Susan Slade is a 1961 American Technicolor drama film directed by Delmer Daves and starring Troy Donahue, Connie Stevens, Dorothy McGuire and Lloyd Nolan.

After working for ten years in an isolated desert in Chile, mine manager Roger Slade (Lloyd Nolan) returns to the United States with his wife Leah (Dorothy McGuire) and their beautiful but naive 17-year-old daughter, Susan (Connie Stevens).

He travels on to Anchorage, while Susan and her parents go to Monterey and move into a home provided by Roger's grateful employer and longtime friend, Stanton Corbett (Brian Aherne).

Her parents attempt to take her mind off Conn by encouraging her to date the Corbetts' son Wells (Bert Convy) and buying her a horse, which is kept at the stables run by Hoyt Brecker (Troy Donahue).

Compared to Susan's family and friends, Hoyt is relatively poor and lives on what he can earn from his stables (which have lost many customers due to the scandal involving his father) and as a struggling writer.

Despite all this, Hoyt and Susan gradually become friends and he confides in her his determination to not run away in the face of local disapproval, but to instead become a renowned writer and redeem his family name.

Variety wrote that it amply illustrated Stevens' acting, but that it "weighs in as little more than a plodding and predictable soap opera" and the "yarn has a chicken way of evading its real issues by ushering in devastatingly convenient melodramatic swerves at key moments.

Excitedly fast-forwarding the taped-off-TV video to the burning infant, clutching my cheap camera like a guerrilla unit-photographer, I was shocked to see how fake the scene looked today.