Long-Lost ‘Sally’ Resurfaces at the Vagabond : Revivals: Marilyn Miller, Flo Ziegfeld’s singing and dancing star of the ‘20s, is featured in the early talkie musical.

Marilyn Miller is virtually forgotten today, having made only three long-obscure early talkies before her death from blood poisoning in 1936 at the age of 37, but she had been Florenz Ziegfeld’s shining singing and dancing star of the ‘20s.

Her first film, “Sally” (1929), long thought lost, resurfaces at the Vagabond today and Wednesday in a respectable black-and-white print, duped from a two-strip Technicolor print apparently no longer extant.

While its appeal today is surely restricted to determined nostalgists and to historians, “Sally” is fascinating on several counts. The early talkie musicals, as little more than filmed plays--in fairness, “Sally,” directed by John Francis Dillon, is more fluid than some--are of greatest interest as a record of popular Broadway entertainments and personalities during its most dazzlingly successful decade, the ‘20s.

And even more than “Sally,” accompanying clips from “Gold Diggers of Broadway” (1929), “The Cuckoos” (1930) and “Show of Shows” (1929) serve to remind us how incalculable the contributions of the soon-to-arrive Busby Berkeley and Fred Astaire were to be in tapping the infinite resources of the camera in photographing and staging songs and dances for the screen.

An adaptation of Miller’s 1920 hit written by Guy Boltonq, with songs by Jerome Kern, “Sally” is a bit of typical fluff of the period about how a klutzy waitress, through luck and pluck, becomes a top musical comedy star. Its key song is the evergreen “Look for the Silver Lining.”

Miller is a pretty blond, not terribly photogenic, with a light operatic singing voice, lovely legs and graceful whether tapping or toe-dancing in the unsophisticated routines of the era. Her genteel appeal pales alongside the down-to-earth Depression heroines Ruby Keeler, Ginger Rogers and Joan Blondell, who were to succeed her shortly at Warner Bros.

The film’s lavish sets and costumes are credited to Jack Warner’s having fallen hard for his star.

If “Sally” is limited in its appeal, the Vagabond’s next offering, “The Narrow Margin” (1952), screening Thursday and Friday with a razor-sharp new print, can be recommended across the board, especially to those who have seen the current remake, which curiously throws away the original’s surprise twist while adding credibility-destroying elaborate action sequences.

If ever there was an argument for less being more, it’s the original “Narrow Margin,” directed tautly by Richard Fleischer and written tersely by Earl Felton from Martin Goldsmith and Jack Leonard’s Oscar-nominated screen story. In this thriller-on-a-train film noir classic, Charles McGraw is the decent, reflective cop escorting hard-as-nails Marie Windsor from Chicago to Los Angeles. Playing with it is “Out of the Past” (1947). (213) 387-2171.

Jesus Salvador Trevino’s “Raices De Sangre” (1977) and Alejandro Grattan’s “Only Once in a Lifetime” (1978), screening Sunday at 2 p.m. in UCLA’s Melnitz Theater, are the first of a series of films that the UCLA Film Archive is presenting in conjunction with UCLA’s Wight Art Gallery’s “Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation.”

Trevino’s film, regarded as the first 35 mm film directed by a Chicano and dealing with crucial moral and career choices facing a Harvard-educated Chicano attorney (Richard Yniquez), was not available for preview. Unfortunately, Grattan’s film is a disappointment--uneven, overlong and tritely conceived.

The vitality that Miguel Robelo brings to his role as as struggling, uncompromising middle-aged painter is dissipated by the film’s leaden pacing and poor acting by some of the supporting actors. It’s too bad that its capable guest stars, Claudio Brook (as a suave art dealer) and Sheree North (as a faded ex-Hollywood starlet), had not been given more screen time.

Sunday: “Break of Dawn” and “Zoot Suit.” For full schedule: (213) 206-FILM, 206-8013.