City Girl (1930)

Directed by

F. W. Murnau

Genre

drama film, silent film, romance film

Country

United States

Runtime

1h 25m

Rated

NR

Rating

7.5 of 10 from 104 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A Chicago waitress falls in love with a Minnesota farmer and moves to the countryside to start a new life. She faces the challenges of adapting to rural life and the disapproval of her husband's family.

romanticmelancholicearthyatmospherictenderquietly intensebittersweetpoetic

What happens

City Girl is a 1930 American drama film directed by F. W. Murnau, and starring Charles Farrell and Mary Duncan. It follows a waitress in Chicago who falls in love with a farmer in Minnesota and leaves her life in the city to be with him. It is based upon the play "The Mud Turtle" by Elliot Lester. Though shot as a silent feature, the film was refitted with some sound elements and released in 1930 as a part-talkie sound film (now lost) due to the public apathy to silent films. While the part-talkie film has a few talking sequences, the majority of the film features a synchronized musical score with sound effects using both the sound-on-disc and sound-on-film process. City Girl was filmed on location in Athena and Pendleton in eastern Oregon in 1928, with some additional exterior shooting taking place in Portland. After location shooting was completed, interior shoots were undertaken on soundstages in Los Angeles. Fox Film Corporation executives who were unimpressed with the film intervened in its post-production process, introducing sound elements against Murnau's wishes. The part-talkie version of the film, which included contributions from director A. F. Erickson, was released theatrically in February 1930. In 1937, the original negatives of the part-talkie version were destroyed in a vault fire at Fox Studios, and the film was thereafter assumed to be lost. In 1970, a print of Murnau's original, longer silent version of the film was discovered in the Fox vaults by an archivist from the Museum of Modern Art, where it was subsequently exhibited in June 1970. The film is credited as being the primary inspiration for Terrence Malick's film Days of Heaven (1978). It was Murnau's penultimate directorial feature before his death in 1931. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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