SUSAN SLADE: so-so soaper studies sex and the single virgin

It really is redundant to describe the plot of a soap as implausible and ridiculous so I'll settle for calling SUSAN SLADE a turgid viewing experience.
It starts out frothily enough with the Slade family, dad Roger (Lloyd Nolan), mum Leah (Dorothy McGuire) and their naive, virginal teenage daughter Susan (Connie Stevens) returning to California after 10 years in Chile's Atacama Desert where dad has been overseeing a mining operation for the uber-wealthy Corbett family (headed by Brian Aherne). On board the liner taking them home the shy and insecure Susan finds herself ardently pursued by the handsome hunk in the next cabin. Conn White (Grant Williams) is not only a chiseled dreamboat, he's also an avid mountaineer with a passion for 'conquering virgin peaks', Miss Slade included.
By the time their boat docks in San Francisco Susan is not only secretly engaged but also knocked-up, so when Conn is killed shortly afterwards in a climbing accident the Slades are faced with an appalling dilemma. What are they going to do with their unwed pregnant daughter? To admit her condition is unthinkable. This is, after all 1961, and decent people with wealthy friends just don't do that kind of thing. So they make the far more rational decision to move to Guatemala where Susan can give birth out of sight and grandma Leah can pretend the baby is hers.
So far so good.

Then the story becomes bogged down with plotlines involving a horse given to Susan as a birthday present and a stuttering romance with stable owner Hoyt Brecker (Troy Donahue). Hoyt's less chiseled than Conn but considerably taller (he almost has to get down on his knees to kiss Susan). He wears a red, Jan Dean style, windcheater but that's as rebellious as he gets. When he's not grooming horses he's writing books, and he's so sensitive that at times he comes across as barely less feminine than Susan. He's solid and dependable and Susan is going to be utterly bored with him within a year or two of marriage.
SUSAN SLADE's main point of interest for me is it's efforts to straddle two cultures - that of the staid, respectable, patriarchal 50s where success was measured by how far up the corporate ladder one can ascend, and the more liberated youth oriented 60s where teenagers turned their back on their parents values in favour of free love and uncoupling happiness from material acquisition. Screenwriter and director Delmer Daves tries to have it both ways with the tale he tells but his sympathies are clearly with the status quo.
It's a little sad to see old timers like McGuire, Nolan, Brian Aherne and Kent Smith slumming it in such a trashy production (and playing second fiddle to Stevens and Donahue), but I'm sure they were grateful for the work. I'm not so sure that McGuire would have been grateful for Daves' hamfisted efforts to endow her close-ups with a veneer of youth. They're shot through such thick filters that her face resembles a moving smear on the camera lens.
Neither a superior soap nor a top tier tearjerker, SUSAN SLADE is nothing more than industrial strength corn. Consume it at your peril.