Maid for a Day

Times have certainly changed and today much of what's in older films is seen as politically incorrect and insulting. Often, I think folks make too much out of this, as you cannot censor a film just because of a bit of offensive content. However, in the case of "Maid for a Day", I could certainly understand someone feeling irritated with it....and if their heads exploded while they watched!

The offensive part involves a flashback where you see a stage production. The actors are all white and playing black characters but the REALLY offensive part is the curtain...complete with giant stereotypical black men with watermelons on it! Yep....it is pretty nasty!

So is the short still worth seeing? Well, first, if you cannot look past the offensive start of the film, probably not (and I'd hate to hear about your brain exploding!). And second, well, the short is pretty crappy otherwise. Like many Vitaphone shorts, the plot is scant and it's mostly a review of songs and dance numbers. Some of them are very good (the bizarre cigarette dance was actually very good) and some (the godawful impersonations) were not. Overall, view at your own risk....and if you skip it, you won't be missing much.

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.

Maid for a Day (1936)

** (out of 4)

Real-life mother and son Grace Hayes and Peter Lind Hayes play a mother and son combo in this two-reeler. Grace is a famous Broadway star who is trying to make a comeback so she takes up a job as a maid in order to practice. Everything is going good until she gets a call from Peter informing her that he's dropped out of college so that he can hit the stage. Only those interested in seeing the mother-son team should check this Vitaphone short out because the material is quite weak and it's actually so weak that you really don't want to judge the duo too bad. I'm not sure how much better each one are but they really don't have much to work with here and especially Peter who comes across pretty badly. For some reason the film has him doing a really obnoxious laugh that is more creepy than anything else. His character really doesn't do anything that isn't annoying so I'm hoping it was the screenplay making him do this stuff and it's not part of his routine. His mother comes off a tad bit better and I must say that I was shocked to see her being a mother as she looks incredibly young and extremely good here. The music numbers aren't that memorable either but "Would You Ring the Gong on Me" is probably the stand out.

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.