Personal Maid's Secret

Warner Bros. made a lot of good programmers and B movies in the 1930s. Among them is Personal Maid's Secret.

Ruth Donnelly plays the personal maid, a woman named Lizzie who works for a wealthy family along with butler Owen (Arthur Treacher). Or, should I say, a formerly wealthy family, since they haven't been able to pay her wages for some months. (At least they get room and board, I suppose.) So Lizzie decides she's going to quit and look for greener pastures elsewhere.

She goes to an employment agency, where she meets Joan Smith (Margaret Lindsay), a wife and mother in need of a maid. Lizzie wants more than Joan can afford, but the two women come to an agreement that Lizzie will take less in salary than she wanted while Joan will pay more than she was willing to; with this, Lizzie goes off to work for Joan and her husband Jimmy (Warren Hull). Owen doesn't think this is going to work, and shows up from time to time for a bit of comic relief.

Jimmy is an insurance salesman who works on commission and has hopes of getting the bigger policies which will earn much higher commissions. There's a catch, however, in that with the Smiths' modest means, they may not be able to meet the sort of people who are likely to buy the big-money policies. Lizzie has the brilliant idea of getting the Smiths to "invest", using their savings to make them appear wealthier than they are, and thereby gaining access to a richer clientele.

It works, and the Smiths move up in the economic world. It brings them, especially Joan's brother Kent (Frank Albertson), into contact with Diana (Anita Louise), a young woman who's recently returned from finishing school in Europe. Diana gets involved in a love triangle with Kent and an already married man Sherrill who is only going to take on Diana as a mistress. Here Lizzie gets to be helpful again, solving everybody's problems including her own.

As I said at the beginning, Personal Maid's Secret is one of Warner Bros. B movies, running a very brief 58 minutes. But thanks to the professionalism of the studio system and the presence of Donnelly, this one turns into an eminently watchable little movie. It all strains credulity at times with the idea of the Smiths being able to afford Lizzie and then suddenly moving into a higher economic stratum. But the movie does work for the most part.

Personal Maid's Secret did get a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive. But I personally think it's the sort of movie that really should have been part of a box set, those having lower per-movie prices than the standalone Archive Collection movies. I'm just not certain what sort of box set Warner Home Video could have packaged it in.