Sally
About Sally
Sally Green (Marilyn Miller), left as a baby at the Bowling Green telephone exchange and named for it, waits tables at a Times Square café and spills a tray on agent Otis Hooper. She moves to the Elm Tree Inn, run by Pops Stendorff (Ford Sterling), where a dishwasher, the exiled Grand Duke Constantine (Joe E. Brown), shares the chores. Blair Farrell (Alexander Gray), already engaged to socialite Marcia, hears her story and sings “Look for the Silver Lining.” Hooper later has her impersonate the dancer Madame Noskerova at a party given by Marcia’s mother, Mrs. Ten Brock. Sally dances “Wild Rose,” is exposed, and is thrown out — but Florenz Ziegfeld, a guest, wants her for his next Follies. On opening night Blair, free of the engagement, is in the dressing room. The reel ends with the two of them coming out of a church into a pack of photographers.
Cast & crew
More about Sally
John Francis Dillon directed Waldemar Young and A. P. Younger’s script from the 1920 Ziegfeld musical by Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse, music by Jerome Kern. First National made it; Warner Bros. released it. New York saw it on 23 December 1929, with general release on 12 January 1930. Dev Jennings and Charles Edgar Schoenbaum photographed in Technicolor Process 3; LeRoy Stone edited. Warner’s ledgers split the receipts into $1,219,000 domestic and $979,000 foreign.
Themes
Making
Miller came straight from Ziegfeld’s stage Sally. The film keeps three Kern numbers and replaces the rest with Dubin and Burke, recorded with the First National Vitaphone orchestra.
Look
Dev Jennings and Charles Edgar Schoenbaum shot it in Technicolor Process 3. Only about two and a half minutes of that color, from “Wild Rose,” are in the circulating print; sepia frames fill gaps in the fragment.
Music
Jerome Kern’s “Look for the Silver Lining,” “Sally,” and “Wild Rose” use lyrics by Guy Bolton and Clifford Grey. Al Dubin and Joe Burke added “After Business Hours,” “If I’m Dreaming (Don’t Wake Me Too Soon),” and “All I Want to Do-Do-Do Is Dance.” A Mendelssohn wedding march closes the church exit.
Preservation
Warner sold its pre-1950 library to Associated Artists Productions, and Sally was effectively out of public sight for decades. What survives is a black-and-white print plus a two-and-a-half-minute Technicolor piece of “Wild Rose,” found in the 1990s, with sepia frames filling missing color. Billingsley’s 2014 find added under two minutes of further 35mm color fragments. The kitchen song “After Business Hours” is not on the surviving track.
Notes
- It was the fourth all-talking, all-color feature, and the sixth Warner Bros. feature released in color, after The Desert Song, On with the Show!, Gold Diggers of Broadway, Paris, and The Show of Shows.
- Warner reportedly paid Marilyn Miller $1,000 an hour, $100,000 in all, to repeat her Broadway role.
- Kern songs kept from the show are “Look for the Silver Lining,” “Sally,” and “Wild Rose.” Al Dubin and Joe Burke wrote the new numbers, including “If I’m Dreaming” and “All I Want to Do-Do-Do Is Dance.”
- “After Business Hours,” sung in the café kitchen in the original release, is missing from the surviving picture and track, though the sheet music was published.
- Jack Okey’s sets were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Art Direction. The film did not win.
- In 2014 archivist Malcolm Billingsley found 45 to 75 seconds of 35mm Technicolor fragments, including 29 seconds from the first reel.
Scenes
- Sally dumps a tray on Hooper at the Times Square café and loses the job.
- She and Constantine clean the inn in the morning and sing “Look for the Silver Lining.”
- At Mrs. Ten Brock’s party she dances “Wild Rose” as Madame Noskerova, then blurts out who she is.
- Photographers crowd Sally and Blair on the church steps.
Influenced by
- Sally (Ziegfeld stage musical, 1920)
Also available
- Wikimedia Commons (Sally (John Francis Dillon, 1929).webm)
