Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me

Today being Christmas, I thought I'd look for a family-friendly film on my DVR to do a review on. It turned out that I have one in The Sun Comes Up, so I watched that to do a review on.

The nominal lead is Jeanette MacDonald, although the real star of the show is Lassie. MacDonald plays Helen Lorfied, the owner of Lassie, as well as a widowed opera singer who has a son who loves Lassie. Helen is in training for a comeback, and it looks like it's going to be a success. But after the concert, Lassie goes running off into the street, and Helen's kid chases after Lassie, getting run over by a truck in the process. Helen now no longer has any desire to enjoy life, and doesn't care for Lassie, either. But Lassie also has no other family, so Helen takes Lassie with her when she goes off to the country to live.

She winds up in the town of Brushy Gap, in the same sort of mountains we'd see a few years later in I'd Climb the Highest Mountain and sees a house in the middle of nowhere that's available for rent. She rents it from property manager and stereotypical country store owner Willie Williegood (Percy Kilbride). Mr. Williegood is just the first of many people not to be accepting of an outsider, although in their defense Helen doesn't seem particularly well-suited to live in a place like this. Anyhow, the kids from the orphanage use the property to play on, and everybody is none too pleased that Helen puts them out because she doesn't want to see kids.

One kid, however, she's going to have to deal with, because he's actually pretty good at doing work around the place that a city slicker like Helen just doesn't know how to do. That kid is Jerry (Claude Jarman Jr.), who also lives at the orphanage because, as far as he knows, his mother was financially unable to take care of him (he would have been born during the Depression). Jerry also takes well to Lassie, and the feeling is mutual. Helen, of course, is not ready to have another adolescent boy in her life.

There's another hour to go in the movie, though, so we know that the two are going to figure out that they need each other, and it's going to be Lassie that brings the two of them together. Lloyd Nolan shows up as the owner of the house who ultimately convinces Helen to do the right thing, although it's also going to take a climactic fire rescue to bring Helen and Jerry together.

Jeanette MacDonald's singing isn't quite my cup of tea, and to be honest I'm also not the biggest fan of the stereotypical treatment of the locals that seems like it came straight out of the old Variety headline "Stix Nix Hick Pix". But then, this is a Lassie movie, so that's what you watch for, not so much the plot. In that regard, The Sun Comes Up will definitely be suitable for the whole family, although younger children will probably enjoy it more than older children.