not Janet Gaynor. In this sob-sister story, Susan is a character who rises above victimhood to become a woman in control of herself and her life. And Rodney is the impetus for her transformation. But, like Robert Montgomery's Andre in Inspiration, Gable's Rodney spurns Susan because she's been unfaithful. Unfaithful – how much better and more evocative that title would have been than Susan Lenox, Her Fall and Rise.In this on-again off-again love story, Garbo is convincing as a woman who spends years chasing after Rodney, who repeatedly rejects her, because, she says, "I know he loves me." Amazingly - or not so amazingly since this is Hollywood - as it turns out, Susan is right. He does love her. During the years that's she's been rising from the gutter and he's been falling into the male version of the gutter – alcohol and laboring in steamy tropical jungles – he's loved her. Gable was well-cast and is convincing as a man who knows how to love a woman, but has difficulty forgiving. Although the script is as faulty as the story, and despite the paucity of jaw-dropping costumes, any film Garbo appears in is worth seeing. And adding Gable is frosting on the cake. 2 months after Susan Lenox arrived in theatres, Mata Hari was released. Now THAT's a story fit for Garbo.
mark.waltz
Greta Garbo suffers to the max as a poor girl whose unwed mother died right after giving birth to her, leaving her in the hands of her nasty Uncle Jean Hersholt who had hoped the baby would be born dead. As the child grows up (shown in a montage of shadows), her uncle promises her to a lecherous Alan Hale (Sr). He attempts to rape her while stranded at Hersholt's home during a flood-causing rainstorm, and Garbo escapes into the night, eventually running into engineer Clark Gable and being taken in by him. They are instantly in love but their plans to wed after Gable returns from a business trip are dashed when Hersholt and Hale locate her. In true pre-code Hollywood fashion, Garbo ends up in a carnival and when Gable finds her, he incorrectly assumes she is a loose woman. Garbo's fury towards men (previously kept quiet) is unleashed as she vows to be exactly what Gable believed her to be. Like any bad penny, Garbo and Gable keep running into each other as the assumptions become worse and Garbo falls deeper into sin.Long before her riotous laugh in "Ninotchka", Garbo is briefly light-hearted here, playfully teasing Gable in their initial love scenes and showing an engaging smile. However, her transition into a tramp from a broken winged bird really isn't believable. Dozens of these films with stars like Dietrich, Bankhead, Stanwyck, Crawford and Twelvetrees (to mention a few) were made in the pre-code sound era, and this doesn't have any more dimension than they did. Cecil Cummingham is amusing as a tattooed carnival performer, while Gable (minus mustache) is very handsome in his only film opposite Ms. G. Hersholt and Hale play very one dimensional, hiss-able characters. But Garbo is always worth a look, and there are some really nice photographic moments between her and Gable that are perfect for movie stills.
dmwspace
This film is noteworthy because of the unique, mysterious, and wonderful screen presence of Greta Garbo. She is thoroughly convincing as the vulnerable young woman at the beginning of the film, and as her character becomes more worldly but still vulnerable she remains convincing. Occasionally she might lapse into acting that would seem to the modern viewer to be overly dramatic, but overall she is brilliant. Clark Gable is okay, but the construction of the film from a plot standpoint left something to be desired. Some things needed to be explained better. This seems to be a common problem with many early sound films as most of the 1928-31 sound films that I have seen are at times disjointed, leaving the viewer wondering why something occurred. That said, I recommend this film because of Garbo.
