The Extra Girl (1923)

Originally posted to Facebook on 8/19/2017

Our fourth and final film from 1923 was The Extra Girl, starring Mabel Normand. This is the second feature in which we've seen Normand, the first being 1914's Tillie's Punctured Romance made almost a decade earlier. And, while she was one of the three principal leads in that film, in this film she is clearly the star. She is easily up to the task of carrying the film -- and one imagines she might well have had a long career if she hadn't died of tuberculosis at the age of 37 in 1930. (Strangely, the director, F. Richard Jones, also died of tuberculosis at the age of 37 in 1930.)

The film was interesting in that it belongs to that durable genre of Hollywood films about Hollywood films. I don't believe it is the first of its type, but it is the first that we have seen as part of this project, and it is clear that by 1923, the glamour and mythologization of Hollywood and its stars was already firmly established. While in some ways the film enhances that mythology -- depicting the dream of someone from middle America moving to Hollywood and getting into the movie business -- in other ways it helps to puncture that mythology, showing how the relatively few on-screen stars are made possible only by an enormous network of people and infrastructure acting in various off-screen capacities.

The film begins in Normand's hometown, and spends a lot of time on a subplot revolving around her parents trying to marry her off to a local suitor played by Vernon Dent, despite her preference for another local played by Ralph Graves. In the midst of this she enters a Hollywood contest, and ends up winning, which provides her with a good reason to leave town. The remainder of the picture takes place in Hollywood, where Normand works in some of the above-referenced support roles in the film industry. There is a long set piece in which a lion gets loose, and chases Normand and others around a studio lot, spectacularly jumping through a transom above a door at one point. I think most or all of these scenes are shot artfully so that the actors do not appear to be in danger, though I wouldn't be shocked if that were not the case, given what we've seen in previous films. The lion does seem genuinely enraged at one point, so I am pretty confident that modern standards of animal treatment were not in place.

A third set of scenes revolve around Graves and eventually Normand's parents following her out to Hollywood. Her parents end up being swindled out of their life savings, the consequences of which account for most of the remainder of the film. The film ends on a rather sexist and tacked-on note, but on the whole it is fairly entertaining, though a bit fragmented plot-wise.

Our next film will be our first from 1924, and our second directed by F. W. Murnau: The Last Laugh. I've also added our planned list of films from 1925 to the spreadsheet, which is, as always, here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT