Ann Sothern had been kicking around Hollywood going from studio to studio for ten years. A lot of B films that didn't deliver a punch until MGM signed her and put her in this film as Maisie. Jean Harlow had been slotted to be the star but that ended with her sudden death. It is based on a novel by Wilson Collison, who also wrote the play Red Dust that coincidentally starred Harlow in the film version. Maisie was a unique character for the time - a tough talking brash Brooklyn girl who was an ex-burlesque dancer. Sothern as the character is like a stretched rubber band that vibrates between sass and sex. She looks at a man and knows exactly what he is thinking - not that you have to be a medium for that. Blonde hair, a fine svelte figure and eyes that gobble you up and often spit you out. Wise beyond her years after seasoning in show business and her mouth reflects that. Not that she really has the Brooklyn accent down in this film - she was born in North Dakota - as it jumps between something that sounds Brooklyn and something closer to Dixie - Brooklyn South shall we say. Not enough dese and dose.
I am not sure if this was initially intended to be a series - hard to imagine they would put a huge star like Harlow in a series - but the film and Sothern hit it off with the public and they wanted more. A lot more. Nine more Maisie's were to come ending in 1947. She also played the character on the radio for six years until 1953. At that point Sothern took her talents to TV in Private Secretary for five seasons and then the Ann Sothern Show for three. Largely forgotten I imagine today because she was never in a big time film. Her last film was The Whales of August in which she co-starred with two legends - Bette Davis and Lillian Gish.
This one touches all the bases from home to home. A comedy with romance and drama and finally a trial for murder. She is the baserunner. She arrives in some dope small town in Wyoming where the steers outnumber the people by a lot. She was told to appear in a show for $75 a week - good money for showing your legs in those days. But the show has vanished losing out to the rodeo. The kind of town where the men prefer fancy cows to fancy girls. Down to 15 cents she gets a job in a shooting gallery and talks Slim (Robert Young - billed higher than Sothern) into taking a few shots. He does but loses his wallet and accuses Maisie of stealing it. She ends up in jail but is soon at his ranch as a maid to the visiting owner (Ian Hunter) and his wife (Ruth Hussey). I think Hussey is a beaut but she seems to usually get cast into bad girl's roles as she does here. Very basic but enjoyable enough. Apparently from what I read they basically throw this one away and start anew in the next film. They had a hit and had to get Maisie off the ranch. Ann Sothern deserves more than a ranch. She is something else.
Congo Maisie (1940) – 5.5
What the hell. We last left Maisie in the first film in this series happily ensconced in a small town in Wyoming seemingly in love with Slim. This one opens with Maisie skipping out of paying a hotel bill in a ragtag river town in Africa. She is on her way to Lagos to perform in a show. Lagos sure is a long way from Brooklyn. And hard to imagine it pays very well. But that is the nutty premise of this second film. Ann Sothern is still a tough nut - maybe a tougher nut as she helps perform surgery and faces down a few witch doctors with murder in their eyes. This is like Maisie got lost in a Tarzan movie and I think it may have used the same stock footage.
She stows away on a tugboat going upriver by mistake - rather than down river - and when the boat breaks down for repairs she and her fellow passenger Michael Shane are put ashore. Shane (John Carroll) is a dick - rude and abusive to Maisie - he kicks her out of his bedroom on the boat! Is he crazy? They find refuge in a health clinic run by Dr. McWade (Shepperd Strudwick) and his too lovely wife (Rita Johnson). Shane takes aim at the wife and it is looking like an ugly ending. Then the witch doctors come for blood. Maisie puts on one of her burlesque outfits and performs tricks for them and saves the day. And then solves everything else. Maisie is street wise - she advises the wife to stay away from Shane but the wife says you know nothing about me. I don't but I know about him - I have met a million guys just like him and he is trouble. Next up is Gold Rush Maisie. Where will our Maisie be I wonder?
Gold Rush Maisie (1940) – 6.0
In this third film in the series Maisie (Ann Sothern) is thankfully back from the Congo. Sending her off to Africa looking for work was kind of a ridiculous idea. They really go for the heart in this one as Maisie meets the Grapes of Wrath - which probably not coincidentally came out in the same year. Behind all of her fast talking grenade tossing barbs give no ground attitude, she is hard on the outside, mush on the inside. But she can't show too much of that. Even by 1940 there were still tough times for a lot of Americans. Maisie is always on the road looking for her next singing engagement and usually down to her last few bucks. Somewhere in the mid-west she is driving her $25 car to her next gig when it breaks down next to a ghost town. The old fashioned kind - the gold was mined out and everyone left but two men who own a ranch (Lee Bowman and Slim Summerville). They don't exactly welcome her but let her stay the night. Bill (Bowman) is angry at the world for some reason and his sidekick Fred (Slim) just doesn't like people - in particular of the feminine kind (a role usually reserved for Walter Brennan).
The next day she gets to the town but the job is gone. She hears that gold has been found near the ghost town and she goes back hoping she can find a job in a café. Instead she finds a lot of broken dreams by farmers who have been kicked off their land looking for one last chance. She hooks up with one of them and goes looking for gold. Maisie doesn't get rich - that would be the end of the series - and she doesn't fall in love as she did in the two previous films - but she brings out the best in everybody and then moves on. Like Zatoichi without the cane sword and the dead bodies left behind.
Maisie was a Lady (1941) – 6.0
The fourth in the Maisie series starring Ann Sothern. Not Southern which I thought was how her name was spelled for years. Maisie is free and footloose again. And without a head. She is the headless woman in a carnival of freaks. It is just a scam of course but people are believing it - "Isn't it amazing what science can do?" - until a soused Lew Ayres walks in and screws up the act. She loses her job at $25 a week and has two dimes to her name. Ayres lends her his car in his inebriated state and when she gets pulled over later he has forgotten when she gets put in front of a judge. It all works out though and she is sentenced to being his maid for two months.
Not a bad gig though as it turns out his family is wealthier than Croesus and has the mansion to prove it. Best about the film is the group of actors around Maisie in this one. Ayres was in the middle of his very popular Dr. Kildare series - until he became a Conscientious Objector during the war and that was the end of that. His sister is the wonderful Maureen O'Sullivan who was in the middle of being Jane in the Tarzan series. And the butler is the great English actor C. Aubrey Smith taking a break from usually being cast as upper class or a Commander of some sort ruminating about the battle of something somewhere when the Brits defeated the scallywags. A mere butler here but lots of screen time. I guess they shave off his always present moustache for this demotion.
Sullivan's character is engaged to a man who we know as soon as we see him is a cad, Ayres who once had great promise (M.I.T.) has turned into an annoying lush and their father is always away playing golf or hunting. It is of course up to Maisie to straighten everything out which she does with a blistering monologue. It is hard to even categorize these films. Not really comedy though it has a few nicely placed barbs, not really all that dramatic since you know where it is going and the romance is always on hand but is treated with kid gloves. It is really just Ann Sothern that kept the people coming - her wisecracking put downs of the rich, the snooty and the men who have ideas. As in a few of the others it looks like love for Maisie at the end but by the next film will she be broke and on the road again. Let's see if that holds up.
Ringside Maisie (1941) – 6.0
In the fifth round of Maisie - still not B films - she gets involved in a boxing melodrama. Yet another sub-genre that has almost been TKO'ed. It begins as usual with Maisie (Ann Sothern) down and almost out. $9.45 cents to her name. She is a taxi dancer or a Dime a Dance Girl and she has a customer with fifty tickets in his pocket and a liking for swinging a girl up and down and all around. She can't take it any more and when she tries to leave the dance floor, the manager says dance or quit. She quits. Her agent has a job lined up as a dancer in upstate and off she goes by train only to be thrown off when she has no dough for the ticket. They literally stop the train in the middle of nowhere and boot her off. I don't think they can do that any more.
Anyways, she gets helped by a boxer in training (Robert Sterling) to get to her gig only to find out her dancing partner wants to be more than a dancing partner and she gets fired for pulling up the drawbridge. But the boxer helps her again though his manager played by George Murphy wants her far away. Murphy began as a song and dance man and does some of that in many of his films - but here he plays it straight. He tried following in the footsteps of Reagan by becoming a Republican Senator from California but throat cancer brought his career to an end. He is an actor I try and avoid if I can. Always rubs me the wrong way. And Maisie ends up falling for him. She falls for someone in every film and then sheds them like an old skin by the next film. Here she tries to help the young boxer come to terms with what he really wants out of life. There is a fair amount of boxing and the fight choreography isn't bad. Looks sort of real. A little too sentimental for my taste but most of it works. As does most of her sharply pointed dialogue.
