Sunny Side Up (1929)

Toronto Film Society presented Sunny Side Up (1929) on Monday, July 8, 1985 in a double bill with Babes In Arms as part of the Season 38 Summer Series, Programme 1.

Production Company: Twentieth-Century Fox.  Producer: William Fox.  Director: David Butler.  Screenplay: Buddy DeSylva, Ray Henderson, Lew Brown.  Adaptation: David Butler.  Songs: DeSylva, Brown and Henderson.  Photography: Ernest Palmer.  Choreography: Seymour Felix.  Costumes: Sophie Wachner.  Art Direction: Harry Oliver.  Sound: Joseph Aiken.  Editor: Irene Morra.

Cast:  Janet Gaynor (Molly Carr), Charles Farrell (Jack Cromwell), El Brendel (Eric Swenson), Marjorie White (Bee Nichols), Frank Richardson (Eddie Rafferty), Sharon Lynn (Jane Worth), Mary Forbes (Mrs. Cromwell), Joe Brown (Joe Vitto), Alan Paull (Raoul), Peter Gawthorne (Lake), Jackie Cooper (Tenement Boy).

SONGS by Buddy DeSylva, Ray Henderson, and Lew Brown: “Sunny Side Up,” “I’m a Dreamer, Aren’t We All?,” “If I Had a Talking Picture Of You,” “Turn On the Heat,” “Pickin’ Petals Offa Daisy.”

Of the three great love teams of the late silent period, two did not negotiate the entry into sound:  Vilma Banky’s rich Hungarian accent caused her early retirement, and John Gilbert, for reasons which are still disputed (though he certainly does not have the enunciation of an Olivier), was also at the near-end of his career.  Their partners, Ronald Colan and Greta Garbo, continued, separately and still more triumphantly, their highly successful progresses.

The third couple, Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, did manage the transition, and remained one of the screen’s most popular love pairs until the middle 1930s.  Sunny Side Up was their fourth film, and their first all-talking, though their third, Luck Star, had contained some dialogue sequences.  Their first three films had all been directed at Fox by Frank Borzage, the most relentlessly yet gorgeously sentimental director in the whole range of the American cinema; and Variety duly noted the change in the fourth film:  “Something new for Janet and Charles, after their royal line of sobby little love stories.”  Yet one of these sobby stories–and it certainly is that, amongst other things–is their first pairing, Seventh Heaven, the fairy tale of the sewer worker who takes unto him a waif of the streets, goes off to war, is thought to be dead, and finally returns to his waif, blinded yet fulfilled.  Though Holden Caulfield would certainly have puked all over himself had he seen it years later on a Sunday afternoon at Radio City, it remains one of the great classics of the American romantic cinema.  And a modern audience, moreover, might find Sunny Side Up a touch on the sobby side down.  (A recent commentator on the musical film hhas called Charles Farrell’s performance “simply awful,” and “If I Had a Talking Picture Of You” is all but destroyed by having it reprised by two uncompromisingly objectionable children–a sentimental blemish which is not unique in the picture).

Sunny Side Up was directed by David Butler, an actor who had played with his two principals in Seventh Heaven, and was now making his eighth (and to date best) film from the other side of the camera.  Butler continued directing workmanlike films, mostly musicals (Where’s Charley?), for the next forty years, and his oeuvre include some of Shirley Temple’s best pictures (Bright Eyes, The Little Colonel, The Littlest Rebel–the latter two with the great Bojangles), a few Bob Hopes, including one Road show, a number of musical biopics (My Wild Irish Rose, Look For the Silver Lining), and a good deal of sentimental Americana; a quarter of a century after Sunny Side Up he was still cutting his films from the same cloth, as in that charming if saccharine transposition of Booth Tarkington, By the Light of the Silvery Moon.  The upbeat belief in the simple American virtues is inherent in this early picture.

Sunny Side Up was Charles Farrell’s sixteenth film, and Janet Gaynor’s thirteenth; their first pairing, Seventh Heaven, had been his tenth and her sixth.  He had begun with a walk-on in the Pola Negri version of The Cheat, and a slightly larger part in Rosita, Lubitsch’s first American film.  Her seventh film is the one for which film history, anyway, remembers her, Sunrise, opposite George O’Brien.  Though his career largely petered out after they made their twelfth and final film together (Change of Heart, 1934)), she made at least three more important films–Henry King’s only excursion into Screwball comedy, One More Spring, The Farmer Takes a Wife, opposite Henry Fonda in his first picture, and William Wellman’s A Star Is Born, in which she, in the decline of her career, and Fredric March, on the rise of his, played husband and wife actors in the reverse positions.  She died last year from the aftereffects of a street accident two years earlier; Farrell lives on in Palm Springs, where he developed large business interests and once served as Mayor.  He is now in his middle eighties.

Sunny Side Up has a rather routine plot, which would later be the basis of more than one screwball comedy:  the tenement girl from the lower East Side meets the Southampton society swell.  While in such comic treatments as Easy Living or My Man Godfrey it is the hero who is in disguise, wealth masquerading as poverty, in Sunny Side Up the working girl is given the chance to masquerade as rich, lady for a day: we are dealing more overtly with the Cinderella story here.  And as befits a fairy tale, all comes right in the end, as Cinderella’s dream of marrying her Prince Charming comes true.  They’re all dreamers, but aren’t we all?

One of the most memorable musical segments in the film is the “Turn on the Heat” number, which for sheer overt sexual symbolism leaves all Busby Berkeley’s bananas and lampposts standing (so to speak).  As igloos given place to tropical vegetation, the chorus line remove their furs to reveal scanty bathing suits, and as they writhe in the throes of ecstasy not only do flames burst forth behind them, but a fountain spurts out a jet of copious water.  Sensibly, the girls dive in to cool off.

Sunny Side Up, though scarcely a landmark, stands at an important moment of film history, as the studios were exploiting to the full the new medium of sound.  In 1927, Warners’ The Jazz Singer, of course, had musical sequences (Queen Anne is also dead), and each of the studios had hailed the coming of sound with extravagant show-sequence productions that put all their talents on display:  The Broadway Melody, The Hollywood Revue of 1929, The Show of Shows, Paramount on Parade.  1929 saw an explosion of music and visual image–with the first true sound musical for the screen (Broadway Melody), the first filmed operetta (The Desert Song), and the first film taken direct from the Broadway stage (Rio Rita).  If not the first, then one of the very first musicals created directly for the screen was this one, Sunny Side Up.

Notes by Barrie Hayne