Maid for a Day

With a song title that, you can imagine the quality of this Vitaphone Brevity (20 minutes or so) that was filler during the mid-30s, a satire about a show biz mom who wants her son to take college seriously and forget about his own show biz aspirations.

Real mother and son (Grace Hayes and Peter Lind Hayes) manage not to embarrass themselves too much with the lame script, wise-cracks and musical direction. It's all strictly '30s vintage material with Peter demonstrating his talent for impersonations which he would go on to use in his later TV and movie career.

What's interesting are the few musical segments which are tolerable despite the poor songs, but because the staging at least shows a little imagination.

Not the worst Vitaphone Brevity, that's for sure, but nothing memorable about it either.

It is a variety act of singing and dancing. There is a great tap dancing scene a little over 10 minutes in while the song "two cigarettes in the dark" is being played. The classic dance following is fantastic, and "Won't You Ring The Gong For Me" knocks it out of the park. Great movie!

Freddy Hayden (Peter Lind Hayes) is rehearsing for the stage. His college friends are laughing at him. He tells them about his mother, Grace Hayden (real life mother Grace Hayes). She's a stage actress pretending to be a maid for the experience.

This one hits you right in the face with the black-face. I wonder where those stage curtains are now. This is definitely another era. To top off the modern inappropriateness, they do a song and dance praising smoking. The mother-son pairing is interesting although I don't know these actors. I expect more plot with the maid story. Instead, this spends most of it time dancing and singing. There is one interesting dance. I just can't get over the black-face.

Starring real-life mother and son Grace and Peter Lind Hayes as mother and son on screen, "Maid for a Day" is a neat little 20-minute musical short that falls back on some clichés (notably the one about the middle-aged entertainer desperate to see her son go to college and Make Something of Himself, while he wants to pursue the same sort of theatrical career she did) but also has some surprisingly lavish dance numbers (notably the spectacular tango performed by dance team Don Lee and Louise) and some nice little satirical barbs aimed at the ultra-rich residents of a beach community who don't want to have to mingle with their, ugh, servants at the beach. (Sounds an awful lot like some of the recent controversies between Hollywood stars and coastal activists over access to Malibu!) This is a charmer, though your plot synopsis gives away the big twist at the end and I wondered why Grace Hayes' big song early on is introduced by a blackface chorus but she herself is given only a very light makeup job (my guess is to make sure the audience still was able to recognize Grace Hayes, which they might not have had she done full blackface).

Grave Hayes wants her son, Peter Lind Hayes, to buckle down and study hard in college for a better life, but he's more interested in practicing his maniacal laugh. To pay for schooling, Miss Hayes is saving her grouch bag and working as a maid in a snooty Long Island home. It all ends in a variety show.

It's certainly not the best of the innumerable short subjects in the 1930s in which the purpose was to showcase some talent from the rapidly vanishing vaudeville stage. By the time this one came out, the framing device was considered as important as the talent, and the choice of Miss Hayes, a real vaudeville trouper, and her son, is not a bad one. Miss Hayes would eventually open her own Las Vegas casino, continue to act in the occasional movie, and survive until 1989 and age 93. Mr. Hay would last until 1998 and age 82.