Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

When you watch "The Girl from Calgary" today, you're very likely to be surprised at just how awful the lead in the film is and wonder how she ever got such a role. Well, I can't logically explain it, other than to say that standards were different in 1932 and perhaps Fifi D'Orsay wasn't considered terrible back then....or at least as terrible. The film begins in the hotbed of musical entertainment, Calgary. A couple guys (including Paul Kelly) make a grand discovery of a ravishing singing sensation, Fifi. They decide to try to get her on Broadway (which is odd considering her VERY strong French-Canadian accent) and get no where. So, they go on a publicity campaign and soon people are flocking to see this sensation. This is odd, because her musical numbers are just god-awful and her charms difficult to decipher. The bottom line is that even for a Monogram film, this is a lousy picture. Had the leading lady been more talented, spoke with an accent that didn't require captions or been prettier (I am not being sexist--the film harped on this aspect of the character), it might have worked better. I doubt if it would have been a good movie, but it certainly would have been better. As it is, it's a tedious film from start to finish and all the stock footage clumsily dumped into the film at the beginning sure didn't help.

One critic referred to her as that for the 1971 Stephen Sondheim musical "Follies" where she introduced the pastiche "Folies Bergere" number, "Ah, Paree!". Throughout her career, Fifi was never without feathers or wacky costumes, whether as the temperamental movie star in "Going Hollywood", the obvious prostitute in "Wonder Bar", or the aging art patron in "What a Way to Go!". In one of her few leading parts, Fifi plays a role similar to Ruby Keeler's in "42nd Street", except that she goes from the nightclub, cabaret and occasional rodeo to becoming a huge Broadway star. Ironically, in "Going Hollywood", she played the equivalent of the Dorothy Brock "42nd Street" role, screaming at everybody and everything around her until they pretty much just had enough.For her to be the leading lady in this unbelievable Cinderella story is not enough to carry my interest for even just over an hour. She might be fine as the leading lady in a short, but for a feature is too difficult to tolerate. Lupe Velez could pull it off, because she knew when to tone it down, but after a while, D'Orsday just starts to grate on the nerves. Along with jealous roommate pal Astrid Allwyn, they make the move from Calgary to Pittsburgh to Manhattan, with beaus Paul Kelly and Robert Warwick at their sides. A few musical interludes are thrown in (mostly outtakes of the campy "The Great Gabbo") and D'Orsday does sing in a few of them. But with a heroine you really just don't care too much about, the result is flaccid indeed.One funny sequence has Kelly and Warwick escorting the ladies home in a cab and being forced to sleep in a barn where they share bedding with a huge pig and a goat who makes a breakfast out of Warwick's necktie. D'Orsday is fine for supporting parts and in small doses, and even with "Follies", she is barely remembered other than looking like something out of the beast's home in "Beauty and the Beast". For the most part, however, this isn't even mildly amusing or remotely something you'll remember much about the next day.

"The Girl from Calgary" is a strange movie but a valuable historical document. It shows how at least one early filmmaker handled the challenge of producing a film in a short period of time with few resources and very little money. Its faults and strengths tell us more about the early sound era than they do about any girl supposedly from Calgary.One striking feature of the movie is that it appears to be a montage cobbled together from various film sources. The first part of the film is silent newsreel footage of an early Calgary Stampede parade, possibly from the 1930 Stampede. (Local viewers with a historical bent may enjoy the view of 7th Avenue S.W. in the early Depression era.) The movie then suddenly segues into a drama between various characters, one of whom is a French-Canadian stage actress, and then portrays a play in which the actress stars. The end appears to be a travelogue of an area which looks more like the mountains of central California than the plains of southern Alberta.The splices between the various sections are abrupt and unexpected, which makes one wonder if the producers assumed that audiences would be more interested in the novelty of sound and the supposed exoticness of the locale than in the plot itself. Differences in sound quality in the dramatic parts and in the stage play itself provide clues as to how these sections were shot and miked.One interesting piece of trivia about this film is that it contains one of the longest and best newsreel shots of Indians in an early Stampede parade. The original newsreel from which the shots were taken has disappeared, and many of the remaining newsreel shots from before the sound era are only seconds long or feature only cowboys and local officials. It's perhaps strange that a Hollywood movie would be such an important source for First Nations historians searching for information about the persons who participated in early parades.As for a French-Canadian (with a Parisian accent!) living in Calgary in 1932...well, there might have been one. It would have made much more sense to make her Scots, English, or Hong Kong Chinese though!

The thirties was where different types of films and approaches to film-making elbowed each other. Some survived and others are buried as fossils in a sort of Burgess shale. If you want to understand what movies are, you need to see what it is not. And few things are as helpful as these fossils of the extinct.This is one of the strangest assemblies. The seams don't match at all.The story is about the random, offhand way which a rural gal is made a headliner. That actually happened with this actress so far as her career. But it characterizes the movie too, its capricious assembly.It is superficially similar to hundreds of movies from this period: a story about a stage star so that we have an excuse to see a stage show. Movies were right at the cusp at this time between the traditions of the old stage and what we know today as movies.But as I say, the splicing is so rough it startles.It begins with genuine footage of a festival in Calgary, mostly featuring Native Americans. This is quite literally spliced. It is a silent movie and the placards are retained. Our heroine is from Calgary, it seems, simply so they could use this interesting footage. Otherwise, the Calgary connection makes no sense as the girl is French. While in Calgary, we see she is a rodeo star.Plucky, you see.She then travels to Broadway and is an instant hit. There is a love/exploitation story of the ordinary kind.Here's the amazing thing. In addition to evolving what movies are, we see some evolution of what beautiful women are.This "girl's" charms are her pluck, her batty eyes and her French accent which here is tied to an endearing whiftiness. That's also what endears her to the audiences we see, the men in which swoon. She does several sexy dances in skimpy outfits with open abandon.But her sexy glances look absolutely stupid. They would be — are — the stuff of comedy today.Her jouncy sexy dance and her feigned dumbness and exaggerated accent are similar stuff.But if you wander into this, you will likely notice her figure first. She has a blocky waist, small bust and huge, huge thighs. Yet she puts on the skimpy costumes and stands in front of dozens of woman with features that have since become mandatory.If this were today, it would be a bold comment about the shallowness of sex. For the time it was an odd splice of a performer into a sexy role as a bad splice.And an obvious, cheap experiment in what works.Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.