City Girl
About City Girl
Lem Tustine (Charles Farrell) is sent from the family’s Minnesota wheat farm to Chicago to sell the crop. He meets Kate (Mary Duncan), a waitress who wants out of the city, and they marry. Wheat prices drop and he sells below the figure his father set. At the farm his mother and young sister take Kate in; his father (David Torrence) treats her as a gold digger and blames her for the price. A harvest hand, Mac, makes a play for her, and the father calls her unfaithful. When hail threatens the crop, Mac pulls the reapers out on strike. Lem fights him, faces his father, and goes after Kate. The crew comes back to finish the harvest, and the father apologizes.
Cast & crew
More about City Girl
The working title was Our Daily Bread, from Elliott Lester’s play The Mud Turtle. Marion Orth and Berthold Viertel wrote the script; William Fox produced. Murnau’s company rented a wheat farm six miles south of Athena and also shot in Pendleton and Portland. Location work ended on 30 September 1928; interiors followed in Los Angeles in October. After a change of control at Fox, A. F. Erickson directed dialogue scenes in October and November 1929. The studio retitled the picture City Girl and released the part-talkie on 16 February 1930.
Themes
Background
Principal photography finished in 1928, before the studios had fully switched to talkies. By the February 1930 release, Fox was selling a hybrid: a short part-talkie cut against a longer silent version Murnau had prepared.
In film history
Terrence Malick has called City Girl the main model for Days of Heaven (1978) and one of his favorite films.
Making
Murnau shot it silent and opposed the dialogue the new Fox management wanted. Erickson supplied the talking scenes. Murnau did not direct them.
Reviews
The Philadelphia Inquirer praised the Oregon locations and the city-country contrast. In the Chicago Reader in 1985, David Kehr wrote that the circulating silent print was still short of what Murnau shot, and pointed to the sunlit field where Farrell, Duncan, and the camera move together.
Audiences
The part-talkie failed commercially. By 1930 many audiences were waiting for all-talking pictures.
Look
Ernest Palmer shot the Minnesota farm on a wheat place six miles south of Athena, with further exteriors in Pendleton and Portland and interiors on Fox stages in Los Angeles.
Music
Arthur Kay scored the 1930 part-talkie, which used both sound-on-disc and Movietone. That version is lost. The print now shown is silent, with English intertitles.
Preservation
The part-talkie negatives burned in the 1937 Fox vault fire. In 1969 MoMA archivist Eileen Bowser found Murnau’s longer silent version in the Fox vaults. MoMA showed it in June 1970. That silent cut, 89 minutes, is the one that survives; the 68-minute release print does not.
Notes
- On 12 August 1928, while still scouting near Pendleton, Murnau had an emergency appendectomy.
- Mary Duncan was named Round-Up Queen of the 1928 Pendleton Round-Up when she arrived that August.
- Guinn Williams, Jack Pennick, and Mark Hamilton (Greasy) play reapers.
- Harry H. Caldwell and Katherine Hilliker edited. Ernest Palmer photographed. Arthur Kay wrote the music for the part-talkie.
- Murnau had pitched the film to Fox in December 1927 as a story about wheat and “the sacredness of bread,” sticking close to The Mud Turtle.
- It was his penultimate feature. He died in 1931, after Tabu.
Scenes
- Lem sells the wheat under his father’s figure as the price falls in Chicago.
- The father turns Kate away from the table and blames her for the sale.
- Hail is coming and Mac calls the reapers out.
- Farrell and Duncan cross a sunlit wheat field with the camera moving beside them.
Influenced by
- The Mud Turtle (Elliott Lester play)
Influenced
- Days of Heaven (1978)
Also available
- Murnau, Borzage and Fox (20th Century Fox Home Entertainment DVD box, 2008)
- Eureka Entertainment Blu-ray/DVD (2010)
- Fox Archives DVD (2015)
- Wikimedia Commons (City Girl (1930).webm)
