The Extra Girl

Mabel plays Sue Graham, a small-town girl whose picture is mixed up with that of a much prettier girl that a movie studio decides they want to put under contract. When Sue arrives on the scene, the studio discovers its mistake and assigns Sue to the props department. Sue does overcome adversity, but not before she mistakes a dog dressed as a lion for an actual lion and her parents come out to Hollywood for a visit and end up exchanging their life's savings for some worthless oil stock. Note Vernon Dent, later of the Columbia comic shorts and specifically the Three Stooges series, as Sue's unwanted suitor.

"The Extra Girl" is one of the more charming silent films I have enjoyed recently, and it's too bad Mabel Normand is remembered more for the Hollywood scandals of the roaring 20's than her charming comic persona in silent films. Her frequent costar, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, suffered a much worse fate - the end of his career - over a crime of which he was acquitted. Like The Primitive Lover, I'm surprised more people haven't seen this film. Check it out, you won't regret it. The best existing DVD copies are in very good shape, and detail is clearly visible. There are only a few signs of deterioration towards the middle of the film.

Somewhere between the Rocky Mountains and Pittsburg, spunky Mabel Normand (as Sue Graham) lives in a small town. She longs to be a movie actress. When her parents arrange for Ms. Normand to wed rotund Vernon Dent (as Aaron Applejohn) instead of handsome childhood sweetheart Ralph Graves (as David "Dave" Giddings), the spirited young woman decides to leave town. Normand first agrees to elope with Mr. Graves, but she is unable to leave her loving parents. She finally exits her small Illinois town, after winning an invitation to Hollywood from the Mack Sennett studios (as the Golden State Film Company). Appropriately, her departure is in Mr. Sennett's comic style. In Hollywood, Normand is not welcomed as a potential star. The photo she sent was switched with a beautiful young star, by a rival for Graves' attentions. Instead, the studio gives the teary-eyed Normand a job in their wardrobe department...

"The Extra Girl" is not a confident feature-length story, mixing styles with inconsistent success. Although the title presumes Normand becomes an "extra" on her way to becoming a movie star, it never happens. In the film's comic highlight, she does manage a screen test. Norman also takes a lion for a walk around the studio lot, thinking he's "Teddy" the Great Dane. The former canine superstar has a subdued cameo. An obviously villainous Ramsey Wallace (as T. Phillip Hackett) swindles Normand's pitiful parents George Nichols and Anna Hernandez (as Pa and Ma Graham) out of a small fortune and Graves joins them to steal the picture. Normand and Sennett parted after this film and she attempted one more feature before returning to shorts, the genre which made her a popular teenage star. Formerly considered to be one of the screen's finest comediennes, Normand was beset by personal problems and never regained her footing.

****** The Extra Girl (10/28/23) F. Richard Jones ~ Mabel Normand, Ralph Graves, George Nichols, Ramsey Wallace

Normand stars as a small-town girl who wants to be an actress. Through a trick, she wins a contest and goes to Hollywood to be a star. When the studio realizes the pictures sent in was not her, she's put in the wardrobe department. Choppy plot and rough transitions (heavy cutting?) don't help the story, but Normand is a winner. She's a cross between Harry Langdon and Giulietta Masina (especially in La Strada). Several very funny bits involving a lion and some gum. Her screen test is very funny. Ralph Graves is surprisingly good as a boy friend her follows her west. Graves didn't make it in talkies and usually played the stuffy best friend. But he's loose and funny here. Vernon Dent (from many Three Stooges shorts) is the jilted lover. The imposing Louise Carver is the wardrobe boss. George Nichols and Anna Hernandez play the parents. Normand remains a tragic Hollywood figure despite her huge stardom in the teens and early 20s and her work with Chaplin and Arbuckle. Her association with the still-unsolved murder of director, William Desmond Taylor, killed her career. She died in 1930 at 36 or 37. She made only a handful of films after this little gem. With Marie Dressler, Normand was one of the first cinema comediennes, and she is quite good in The Extra (as in screen extra) Girl. It sure looks like Normand in there with the lion and doing stunts off the back of a train. Remarkable. But Normand will be remembered by buffs for The Extra Girl and for the first comedy feature, Tillie's Punctured Romance.

Note: the grass widow, Belle Brown, was listed in the film credits as being played by Mary Mason. The IMDb lists her as played by Charlotte Mineau. Did Mineau use this other name?

An entertaining little comedy starring Mabel Normand, the beautiful funny girl who in her heyday was as famous as Chaplin but who is sadly mostly remembered today as a footnote to the spate of sex and drug scandals that afflicted Hollywood in the early twenties. At nearly thirty she does looks a bit old to be playing an ingénue, but she's nevertheless quite appealing as the scrappy but naïve farm girl Sue with her old fashioned ringlets and homemade dresses who is determined to take Hollywood by storm. She doesn't, and the movie rather than being a rags to riches chronicle you might have been expecting becomes a relatively prosaic account of the fate of thousands of girls who tried to make it in Hollywood, failed but ended up happy enough with ordinary lives as wives and mothers. The movie doesn't dwell too much on its more realistic elements, however, and viewers are most likely to remember those amusing set pieces as when Sue's overbearing father attempts to force her to get out of bed and dress for her wedding or (the highlight of the film) when Mabel, now working as a lackadaisical prop girl, mistakes a lion for a dog dressed up in a shoddy lion's costume and nonchalantly leads it about the set on a leash to the horror of onlookers.

"The Extra Girl" is good introduction to the work of a talented comedienne who deserves to be better know today.

It has taken quite a while for THE EXTRA GIRL to make it to commercial DVD and now that it's finally here, we should all be grateful. But with that gratitude there should be some sadness as well for this 1923 film was the beginning of the end for one of the silent era's most gifted performers. Mabel Normand (1892-1930) began her career as a model for Charles Dana Gibson before breaking into films with Biograph in 1909. She moved over to Vitagraph and then left to be with Mack Sennett at Keystone in 1912.

In addition to being the silent era's greatest comedienne she was among the first women to write and direct her own material. She also directed Chaplin and Roscoe Arbuckle but was never given credit for it. She successfully moved from shorts to feature films before her run of bad luck began. Implicated but never charged in a series of scandals including the unsolved murder of director William Desmond Taylor, Mabel's career as a star unraveled during the 1920's. Drugs and alcohol aggravated the tuberculosis she had lived with for many years and she died at the age of 37 right at the dawn of the sound era.

Her association with Chaplin, Arbuckle, and the Keystone Kops have kept her face before the public but so little of her other work has survived and almost none of it is on DVD. This Kino release of THE EXTRA GIRL along with the 1913 Keystone one reeler THE GUSHER will certainly help. It also shows how much the nature of American film comedy evolved over 10 years. The visual quality of this disc taken from a 1969 Killiam Collection print is excellent with an organ soundtrack provided by Jack Ward that is above average for Killiam.

The story of a small town girl who goes to Hollywood has been done many times but Normand makes it her own even though at 30 she's too old for the role and it shows. You can watch her physical appearance change throughout the film reflecting the health problems she was dealing with. Nevertheless the backstage look at moviemaking, Normand's screen test, the escaped lion sequence, and the unhappy/happy ending are among many highlights the film has to offer...For more reviews visit The Capsule Critic.