After The Women, George Cukor was assigned to direct Susan and God, based on Rachel Crowther's play, in which the heroine, Susan Trexel, is a flighty, self-deluded upper-crust woman, who drives her family away when she temporarily experiences a religious conversion.
Susan comes home from Europe obsessed with a new religious fad, which she tries to impose on her jaded friends. But gradually, she comes to realize that her withdrawn daughter and alcoholic husband need her and that charity truly begins at home.
Unlike most of Cukor's films, Susan and God simply lacks a sympathetic character at its center. What Susan needed, Cukor jokingly said, was a good spank from a man. As much as he tries, he can't salvage the movie's stuffy dialogue and tedious plot.
MGM had purchased the rights to Susan and God for Norma Shearer, but the star turned it down because she didn't want to play a mother with a teen-age daughter; it would have revealed her age. As in the past, the next star down the line at MGM was Joan Crawford. Cukor wasn't thrilled, and not because of the unpleasant "knitting" incident on the set of The Women.
Since Susan and God was high comedy, Cukor hoped to transform Crawford into a comedienne, just as he did successfully with Rosalind Russell in The Women. Cukor thus demanded that Crawford submit completely to his unrelenting discipline. But Crawford lacked the necessary skills to pull off the role. Cukor was frustrated since he was unable to stretch Crawford's skills; she was simply not a comedienne. Cukor did help Crawford to broaden her range, thought she would give her best performance in a Cukor film a year later, in A Woman's Face, in 1941.
Fredric March, who had worked with Cukor on The Royal Family, was cast as the distressed husband, who takes to drinking as an escape from his frivolous and insensitive wife. But as accomplished as March was, he too was defeated by the script and gave a listless performance. By Cukor's standards, none of the performances in the film was good.
There was a small role of a society woman in the film, and Cukor, against MGM's advice, cast a young actress by the name of Rita Hayworth. Sensing there was something special about Hayworth, Cukor gave the makeup people specific instructions on how to make her look more beautiful, and Susan and God served as one more step on Hayworth's upward way to stardom.
