Glorifying the American Girl – Glitter, Jazz Hands, and a Lotta Old-School Sass

Honestly, mate, when I put on *Glorifying the American Girl* yesterday evening, it was half a nostalgia trip, half a culutral anthropology experiment. This oldie from 1929, directed by Millard Webb (yeah, not exactly a household name in Västerås, am I right?), is one of those early talkies trying to figure out what cinema can actually do with all that noise.

What really smacked me in the face though was seeing Eddie Cantor pop up, and there’s Helen Morgan, and then—surprise—Florenz Ziegfeld himself in a cheeky cameo. Ziegfeld, he was basically the king of Broadway glitter. It’s like putting Ingmar Bergman in a cameo at an old Stockholm teater, totally bananas.

I have to be honest, half the time I was squinting at the screen—visuals are grainy in that som gammal räksmörgås—that’s old shrimp sandwich for the non-Swedes, means a bit past its prime. The colours try to blaze in those two-strip Technicolor sequences, but it’s not quite “evening sun in Malmö”-glowing, more like faded midsummer flowers you forgot to water.

But there’s a certain charm there. The plot is all over the place: small-town girl dreams of the big stage, men in goofy tuxedos, endless musical numbers. My aunt Majken used to drag me to tentrevyer in Karlskrona and this film brings back that mix of excitement and slight confusion, not knowing if you’re watching genius or a parade of drunk uncles.

The best part? That feeling of wanting *something else*, wanting glamour from grey everyday life. And yeah, compared to today’s films, this is kinda slow, a bit too theatrical, but if you’ve ever daydreamed during a November drizzle in Sundsvall, you get the American Girl’s longing.

Watch it with friends so you can giggle at the corny lines and that ancient jazz, and maybe wonder together if we’re all still trying to “make it” somewhere brighter.

watch the full movie on Mavshack Movies on YouTube

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