Sunnyside Up (1929)
Director:
David Butler
Writers:
Buddy G. DeSylva (story), Lew Brown (story)
Stars:
Janet Gaynor, Charles Farrell, Marjorie White
The popular silent romantic team of Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor made a successful all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing debut in Sunnyside Up. The story is old bromide about a poor girl who falls in love with a rich man, then tries to pass herself off as a woman of wealth. This being a 1929 Fox picture, the supporting cast includes the ineluctable dialect comedian El Brendel, along with squeaky-voiced soubrette Marjorie White. In his feature-film debut, 7-year-old Jackie Cooper shows up as a tenement kid, while Joe E. Brown does a guest bit as a grinning undertaker. The superb DeSylva-Brown-Henderson score includes "If I Had a Talking Picture of You," "Turn on the Heat" (a jaw-droppingly erotic number, in which the gyrations of the chorus girls causes a banana tree to blossom full out!), and the title song.