Farm boy from Minnesota travels to Chicago. While in the Windy City he meets and falls in love with a waitress working at a diner. They impulsively get married, return to the farm where they are not well received by the farm boy's Christian Fundamentalist father. That's basically the story.
The director F.W. Murnau had filmed The Last Laugh in Germany. American film executive William Fox whose studio would later become 20th Century Fox, considered The Last Laugh the best film ever made. Fox brought Murnau over to Hollywood for two purposes, he let Murnau make any film of his choosing and he wanted him to teach his studio directors how to make better films.
City Girl contains scenes of strong lyrical beauty with beautiful shots of the farm fields and the couple running through them. It also has very emotional performances from a cast that actually look like people who would live on a farm. The composition and photography in each scene using light, shadow and set design is very impressive in the city and farm scenes.
Murnau's first American film Sunrise, is now considered one of the greatest films ever made, unfortunately it did not do very well with the audience which was overwhelmed with it's stunning technique. City Girl was Murnau's third American film and it got caught up in the transitional mess from silent to sound films. Fox screwed around with it, reedited it and released it in a version not approved by the director.
Still the film has a strong sense of atmosphere for the period and place and it's a very good film.
Written by Marion Orth and Berthold Viertel, the running time is 89 minutes.
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