Robert J. Maxwell It's the depression and everyone is hard up except the very wealthy. (Plus ca change...) Ginger Rogers is a working girl forced to share an attic or loft with Norman Foster, an artist who refuses to take any money from the society matron (Laura Hope Crews) who pursues him. George Sidney is Mr. Eckbaum, the slightly frantic landlord who tries to keep everything going. He arranges it so that Rogers, who is a telephone salesgirl by day, and Foster, who has a job as a night watchman, never meet. Trying to keep the place "respectable," you know.Well, the two roomies who don't know each other take a long time to meet. In the meantime, leaving nasty notes for one another and playing painful pranks, each comes to loathe the other.But -- guess what! -- they meet accidentally outside their attic, assume false identities for different reasons, and fall for each other. This plot, I'm sure, goes back farther than "You've Got Mail" or "The Shop Around the Corner." I honestly don't know how far back in the mists of ancient history it goes. When did they invent rentals? It's a bit slow at first. George Sidney is funny, though, as the wisecracking Jewish landlord. His son Julius brings him a bowl of noodle soup for the famished Rogers but spills some on the carpet. "Ahh, next time I ask you for TWO bowls of zoop -- one for the lady and one for the carpet." If you don't think that's funny, I ought to warn you that that's about as good as it gets.Robert Benchley is in it too, as the amorous boss of Rogers at the Icy Air Refrigerator Company, but his particularly Ivy League brand of humor may be an acquired taste. Except for "Foreign Correspondent," come to think of it, where his non sequiturs were superb. Guinn (Big Boy) Williams also appears in the small role of a comic taxi driver.Foster isn't much of an actor but Ginger Rogers is delightfully piquant as a tough but vulnerable proletarian. She has a wonderful figure, which she gets to display, but her movements are stiff and no one could have predicted that within the next few years she would be a partner in the most famous dancing team in the world.Everything about the movie is smooth and logical and never rises above the level of "nice" -- slightly amusing, slightly warm, and with a happy ending.

MartinHafer This is one of the "lost but found" films shown on TCM on 4/4/07. Apparently this and two other films shown that night were held out of public release due to litigation concerning royalties and now the powers that be at Turner Classic Movies have taken care of the licensing issues. Of the three films shown that night, none of them were great treasures but all three were excellent--very solid examples of the type of films RKO made during the era. Normally, when you think of RKO in 1933, you think KING KONG or Astaire and Rogers as a team, but there were other good films that might rank just below them in quality and entertainment.RAFTER ROMANCE was made just before Ginger Rogers began her starring films with Fred Astaire. Although she had done a few movies before this, she was not an A-list star and often appeared in B-pictures or in supporting roles. Here she is teamed with the relatively unknown actor, Norman Foster--befitting her status at RKO at the time. However, despite this technically being a "lesser" film, it was marvelously entertaining and fun provided you could suspend your sense of disbelief and just enjoy. Sure, the possibility of a man and a woman sharing an apartment and never meeting and hating each other BUT also meeting in real life and fall in love because they don't realize they are roommates is pretty tough to swallow. But it is no nicely handled and fun that you probably can look past this and just enjoy it on a superficial level.By the way, the landlord (George Sidney) was great. Sure, he was very stereotypically Jewish, but he was pretty funny and not particularly offensive. Also, when his dim-witted son was drawing a swastika on the wall "for good luck", seeing his dad slap him up side the head was a pointed and very interesting comment about the rising anti-semitism of the Nazis in Europe.

movingpicturegal Delightfully fun romantic comedy about Jack, behind on his rent, Mary, behind on her rent, and the well-meaning landlord who comes up with an idea for a rather novel arrangement for the two - to share Jack's attic apartment. Mary has a job selling ice boxes, Jack works the night shift, so Mary gets the apartment from 8 P.M. to 8 A.M. and Jack from 8 A.M. to 8 P.M. - and the two of them hate each other instantly and pull mean tricks on each other (stuff like putting his suit in the shower and cutting her bed so it collapses), though have never actually met. But wait! They do meet each other one day in front of a local delicatessen, and like each other, but have no idea they are actually living in the same apartment.Sounds like a plot we've all heard before - but this film was really, really cute and fun to watch. Ginger Rogers is gorgeous and funny as Mary, Norman Foster gives a steady, likable performance as Jack, and Laura Hope Crews really steals the scenes she is in playing a rich, drunken old dame who wants to "help" handsome Jack's career (he also happens to be a struggling artist) - she is hilarious. Okay - here's a few observations: how come Mary and Jack have never, ever seen each other before even though they have been living in the same brownstone on separate floors for at least long enough to both be overdue on the rent (you would think they would have at least passed each other on the stairs or out at the curb or maybe on the weekend a few times), and how about that company picnic where everyone has left except our two stars and ALL the garbage and trash from the picnicking is just left behind on the tables! Ah well - all in all, I found this to be a very enjoyable, funny, well done film.

F Gwynplaine MacIntyre A previous IMDb reviewer has stated that 'Rafter Romance' is a 'rip-off' (that's the other reviewer's term) of a German musical called 'Me By Day, You By Night'. Apparently that reviewer is unaware that *both* of these films have borrowed their premise from 'Box and Cox', an English play written by John Maddison Morton in 1847. This play deals with two tradesmen who rent the same room from an unscrupulous landlady, each man believing himself the sole tenant. Because the two men have different work schedules, the ruse is not discovered straight away. This play was once so popular in Britain that 'to Box and Cox it' became a common term for an arrangement in which two people willingly shared accommodations meant for only one person.The innovation of 'Rafter Romance' (and its predecessor) is that the two tenants are now a man and a woman, who inevitably develop a romance. As is usual in these cornball movies, the guy and the gal detest each other until they fall into each other's arms. Hoo boy.The landlord in this film is played by George Sidney, a character actor who specialised in playing Jewish stereotypes that were meant to be sympathetic. George Sidney was never as annoying as the odious Harry Green (the Jewish equivalent of Stepin Fetchit) but Sidney's depictions of Jewish characters are still exaggerated and embarrassing to watch.The single most notable thing about 'Rafter Romance' is that, to my knowledge, this is the earliest Hollywood film to make reference to Hitler and the rise of Nazism. At one point in this movie, landlord Eckbaum (Sidney) discovers his teenage son Julius engaged in chalking swastikas on the walls. Eckbaum and his son are clearly meant to be Jewish. Admittedly, nobody in Hollywood in 1933 had any real idea of what Hitler was planning for the Jews in Europe ... still, it's surprising to see a film depicting a Jewish teenager who thinks that swastikas are a joke. His father is, quite properly, angered by this display of the Nazi symbol.A very shameful aspect of Hollywood history is the documented fact that all of the major Hollywood studios continued to do business with the Third Reich as late as 1939. Hollywood's leading ladies were medically documented as 'Aryan' so that their films could be distributed in Nazi Germany and Austria. For the same reason, Hollywood's leading men were documented as 'Aryan and uncircumcised'. Except for Darryl Zanuck at Twentieth Century-Fox, all the Hollywood studio executives who colluded in this policy were Jewish ... but clearly had no objection to doing business with Hitler. I'm surprised that 'Rafter Romance' contains a scene depicting swastikas unfavourably, as this sequence would have rendered the film Verboten in Germany and Austria. (Maybe the scene was cut out for German release: it isn't crucial to the movie's plot.) Apart from this, the movie contains nothing notable. Robert Benchley does his usual unfunny befuddled characterisation: I've never understood the appeal of this man. I'll rate 'Rafter Romance' 4 out of 10.