Bad Girl. 1931. USA. Directed by Frank Borzage. 35mm print preserved and restored by The Museum of Modern Art, funded by Twentieth Century Fox.. 90 min.
In 7th Heaven, Frank Borzage had created the silent era’s last great romantic couple in Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell. With Sally Eilers and James Dunn in Bad Girl, he created the first great romantic couple of sound—no longer the inhabitants of a soft-focus dreamworld, but residents of a real and raspy New York City, where Sally is a department store model and Jimmy is a radio repairman with ambitions to open his own store. An immediate hit with Depression audiences, Eilers and Dunn went on to star in six more films together (and Borzage won another Oscar for his efforts).