The Housekeeper's Daughter

This week's Noir Alley selection is a foreign film I've blogged about before: the 1960 South Korean movie The Housemaid, airing at midnight between July 27/28 (on the east coast; as always, that's still Saturday, July 27 in more westerly time zones) and again Sunday, July 28 (in all time zones) at 10:00 AM. With that in mind, I figured it's time to do a post about a movie that's been sitting on my DVR for several months, that's only related by title: The Housekeeper's Daughter.

Joan Bennett plays the daughter, although as the movie opens up there's no housekeeper involved. Bennett plays Hilda, who is watching one of those 1930s poker games in hotel rooms that, to anybody who had seen enough movies from the beginning of the decades, was obviously rigged. However, there's still one mark who must not have seen enough such movies, and keeps losing hand after hand. Hilda finally drops a hint that perhaps the mark can't win, which is trouble for her, as her boyfriend Floyd (Marc Lawrence) is one of the crooks fleecing the mark.

Hilda realizes she needs to get away, so she heads for her mother's house. Or, at least, her mother's living quarters, since mom Olga (Peggy Wood) is the housekeeper to the Randall family, an archeology professor and wife with an adult son Robert (John Hubbard) who wants to be a reporter instead of following in his father's footsteps. The parents are going away for a working vacation, so there's enough space for Hilda to stay at least until her troubles boil over. Meanwhile, Robert, partly wanting to earn his own living and partly from having seen Hilda, decides to stay.

Back to Hilda's boyfriend Floyd. He's looking for a new girl to replace Hilda, and has settled on a showgirl. A Runyonesque bum, Benny (George E. Stone), who helped Floyd procure this showgirl, is distressed at how Floyd is treating her, so serves Floyd a cup of poisoned coffee. Except that Floyd doesn't drink the coffee, giving it instaed to the showgirl, who promptly dies and gets dumped into the river by Floyd.

That story obviously makes the newspaper, and when Robert reads it, he wants to help solve the case. So he simply calls up one of the newspaper editors, Wilson (Donald Meek), and says he wants to help ace crime reporter Deakon Maxwell (Adolphe Menjou). Amazingly, the editor hooks the two up. Deakon is also a hard drinker (another of those 1930s stereotypes), and unsurprisingly Robert is unable to keep up with Deakon's drinking. Robert gets blackout drunk one night but interviews Benny, calling up Wilson and relating Benny's confession, waking up the next morning to have no recollection of having done so but getting a byline in the paper. This is what brings everybody's storylines together, not that Floyd knew Hilda was living under the same roof as Robert.

The Housekeeper's Daughter was produced by Hal Roach at a time when he was trying to get into bigger pictures than the "screenliners" and shorts his studio had been making, even though this one only clocks in at about 79 minutes. It is a bit more than a B movie thanks to the presence of Bennett and Menjou, but it's certainly not anything major. Despite the relatively low production values, it does entertain, at least for people who like old movies already.

Nobody will ever put The Housekeeper's Daughter on a list of greatest pictures of all time, but it's still definitely worth one watch.