Personal Maid's Secret

Dir. Arthur Greville Collins

58 Minutes

USA

1935

Starring: Margaret Lindsay, Warren Hull, Anita Louise, Ruth Donnelly, Arthur Treacher

**/*****

Odd amalgamation of plot lines and characters over an incredible brief fifty-eight minute running time that is not without its individual pleasures but is mostly a trifle. Ruth Donnelly leads (though is not top billed) as Lizzie, a long time maid of the Bentley's who leaves after the fail to deliver wages for several weeks. She soon meet Joan (Margaret Lindsay) at a maid service office, who gently goads her husband Jimmy (Warren Hull) into allowing for the new addition. While reluctant because he has not closed a sale in recently months, Jimmy eventually submits to her insistences. But Lizzie has a few other tricks up her sleeve, including trying to get her butler friend Owen a spot in the home, and pushes her new employers towards climbing the social ladder while also harboring a secret of her own.

The film packs quite a bit into this brief narrative, but never has any consistency of direction towards what exactly the purpose of all of these moving parts. It briefly feels like it is moving into a Downstairs-like direction with Lizzie using the family for her own gain, but it switches gears into a more domestic drama with her skeletons. This is not to say that the piece is not without its charms, and the whole affair is a quick one so it is not particularly time consuming for the curious minded. There are some interesting ideas scattered about, namely this concept of the once affluent struggling to keep up with the maintenance of their decorum, but also what happens when a "maid" and a "butler" do not have a place for those labels to be utilized. But this is mostly on the outer rim and open for discovery, but the film itself rarely probes further not these themes. And cannot ignore Jimmy and Joan's son Bobby (Ronnie Cosby) and the bizarre inclusion for his character to be fascinated with "colored people" (leading to the films final punchline where he observes an engagement between two characters and says "Bet you wish he was colored!").

January 15th, 2020