CITY GIRL
Starring Charles Farrell and Mary Duncan
LIMA (OH) NEWS
May 11, 1930
Charles Farrell and Mary Duncan play the leading parts in "City Girl," starting Sunday at the Lyric theatre. It is a romance of the wheat belt with Farrell as Lem, unsophisticated country boy, and Miss Duncan as Kate, waitress in a restaurant in a large city.
Conspicuous roles in the picture are handled by David Torrence, Edith Yorke, Dawn O'Day, Jack Pennick, Warren Burke, and others in the supporting cast include Guinn "Big Boy" Williams, Dick Alexander, Harry Gripp, Ed Brady, Mark Hamilton, Tom Maguire, Harry Leonard, Ed Clay, Werner Klinger, and William Sundholm. Berthold Viertel and Marion Orth wrote the scenario for "City Girl."
The story has to do with the son of a tyrannical wheat rancher who is sent to the city to sell his father's wheat and admonished to get a certain price.
The son sells the wheat for less than the father desired and brings back as his bride a waitress whom he has met in the city. The father blames the girl for his loss of money and makes life miserable insisting that she is a woman of the streets who has tricked his son into marriage.
Her husband, long dominated by his father, fails to defend her. This brings a love rift that is healed only after only after a bitter struggle between the girl and the rancher.
David Torrence is said to play a highly dramatic role as the father. David Murneau (sic) who has directed all of Farrell's most successful pictures dating from "Seventh Heaven,' was in charge of "City Girl."
CITY GIRL
Starring Charles Farrell and Mary Duncan
(BUTTE) MONTANA STANDARD
February 23, 1930
Mary Duncan and Charles Farrell in the Fox movietone production "City Girl," a story that has for its locales the great American wheat belt and a great city, will open as the feature attraction at the Fox Theater commencing tomorrow. It was adapted from Elliott Lester's stage play "The Mud Turtle" and produce under the direction of F.W. Murnau.
There are many big moments in "City Girl," moments that border on the tragic, and there is a deal of comedy relief. The story is that of a boy who goes to town from the wheat ranch. Here his shy, country-boy way, his saying of grace, something different about him, stirs the imagination of Kate, a waitress. Kate never has seen the country, but is seems like the thought of a quiet paradise to her. They marry and the boy takes her home, but it doesn't work out so well. The father is a Puritan and can't get out of the idea that City Girl means Bad Girl. The harvest hands, taking advantage of the father's dislike for girl, stalk her as their prey. It is then that the big drama of the story is enacted and the dominated boy throws off the parental yoke in a new slant on the theme that there's a pot of gold at the rainbow's end.
CITY GIRL
Starring Charles Farrell and Mary Duncan
MADISON (WI) CAPITAL TIMES
March 24, 1930
The flat grain fields of the Middle-west and the noisy, sweltering crowds of Chicago are the contrasting backgrounds for the picture which leads your interest along to a rather mediocre climax. Romance comes to a city girl with a picture calendar conception of the country, and a country boy sent to the city to sell his wheat at a price fixed by his father while the boy waits for the price in the stock exchange to recover from a drop.
While the chalked figures on the black board go lower, the boy and girl use the lunch counter as their trysting place and on the day of his return are married.
Facing his father with a waitress wife, the boy is at a disadvantage with the dour farmer who thinks he knows the type. The girl proves herself and the picture ends happily with the human relations in the family straightened out, but with the wheat crop the sole hope of the family, ruined by the rain.
Charles Farrell and Mary Duncan, as well as the parts of the father and mother, are well cast. The farm scenes are beautiful and telling and the photography is good.
For more information, see "City Girl" as our "Feature of the Month"