Personal Maid

Nora Ryan ( Nancy Carroll) plays a maid who pretends to be wealthy to impress Pat O'Brien ( shades of a much worse film ( Maid In Manhattan)). But unlike Maid In Manhattan there is another option played by Gene Raymond ( who never impressed me one way or another). Who does she end up with? Go to YouTube and find out. Here is something about Nancy Carroll, for some reason her films are hard to find. You never see them on TCM or anywhere else. Which means although Personal Maid is not a great movie (fair at best), it represents an opportunity to see Nancy Carroll so take advantage of it, In fact, this is only the second film of hers I have ever seen ( and I do not remember the details of the other one at all) I will give it 5/10 stars.

Nancy Carroll is cute as a button as Nora Ryan. Brought up in Irish slums of New York, she wants something better. three years later she is the personal maid of Mary Boland, the daughter of extravagantly wealthy George Fawcett. When Mary's son, Gene Raymond, is thrown out of Yale, she sends Nancy to get him away quietly before Fawcett finds out and disinherits everyone. Raymond behaves like a lout, but calms down under Nancy's ladylike handling.... and then forges a check and heads for Havana.

It's from a novel by Grace Perkins and it seems to be a good book about class and character, with a standout role for Mr. Fawcett, and a good one for Pat O'Brien as Fawcett's business manager, who tries to bed Miss Carroll in the second act, when she's masquerading as a rich lady. It's the third act, when true character is revealed, that this movie falls down. It's too rushed to offer more than the standard ending to seemingly every Hollywood movie, as if they think the audience is looking at their watches, too bored to care what happened to these characters in the book that the studio bought to turn into a movie because it was so good. That failure of will results in what might have been a great third act -- or possibly a rotten one -- being reduced to a meaningless epilogue, and a very interesting start and middle ruined by a short ending.