The Girl Downstairs

This film plays almost like a fairy tale with illiterate scullery maid Franciska Gaal, in her third and last starring role, getting involved with playboy Franchot Tone, who pretends to be a chauffeur just to get into her house and woo her boss' daughter, Rita Johnson. I enjoyed some of the comedy, with the best sequence being the taxicab Gaal buys Tone thinking he lost his job. Billy Gilbert sells her a dilapidated car that looked like it came out of a Laurel and Hardy Film - it falls apart as they drive! And it's so slow a kid on a bike grabs hold of it, not to have it pull him along, but to help pull it along. A very funny sequence. The pacing of the film is just right, but many of the comics in the supporting cast (Reginald Gardiner, Franklin Pangborn and Robert Coote) were wasted. However, Walter Connolly does his exasperated father routine perfectly. Gaal has a down-to-earth naive quality which endeared her to me, so I enjoyed the film. I wondered why she just quit making films altogether after this film.

A love-triangle farce, with Franchot Tone. and any film that has Walter Connolly, Franklin Pangborn, Billy Gilbert, and Reginald Gardiner must be pretty good. Paul (Tone) falls for Rosalind, the rich man's daughter, but is banned from the house. He decides to ask out Katerina, the maid, just to get into the house. (Franciska Gaal, from Budapest. she had emigrated to the US in the 1930s.) so the maid goes all in, and thinks it's a whirlwind romance, but Paul is still really in love with Rosalind. he gets in deeper and deeper with Katerina, but doesn't have the guts to break her heart. we know it's all going to blow up at some point. what's the best way out of all this? Directed by Norman Taurog, who had won for Skippy in 1931. Taurog had directed Jackie Cooper and of course, Elvis! Girl Downstairs is pretty good. Too bad they didn't use Pangborn and Billy Gilbert more.. they were masters. it's a fun caper.

The Girl Downstairs is yet another film where MGM gave Franchot Tone another opportunity to wear a tuxedo. Tone was well typecast as a debonair playboy by this time. His leading lady was Franciska Gaal borrowed from Paramount when Luise Rainer refused to play the part.

Said part was that of a poor peasant girl from the Hungarian countryside come Budapest to work in Walter Connolly's house to earn enough money to buy a replacement cow for the family farm.

Connolly doesn't think wastrel Tone is fit for his daughter Rita Johnson. But as a ruse Tone pretends he's courting Gaal. And Gaal thinks he's a storybook prince.

This kind of romantic frou-frou was popular in Europe and in some cases well in America. Gaal in her three American films always played the innocent as she does here. Tone had the playboy parts that MGM kept casting him in down in his sleep.

Highlight of the film for me is garage owner Billy Gilbert palming off a wreck of an old taxicab on Gaal. She throws her cow money away on it so that Tone whom she thinks is a chauffeur can work on his own. It's funny yet wistfully sad.

Good if old fashioned movie.

A pleasant enough ironing movie, this is quite annoying the more you concentrate on it. The plot is as flimsy as it is ridiculous, seeming more appropriate to a second-rate operetta, with lots of grimacing and winking. Why would Franchot Tone (looking quite dishy in chauffeur's uniform) need to court a scullery maid in order to see his girlfriend, the daughter of the house, whose father disapproves of him? This enormous mansion certainly has a telephone. And there is nothing to stop the daughter from going to Tone's house or to bars and cafes he frequents. Then there is the rather unpleasant moral aspect--his pretense of courtship is very caddish behaviour. The social aspect (a sophisticated playboy in love with a girl who cannot read and has never made a phone call?) is as absurd as the maid's appearance--folk-dance costumes and pigtails that turn up the end (how? why?) like a clodhopper in a cartoon (but lots of fashionable makeup). The plot is so simple that, when it has clearly come to an end, it has to be extended by a pointless and unfunny chase sequence to eke out the movie. It is also very pleasant to see Walter Connolly, the funniest exasperated man in pictures. But it is frustrating to see Reginald Gardner, Robert Coote, and Franklin Pangborn in roles that are too brief and ill written to exploit their talent.

I loved this movie because it was about two people in love - nothing else mattered! They were equal even though she was a maid and he was a "gentleman" I wish the world loved like this ❤