(3.5/5)

Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard argues that when she was a star on the (silent) silver screen, “we didn’t need dialogue; we had faces!” And she may be on to something there. Sunnyside Up was the first sound film for popular silent star Janet Gaynor (fresh off winning the first ever Best Actress Oscar for her three films in 1927) and her frequent costar Charles Farrell. It’s still very much a transitional film, trying to figure out how to deal with sound and what changes in script and acting style were going to be necessary, and I won’t lie and say many of the line readings aren’t cringe-worthy. But as soon as Gaynor tips her head and smiles (or cries, or glances), suddenly nothing else matters at all, and you remember why she was such a huge star.

Gaynor plays Molly, a working-class young girl living in New York City, dreaming of a rich, classy boyfriend. Meanwhile, Jack (a rich, sorta classy guy) fights with his non-committing girlfriend and speeds into the city, only to have a tiny accident outside Molly’s window, provoking a series of events that leads to Jack inviting Molly and her friends to the Southamptons to a) sing in the local charity show and b) make his girlfriend jealous. Things go fairly predictably from there, but with more charming moments than not.

The studio really went all out for the musical and variety numbers in this – everything from popular kid actor Jackie Coogan starting to recite “The Village Blacksmith” and breaking down into the peepee dance to Gaynor directing a whole song winningly at the camera, and from comic relief Marjorie White and Frank Richardson mugging their way through a duet, to what is one of the very first (if not the first) large-scale production numbers. Just to give you an idea of the last, it begins with a bunch of igloos on a frozen landscape; then a bunch of girls dance – and by dance, I mean “gyrate crazily” – to “Turn On the Heat” and the ice all melts, replaced by palm trees with bananas that inflate along with the dancing, and eventually everything is overtaken by fire. That got an ovation from our audience, I think as much out of “what the heck was that” as anything else!

As a product of its time, Sunnyside Up is exemplary in both senses of the word. On the one hand, it’s very easy to the struggle as the actors try to handle dialogue, enunciate clearly enough that the microphones can pick them up, and adapt their acting to the less visual-dependent sound cinema needs to seem naturalistic. They all have a tendency to overdo motions and movements, but if you imagine each scene without sound, without the dialogue to carry the exposition and emotional content, the somewhat overblown acting suddenly works again, just as it did in silent cinema. In fact, the film is much better off as a whole when it relies on visual cues and sight gags than on dialogue – which is rather interesting in itself, and betrays how very early a talkie this is.

I’ve always had the thought in my head that early sound movies had much more static cameras than either silent or later sound cinema, largely because the sound from the camera itself had to be isolated in order not interfere with the rest of the sound. But Sunnyside Up opens with an almost virtuoso long crane shot introducing the street Molly lives on in New York – from the boys playing baseball in the street, tracking forward to the cop playing catcher for them, panning up to the second story windows and showing vignettes in each of them before dropping back to street level for a moment, then showing us the windows on the other side, throwing in a birth control gag, and finally moving into a shop. All this in a single take, with people moving in and out of the shot. It’s a brilliant way to open the film, giving us a slice of the life on this street, each little vignette seeming to give a window on a family with a whole backstory that could each fill a movie – just not this one. There are other shots like that, too, that I never would’ve expected in a film from this particular point in time.

Seeing this film with an audience, and with this particular audience probably, was a real treat. Yeah, you have to go “really?” a time or two at the way Gaynor says some lines (or Farrell says most of his lines), but there are some gems even there, mostly from Richardson and White. Like the exchange where Richardson, an aspiring songwriter, whines that White never gives him any encouragement, and she rejoins with “Well, you never offered to jump out of a window” with perfect delivery and timing. But generally, there are a lot of charming moments, a number of laugh-out-loud funny ones (and yes, the audience laughed out loud, and I’m sorry, but there’s nothing better in the world than seeing an 80-year-old film with an audience that’s right on the same page with you the whole time), and though you’d hardly call Gaynor and Farrell singers, some enjoyable if slightly corny music. Tonight was the premiere of a brand-new restoration print, thanks to the hard work of the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Foundation, and it both looks and sounds gorgeous. Kudos to those who work hard at restoring and preserving films like this that remain enjoyable in their own right and are such perfect snapshots of a specific moment in film history.