Small Town Girl (1936)

(On Cable TV, July 2021) There is a pleasant matter-of-fact treatment of an outlandish premise in Small Town Girl that’s both a reflection of the common tropes of the time, and a charming reminder that 1930s Hollywood screenwriters played by different rules. The story of a, well, small-town girl swept off her feet by a dashing Boston surgeon, the film quickly goes to a familiar place: the quick whirlwind marriage, preceding romance by quite a margin. What would be truly weird today ends up being just another Hollywood trick to force our characters into an intimate relationship without riling up the Hays Code. Since they are married, they can go all the way at the slightest moment and that’s where the romantic tension emerges. Otherwise, though, there isn’t much more to the film. A still-unknown James Stewart shows up as a distant supporting character—the boring suitor who gets dumped as soon as the surgeon drives into town. Janet Gaynor and Robert Taylor are presented as the protagonists, but neither of them have much of a spark — they do what lead actors are supposed to do and get the film to the finishing line. By 1930s romantic comedy standards, Small Town Girl is ordinary: slightly weird seen eighty years later, but mildly charming at the same time and quite representative of the way marriage would be used as a plotting device in the shadows of the Hays Code.