Die drei Portiermädel (The Three Daughters of the Janitor)

In his excellent biography of Jacques Tourneur, The Cinema of Nightfall, Chris Fujiwara lists Les filles de la concierge as Tourneur's best French film. Yet even him does not seem to know that, unlike what is implied by the credits on the main title of the film, it is not an original story.

The story is supposedly by Georges de la Fouchardière and Jean-Georges Auriol.
Fujiwara also tells us that 30 years after his film was released, Tourneur had considered remaking his film in the USA. Apparently nothing came of it, but it so happens that the film was already a remake.

I came across an article in the December 31, 1925 edition of the French magazine "Mon Ciné" entitled "Les trois filles de la concierge". The article is by a French reporter in Germany who reports of a film he saw at the Marmorhaus Theather in Berlin called Die drei Portiermädel, directed by Carl Boese. The story of the film follows:

Martha, Amelie & Annie

The daughters in Tourneur's version

A janitor (Margarete Kupfer) has three daughters. Amelie (Hanni Weisse) is employed in the fashion shop of Leopold Siedentopf (Jakob Tiedtke) who seduces her, Annie (Helga Molander) works for a photographer (Hermann Picha)and Martha (Maly Delschaft) is a launderer and is in love with Franz (Hugo Fischer-Köppe), a chauffeur who uses the boss's car to drive the three girls to work every morning. When he reports late to work one day, he clumsily tells his boss, Mr. Hans Brandstetter (Bruno Kastner), that he ran over a young girl. When he demands to see the victim, Franz introduces him to Annie and he falls in love with her. They soon get married.

Martha's wedding

Lucie's wedding (Tourneur)

Annie's mother, who feels ashamed of her social condition, uses an apartment in her building whose lodgers are on vacation as her own when her son-in-law visits her and pretends she is the widow of a secret service agent.
However, when Mr. Brandstetter surprises his chauffeur speaking too casually with his wife, not knowing that he is actually her brother-in-law, gets the wrong idea and Annie, upset with the whole thing, goes back to her mother's.

Siedentopf & Amelie

Brandstetter decides to drown his sorrow and goes out to a party where, by chance, he meets Amelie and Martha. When Franz sees his girlfriend with his boss, he too gets upset.
Annie and Martha are soon joined by Amelie at their mother's because she also left her husband who, it turns out, was unfaithful.

Ginette & Gaston Rival in a similar scene

The next day, Brandstetter comes back to the janitor's building where everything is explained. He embraces his new family. Franz and Martha make up and Amelie also finds happiness with Emil the bartender (Harry Halm), an old flame of hers whom she always loved.

Albert singing

Those of you familiar with the story of Tourneur's film have noticed that the only things different about this story are the names of the characters. The rest is a carbon copy. The article mentions that the film is energetic, fun and it predicts more success for it, but the journalist deplores that the  screen-writer (actually Margareta-Maria Langen) is not credited.

However, this apparently unpretentious story will surprisingly be filmed two more times before Tourneur tackled the subject! In Germany still, as a 1932 sound remake called Frau Lehmanns Töchter directed by Carl Heinz Wolff and starring Hansi Niese which will be released the next year in the USA as Mrs. Lehmann's Daughters. It also will see a limited release in eastern France, under the title Les filles de Madame Lehmann on June 14 1934, only 14 days after the release of Tourneur's version! In this output, the chauffeur sings a song, just like in the later French version.


A 1933 Swedish version called Giftasvuxna döttrar (Blooming Daughters) was directed (and played) by Sigurd Wallén.

It is unclear who the creator of the story really is since each film credits a different writer for the same plot. Wolff's version credits a book by Franz Rauch as the basis of the story. I could not find this book, though, and the man has credits only as a screenwriter and actor in most sources. Also he isn't mentioned in the first film. It is interesting how each version completely ignores the existence of the others.

Nothing in the article suggests that Die drei Portiermädel was released in France, but its success apparently resonated beyond Germany's borders. To my knowledge, if Tourneur's film is hard to find, it does exist (I have a copy), but the German original is probably lost.

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That's all for today folks!