Servants' Entrance

Servants' Entrance is a 1934 American Pre-Code musical comedy film. It was written by Samson Raphaelson from the Sigrid Boo novel and directed by Frank Lloyd, with a cartoon sequence by Walt Disney (Who's company now ironically owns this film due to their 2019 Acquisition of Fox) in which an understandably startled Janet Gaynor sings a song while obstreperous animated singing silverware prance around on her bed, an early example of combining live action with animation. Critics found this musical interlude especially charming.[1]

This film was adapted from Sigrid Boo's 1930 Norwegian novel Vi som går kjøkkenveien ("We Who Enter Through the Kitchen") which has an almost identical plot to Eleanor Hoyt Brainerd's popular 1917 novel How Could You, Jean?, which had already been adapted into a film of the same name in 1918, directed by William Desmond Taylor and starring Mary Pickford. Servants' Entrance plot was strikingly identical to that of the earlier film; as the New York Times commented, "apparently, the old Pickford comedy was already forgotten, and no copyright infringement suit was filed."[2]

An earlier film based on Sigrid Boo's novel was Servant's Entrance (1932), directed by Gustaf Molander in Sweden. The Swedish version starred Tutta Rolf, who became contracted to Fox Film in 1935.