SUNNY SIDE UP (1929)

It's the Fourth of July on the Lower East Side of New York City as we see a long tracking shot of a tenement neighborhood with kids stealing food from Eric, the Swedish grocer. In one of the buildings, Molly (Janet Gaynor), who rooms with her friend Bea, is nursing a crush from afar on the wealthy playboy Jack Cromwell (Charles Farrell). Meanwhile, at a party at his family's mansion in Southampton, Jack is fed up with his girlfriend Jane constantly flirting with other men—she blatantly brags that getting married won't keep her "out of circulation"—so he drives off in a slightly drunken huff and winds up in Molly's neighborhood, having had a minor fender bender. Eric lets him stay at his apartment to rest up but he winds up with Molly instead. They hit it off and when he sees her sing at the street block party, he asks her to sing at a charity event in Southampton, in part to make Jane jealous. As rumors spread at the party that Molly is Jack's kept woman, the plan seems to work, with Jane suddenly becoming interested in marriage. The problem is that Molly's celebrity crush on Jack has turned into a real-life one. Will Jack ever see that it's Molly he should be with? Plotwise, this is an average romantic comedy of the era. But it's also a pre-code movie and has some risqué behavior. It's also a musical with one particularly sexy number, "Turn Up the Heat," performed poolside at the mansion. Despite some fun numbers, no one will mistake this for an Astaire-Rogers or Busby Berkley musical. Gaynor and Farrell, a popular film couple of the era, are fairly lightweight, as are their singing voices. Marjorie White and Frank Richardson are fine as friends of Molly's who pose as her servants at the mansion. El Brendel, the Swedish dialect comic who was inexplicably popular for a few years, is tolerable as the grocer, who also accompanies Molly to the mansion. Mary Forbes, a familiar high society face from movies like You Can't Take It With You and The Awful Truth, plays Jack's mother, and child actor Jackie Cooper has an uncredited role a few years before he hit the big time in The Champ. The best song is "I'm a Dreamer, Aren't We All," which I actually know as a pop culture pun by Groucho Marx in ANIMAL CRACKERS ("I'm a dreamer, Montreal"). What I said about a later Farrell/Gaynor musical, DELICIOUS can go for this one, too: "Mostly worth watching as a historical oddity, a movie musical done as Hollywood was, by trial and error, inventing the genre." Pictured are Farrell and Gaynor. [TCM]