The Sun Comes Up
| The Sun Comes Up | |
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VHS cover
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| Directed by | Richard Thorpe |
| Produced by | Robert Sisk |
| Screenplay by |
Margaret Fitts William Ludwig Eric Knight |
| Story by | Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings |
| Starring |
Jeanette MacDonald Lloyd Nolan Claude Jarman Jr. Pal (credited as "Lassie") |
| Music by | André Previn |
| Cinematography | Ray June |
| Edited by | Cotton Warburton |
| Distributed by | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer |
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Release date
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Running time
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93 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $1,659,000 |
| Box office | $1,280,000 (Domestic earnings) $764,000 (Foreign earnings) |
The Sun Comes Up is a 1949 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Technicolor picture with Lassie. Jeanette MacDonald had been off the screen for five years until her return in Three Daring Daughters (1948), but The Sun Comes Up was to be her last. In it, she had to share the screen not with an up-and-coming younger actress but with a very popular animal star. Although her retreat from a film career can be blamed largely on an increasingly debilitating heart ailment (which eventually took her life at the age of 61 in 1965), MacDonald continued to make concert and TV appearances after this. Her last radio appearance was a broadcast version of this same story on Screen Guild Theater in March 1950.
Ex-opera singer Helen Lorfield Winter (Jeanette MacDonald) rents a house in the small town of Brushy Gap, in the hills not too far from the Smokies, Blue Ridge, and Atlanta Georgia with her dog, Lassie, after the tragic death of her son. There she befriends Jerry, a young orphan (Claude Jarman Jr.). Growing attached to Jerry, but not wanting children so soon after the death of her own son, Helen leaves Brushy Gap to resume her singing career. While she is away, Jerry is caught in heavy rain returning Lassie home and develops pneumonia. Helen returns to Brushy Gap to find the owner of the house, Thomas Chandler (Lloyd Nolan), nursing Jerry back to health. Soon after Jerry has recovered, the orphanage catches on fire, and Lassie and Tom both rescue Jerry from the blaze. Helen then decides to adopt Jerry and remain in Brushy Gap.
Parts of The Sun Comes Up were filmed in Glenwood, California, and lumber from the set was used to build the last town post office.
In 2010 Film Score Monthly released the complete scores of the seven Lassie feature films released by MGM between 1943 and 1955 as well as Elmer Bernstein’s score for It's a Dog's Life in a collectible package titled Lassie Come Home: The Canine Cinema Collection limited to only 1000 copies. Due to the era when these scores were recorded, nearly half of the music masters have been lost so the scores had to be reconstructed and restored from the best available sources, mainly the Music and Effects tracks as well as monaural ¼″ tapes.
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