City Girl

I haven't done a post on a silent film in a while, but I've got quite a few on my DVR thanks to recording a couple of the movies in TCM's Silent Sunday Nights programming, as well as a day honoring silent cinema they had back in September or so, I've got quite a few to go through. So first up is one I'd never heard of before, City Girl

In contemporary (ie. late 1920s) Minnesota, the Tustines grow wheat. Dad (David Torrence) has run the business -- since farming is in many ways really a business -- with a strong hand, going to Chicago himself to sell the wheat on the Chicago Board of Exchange. But he's getting up there in years, and his son Lem (Charles Farrell) is all grown up now, so Dad decides it's time to send Lem off to Chicago to sell the wheat. Dad knows how much wheat he's got to sell and how much money he needs, so it's a matter of simple arithmetic to figure out what price per bushel the wheat needs to sell at in order for the farm to keep going for another year.

If only real life were that simple. One gets the feeling that Lem has never been to the big city before, not even on trips with his father in previous years to get a good price for the wheat. As a result, one expects Lem to be overwhelmed by the big city and all that it has to offer a seeming naïf like Lem. While a bit of that happens, it's also not quite what happens. Lem finds a nice little diner where he can go to have lunch every day, and working the counter is pretty little Kate (Mary Duncan). In a normal movie, we might find that she's taking him for a ride, but in City Girl we find out that she's one of those people who's fed up with the big city and would like to get away from it all. As a result, the two begin to fall in genuine love.

But of course Lem is there to sell the wheat, and there's not a whole lot he can do about the people with the money buying it and what price they're willing to pay. If the buyer and seller cannot agree on a price, then no sale is going to be made. And there appears to be a glut of wheat on the market this season that's causing the price of wheat to fall. So poor Lem panics and sells for what he thinks is the best price he's going to get. (And, in his defense, the longer he stays in Chicago, the more expenses he's going to have, eating into the price he gets for the wheat.) Lem also decides to marry Kate and bring her back to the farm.

Dad is none too pleased about Lem not getting a good enough price for the wheat. But he's really ticked off about Lem's marriage to Kate. Dad immediately presumes that Kate is simply in it for the money and that a big-city girl like her is never going to be able to survive the life of hard work on the farm, Green Acres not being the place for her. Kate, Dad thinks, is just going to squeeze Lem and the rest of the family for what she can get and run off. And Lem doesn't do much to defend his or his wife's honor!

Matters get worse when more dramatic tension is added in the form of a storm coming from Canada that threatens to do a lot of damage to the crops when it dips down into Minnesota. They're going to have to speed up the pace of the harvest. To that end, Dad has brought in one of the regular itinerant farm crews, and Mac, boss of the crew, has decided he's taken a liking to Kate. Kate is getting a bit disillusioned by the way her father-in-law treated her and the fact that Lem didn't stand up for her, so she's willing to have the marriage annulled and leave now. But Mac decides he wants Kate for himself....

As I said, I didn't know the movie City Girl coming into this viewing, and learning about the history of it is the reason why I didn't know anything about it. This was directed by F.W. Murnau just after he made Sunrise, and as you can see, the two movies have some fair thematic similarity. But in the intervening period, sound had come to film, and by the time work on City Girl as Murnau had conceived it was complete, a major studio like Fox wasn't going to be able to release a silent picture. So the execs insisted on reshoots that would make it one of those part-talking pictures of which Hollywood released several in 1929. Eventually, a complete (or as complete as we know) print of Murnau's silent vision was found a good 40 years after the movie was made, and that's the version TCM ran.

City Girl is a visually beautiful movie, and one that's fairly well acted. If the movie has faults, it's in the story, which really isn't very original. But then there aren't too many really original stories out there. City Girl is one you should see if you can, for the beauty of Murnau's creation.