Skeets Gallagher and sister Nancy Carroll need money, so they rent their southern plantation to Jobyna Howland. She drags along her daughter, Lilian Roth, Stanley Smith (whom she wants Lilian to marry) and Harry Green to watch her jewelry. She also demands white servants, so in come upstairs maid Zasu Pitts and her daughter Mitzi Green. The butler and cook get tossed in jail for drunk and disorderly; Gallagher and Carroll pretend to be their replacements.
It's an erratically produced musical comedy. Miss Carroll is always beautiful and charming, particularly when she is pretending to be Irish for no particular reason; Gallagher is at his best at the very beginning, when he is angry and annoying; Miss Howland plays her role in a manner that suggest an evil May Robson and has the best lines; Miss Pitts & Mr. Green, the two surest comic performers, could have been cut out of the movie without a loss; Mitzi Green is annoying and necessary to the plot; and the best musical number is a "darkie revival" chorus led by an uncredited Louise Beavers! -- although Lilian Roth gets in a hot verse.
Usually when watching movies this old I am able to compartmentalize my reactions -- how it might appeal to a contemporary audience in one of Paramount's big-city Whites-Only movie palaces, how it might strike modern audiences, kept carefully separate. Between the actors switching registers (not only Carroll and Gallagher, but Roth, from lady to her more raucous, stagey character), I was absolutely whipsawed.
I will tell you one thing: Louise Beavers could sing!
