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