A Girl of the Limberlost

This tiny rustic 70 min film was a smash success for emerging poverty row studio Monogram Pictures in 1934 and rated as one of the most heavily booked films of the year. It is on record as having 14,000 bookings in at time when there was 20,000 cinemas in the USA. It is on par with the other major hits of the day "Dinner at Eight" and the Busby Berkeley films. Listed in the industry Quigley Publications diary for 1935/6 as a blue ribbon winner of 1934 it must have come as a bombshell to anyone including the Monogram management that the film was so profitable, costing only $70k to produce and pulling $1m. in rentals. In the same year Monogram had several other 'major' releases one being KING KELLY OF THE USA which even had a minor but cute animation sequence. Most Monogram films of this period ran about 70 minutes and played the second feature on a double bill. However, GIRL OF THE LIMBERLOST played as an A level feature as it commanded main feature box office sales. No wonder Herbert J Yates at Consolidated labs wanted the Monogram outfit rolled into his newly formed Republic Pictures! he accomplished that by closing their account for lab processing and forcing them to merge along with several other studio s like the serial kings Mascot Pictures. GIRL is from one of America's most widely read novels and already had a huge inbuilt audience ready to devour the film. It is a charming tale of an unappreciated child raised in the hills and facing all sorts of bumpkin emotional dilemmas. It had a solid run internationally too, so easily grossed another wad of cash before vanishing like so many other 30s pix.

There is a staccato pace to the editing of this movie that gives this first talkie version of Gene Stratton-Porter's 1909 novel an episodic quality. It begins with Marian Marsh anxious to enter high school and get an education, but her mother, Louise Dresser, hates her, because her father drowned the night of her birth. Only her aunt, Helen Jerome Eddy, and uncle, Ralph Morgan, are anxious to help her, but her sweet nature wins over a bevy of admirers, many of them silent film actors, ready to please fans of old movies: Betty Blythe, as "The Bird Lady" -- a stand-in for Mrs. Stratton-Porter -- who becomes her best friend; Henry B. Walthall, as the kindly local doctor; Baby Peggy, as a schoolmate; and Syd Saylor as a local hard case.

The real issues of abuse, poverty and, indeed, nature conservancy that run through the original novel are muted in director Christy Cabanne's handling of the material under the newly enforced Production Code, but the performances are all telling. Indeed, Ralph Morgan may never have given a better one. The material may strike the modern viewer as old-fashioned and sentimental, but the issues that underlie the movie remain real, and its messages of triumph and redemption, rather than punishment, is one I applaud.