Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

FirstWitch A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

vert001 I first saw RAFTER ROMANCE a few years ago as a break from all the Akira Kurosawa films I'd been watching on TCM. In a rather odd coupling, Turner Classic Movies had decided to play all of the Japanese director's films during its Ginger Rogers Month, and all the promos I'd been seeing about Ginger finally made me decide to take a break from the next modern day Japanese version of HAMLET or KING LEAR or MACBETH (or Gorky's THE LOWER DEPTHS for that matter). Something called RAFTER ROMANCE seemed like it would be quite a contrast. It was, and it was a lot of fun, too.Instead of going over the plot again, I'll mention two scenes. The swastika incident has inspired some comment. The swastika had long been a good luck symbol in much of the world, including among the Hindus as well as the aboriginal American Indians. Clearly the boy is using it as such in the scene in RAFTER ROMANCE. It's not surprising that an adolescent wouldn't have been keeping up with the contemporary political developments in Europe. His father, however, judging by his accent, must have originally come from the Old World, and it's not unlikely that he would have been familiar with recent European events. Thus the landlord associated the swastika with the Nazis and was unhappy to see it on the walls of his apartments, a reaction that his son did not immediately understand. It seems to me to be a sly political commentary, surely the only one that we see in the charming romcom RAFTER ROMANCE.True the plot about two people sharing an apartment without ever meeting one another doesn't make any sense (what happens on weekends or holidays?), but how many airtight plots do we ever come across? RAFTER ROMANCE moves quickly, contains likable characters, has some genuinely funny scenes (anything featuring Laura Hope Crews, anything featuring the telemarketing office, Ginger's 'date' with Robert Benchley), a few that aren't so funny but nothing that is notably awful, and a pair of leads (Ginger Rogers and Norman Foster) who fit easily together in what is their third and last movie as co-stars. Though there's considerable talent all around her, it's Rogers who holds it all together, and RKO must have been very pleased in seeing what they had in her.Though it's a small, simple picture, RAFTER ROMANCE does supply some surprises. Did you know there were telemarketing companies in 1933? I sure didn't. Neither their spiel nor the reactions to their cold calling seems to have changed much. But most surprising was that shower scene, or I should say the prelude to it. When Ginger slipped off the jacket of that business suit she was wearing my jaw dropped at the sight of her bare back! I mean, no blouse underneath, only a silk scarf crossing over her breasts? Somehow I doubt that was a common costume for the well-dressed office girl of 1933, but I guess that's why they call them pre-Code!

mark.waltz A far-fetched set-up is in order for this romantic comedy similar to "The Shop Around the Corner", about two people who meet, at first can't stand each other, and eventually discover that they are connected in a rather unique way. He's a night security guard who needs a place to sleep during the day (apparently working seven days a week) so landlord George Sidney convinces broke tenant Ginger Rogers to share her apartment with him, she working by day while he sleeps, and him gone when she gets home. By chance, they meet each other (not knowing what their shared apartment roommate looks like) and slowly fall in love after a shaky start.A breezy pre-code comedy with some nice art direction for the apartment, witty dialog and a fabulously comic Laura Hope Crews as a clumsy drunken slob, this is memorable for a sequence where Rogers strips down to her lingerie, revealing a lot and hiding little. Rogers shines in scenes where she's promoting the refrigerators she's trying to sell, and sarcastically dealing with the eccentrics around her. Foster, better known as one of Claudette Colbert's husbands and Loretta Young's brother-in-law, is a light-hearted romantic lead who holds his own against the rising star Rogers who was about to shoot to the top of the box office as the dancing partner of Fred Astaire. In spite of the illogical premise, the film is quite enjoyable, much so that RKO remade it only three years later as the weaker "Living on Love". Crews's character, obviously a wealthy alcoholic out to make Foster her paid lover, played a similar character in the Bob Hope comedy "Thanks for the Memory", and her character bears more than a passing resemblance to the more sophisticated character that Patricia Neal played in "Breakfast at Tiffany's".

theowinthrop It is a happy moment when something that has been absent for awhile returns in good shape. On Wednesday, April 4, 2007 Turner Classic Movies (hosted by Robert Osborne) played (for the first time in sixty years) three of six films that had been out of circulations due to some complicated court settlements involving RKO studios and their producer Merriam Cooper. All the films are from well preserved negatives, so these films looked fresh as well.Whether they hold up as well as they did in the 1930s is another matter. I happen to like them, but they are not missing gems - it's not like finding one of those great "Holy Grails" like the complete GREED or the complete Welles' MAGNIFICENT AMBERSOMS". These were serviceable comedies and dramas of the age of our grandparents, and have the flaws of those films as well as the best merits of the Hollywood system near it's peak.RAFTER ROMANCE is typical of the positive and negative aspects of these films. An early Ginger Rogers movie, it reminds us that prior to turning out to be the perfect dancing partner to Fred Astaire Ginger was usually playing smart, tough working girls in comedies (sometimes being too agreeable - as in her role of "Anytime Annie" in 42ND STREET just before this film was made). Rogers has come to New York for a career, and is in Greenwich Village (the outsider's view of the raffish village back in the 1920s or 1930s - no Gay types seem visible). She is rooming in the "Eckbaum" Arms rooming house, run by George Sidney (Mr. Eckbaum) and his wife and son Julius. Sidney got permanently typecast as Jewish after appearing in a series of "Abie's Irish Rose" mixed ethnic silent comedies in the 1920s called "THE COHENS AND THE KELLYS".Sidney's not bad as far as caricatures of Jews go. He mangles language a little - tolerably so (we still understand him). He uses some Yiddish terms. He is money grubbing, but with the taxes on his rooming house it's understandable - he's constantly knocking the pay phone to retrieve coins, with indifferent success. However, he does show anger once - his idiot son starts drawing swastikas on the wall of the hallway, and Sidney lets him have it (a first perhaps in American films). He's also kindhearted. He has let Ginger and another roomer (Norman Foster) stay on far longer than most landlords without paying all their rent. But his wife convinces him he has to alter this.What the screenwriters did is actually a bit of plagiarism, which I am surprised nobody caught. In 1866 Maddison Morton wrote a farce called BOX & COX about two men, one who works at night and one who works at day, who both (unknown to each other) rent the same room in a boarding house (until they accidentally meet when one gets an unexpected holiday). This farce was made into a one act musical operetta retitled COX & BOX by F.A. Burnand and Arthur Seymour Sullivan (of Gilbert & Sullivan fame) which is how it survives today (like CAVALLARIA RUSTICANA and PAIGIACI, COX & BOX is usually on a double bill with Gilbert & Sullivan's TRIAL BY JURY: it is the only non-Gilbert & Sullivan work that Savoyards like to watch).Sidney moves Rogers to the attic loft that Foster lives in. From 8:00 P.M. to 8:00 A.M. Rogers may use it as her own. From 8:00 A.M. to 8:00 P.M. Foster can use it. Needless to say neither is happy at the arrangement. They never have met, so they are soon sniping at each other. The reader can see where this will lead.Rogers finally gets a telemarketing job for a refrigerator firm owned by Robert Benchley. She does well, but she has to fight off Benchley's amorous interests. Foster is a night watchman, but he is also a struggling painter. He has attracted the attention of Laura Hope Crews, a wealthy woman who is also a dipsomaniac. He has repeatedly refused to have her make him her boy toy (much to Sidney's chagrin, as it would pay off the debt that Foster owes him). By chance Rogers and Foster meet in the streets of the city, and a romance begins - but at the same time they are unconsciously sniping and sabotaging each other as the rival, unseen roommate.Benchley was just starting his film career, and in his opening scene his fumbling with some papers to explain to the new girls how to do their sales pitch reminds us of his classic "THE TREASURER'S REPORT" which began his acting career. He was not quite as paunchy here as in later films, but certainly no Adonis. Ms Crews' alcoholic dowager is miles from "Aunt Pittypat" in GONE WITH THE WIND, but is a distant cousin of her drunken mentalist working with Clark Gable in IDIOT'S DELIGHT. She has a distinct distaste for boarding house landlords.Guinn "Big Boy" Williams has a role that probably was a little longer originally. He's a taxi driver who takes a brotherly interest in Ginger. They apparently meet when she is buying herself a hamburger at an all night stand. Later he helps her derail Benchley's attempts to make an evening's dinner - theater date into a boring flop. He also shows up at the conclusion of the film to assist in the genial mayhem.It's also nice to note (in a bit part) our old friend Bud Jamison - away from his foes The Three Stooges for awhile - as the winner of a fat man's contest at a picnic.

Eleanor Knowles Dugan This is a B Hollywood rip off of the plot of two very stylish 1932 European musicals: Ich Bei Tag und Du Bie Nacht (Me by Day and You by Night), directed by Ludwig Berger and produced by Erich Pommer. Score by Werner R. Heymann. German version starred Käthe von Nagy and Willy Fritsch. Simultaneously filmed French version was "A moi le jour, à toi le nuit" (For me the day, for you the night) with von Nagy in same role and hero played by Henry Garat.I haven't had the pleasure of seeing Rafter Romance, so I don't know if they bought the rights to the music, but probably not. One of the charms of the European version is that the hero works nights (thus needing a bed by day) as a projectionist, so the story occasionally switches to the one on screen. In the end, when the lovers discover they have been bedmates and decide to marry, they honeymoon in the cinema audience, watching a huge mittel-Europa operetta wedding on screen.