Wild Girl
Directed by Raoul Walsh, Wild Girl follows Joan Bennett’s Salomy Jane as her quiet, small-town life is thrown into disarray after a handsome stranger rides arrives on the scene. Filmmaker Walsh, armed with a script by Doris Anderson and Edwin Justus Mayer, delivers a lackadaisical slice-of-life story that benefits from its compelling atmosphere and raft of above-average performances, with, in terms of the latter, the picture receiving plenty of mileage out of Bennett’s appealing and frequently magnetic turn as the restless central character. (And this is to say nothing of the strong work by such top-notch costars as Charles Farrell and Ralph Bellamy.) And although the episodic narrative has admittedly been suffused with a small handful of engrossing sequences, including (and especially) a surprisingly gripping interlude detailing a spur-of-the-minute hanging, Wild Girl‘s padded-out vibe ensures that the picture slowly-but-surely begins to run out of steam long before it arrives at its fairly inevitably conclusion – which does, in the end, cement the film’s place as a decent-enough endeavor that feels long even at just 78 minutes.
** out of ****
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