Between 1940 and 1947, MGM made ten films in which Ann Sothern starred as Maisie, one of the most unusual recurring female characters Hollywood conceived in the 1940s. The MAISIE films were an immensely popular series. Conceived as B-films by MGM, they are pre-eminent examples of how some B-films and series transcended their programmer status. Sothern depicted Maisie as a sexy, quick-witted, sharp-tongued, fearless beauty, constantly out of work and on the move from one pick-up job to another. In her various iterations, she’s a stage dancer, a manicurist, a gold prospector, an assistant to a carnival knife-thrower, the Headless Woman in a different kind of carnival, a maid in a mansion, a taxi dancer, a worker on a wartime defense assembly line, a secret agent — and more. She’s a screwball archetype all her own, with certain constants. Sporting an iconic wardrobe of huge floral hat, sassy form-fitting dress, drop-dead Mary Jane pumps, and big brassy bracelets crowded with jangling charms on each wrist, Maisie keeps losing her jobs, keeps looking for new ones, is always on the way to a new place, and has the chops to resist the mashers; she’s always open to the appeal of a handsome man, she can’t let bad people exploit good ones, and she is never at a loss for a spicy comeback or sharp insight. People take her for an airhead blonde, but she observes closely, she stands up for herself, and she speaks her mind. Often, at the end of a particular film, she doesn’t end up with her man; sometimes, she does — but it doesn’t matter, because in the next film she’s on her own again, without backstory explanations or references to her relationships in previous films. In other words, Maisie is always independent, and so are her films, which place her in different genre settings: modern Western, exotic adventure, class comedy, comic crime, and more. She doesn’t always want to be on her own, but she can’t help it. That’s who she is. There’s no long epic story across the films, no “The Perils of Maisie.” She’s a figure: sex-positive, street smart, romantic, fated to be an attractive woman who’s confident in her autonomy. It’s the 1940s.
The idea to make a MAISIE film was originally intended for Jean Harlow. Harlow’s breakout film had been Red Dust, adapted from a play by Wilson Collison. Collison had done time as a studio writer at MGM, and as far as I can make out from fragmentary data, two of his stories that were prototypes for MAISIE films were left to languish after Harlow’s death. Collison later expanded them into two hardboiled novels, Congo Landing (1934) and Dark Dame (1935). The former would eventually be adapted as Congo Maisie, the second of the MAISIE films, and the latter as Maisie, the first of them. Studio interest was revived after the MGM execs saw Sothern’s performance as a sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued blonde in Tay Garnett’s adventure-comedy, Trade Winds. It’s fun to imagine Harlow as Maisie. But the sheer serendipity of Sothern’s casting and MGM’s decision to entrust the screenplays to Mary McCall, Jr. assured that the MAISIE films would be one of the longest lasting and most popular series in America. Maisie was the first film Sothern made for MGM after years of being underutilized at RKO. McCall, a contract writer for the studio, was also one of the most powerful women in Hollywood, elected twice as president of the Screenwriters’ Guild, and an instrumental figure in the unionization of Hollywood writers. Sothern and McCall developed a creative friendship writing the MAISIE films that was almost symbiotic. (The team was soon joined by McCall’s friend, Elizabeth Reinhardt.) The first few of them were filmed on MGM backlots, and it’s evident that the studio heads didn’t pay much attention to them. As a result, Sothern and McCall created what was possibly at the time the most woman-friendly series in Hollywood history. (A good account of McCall’s career can be found in J.E. Smyth’s book Nobody’s Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood.)
Given the MAISIE series’s popularity, it’s puzzling why historians of American film in general, and feminist film historians in particular, have paid so little attention to them. But I have some ideas.
Sothern’s Maisie has qualities that one would think would endear her to feminist-minded critics. She’s an anomaly in the Hollywood ecosystem of the time dominated by noir femmes, altruistic nurses, freckled-faced girlchilds, suburban housewives, and efficient professionals. Looking like a floozie, dressed cheap a la Dolly Parton because she likes the look and owns it, Maisie skirts the boundaries of the by-then well-consolidated Code era, when even Nora Charles was saddled with a baby and bourgeois burdens. Maisie projects the aura of feisty independence and knowing skepticism about male claims to power more typical of some comic heroines of the early ’30s than the ’40s. Her situation as an itinerant working girl incapable of domesticity, her spicy, confrontational language, her moral strength, and her unfailing power to overpower her male opposites’ complacency, prickles the established Decency League norms.
Maisie is perpetually hobbled by men in power, and harassed by men without it. Each film begins with Maisie either out of a job or losing one, and, with only a couple of exceptions, it is because of men. She expects to be exploited and/or harassed, and she refuses to buckle under to it. She accepts the gender power relations as they are, since her constant goal in life is to earn an honest living and there’s no doubt about who controls the labor market. No handouts, no gold digging. She always rebounds on her own, finding work by herself, on her own terms. She’s constantly underestimated by men, who see her initially as a gaudy trollop, a dumb blonde, or a pretty grifter. And always she’s smarter, more centered, and more honest than others, male or female. Provoking or landing in a war of words, her wits and her wit invariably prevail. Like almost all heroines of her time, she longs for romance and marriage with a handsome dude. She sometimes achieves the former and the promise of the latter, but only after a long struggle in which she proves her moral superiority over everyone. And when the next film in the series comes around, she’s on her own again. For whatever unstated reasons, she’s on the road again. It doesn’t need to be stated that those forgotten romances probably didn’t meet her standards.
Maisie is one of the few screwball heroines in a series format, a protocol that saves her from the perpetual screwball problem: delivering into marriage a woman too smart and witty to be dominated. She’s too hard to handle, for all her romanticism and sensuality. Her working-class attitude and patter place her among a very few female characters of the time who evinced an Irish subjectivity. Maisie proudly proclaims her Brooklyn fighting Irish heritage. Her screenwriter McCall herself was from New York Irish stock. Sothern’s Maisie is feisty, romantic, combative, sardonic; she has self-respect, class humility along with some resentment, the gift of gab, simple and clear morality, the experience of rough neighborhoods, and no time for phonies. She displays all the attributes of our contemporary minority heroines. Of course, by the mid-20th century the Irish were acceptably white racially and thoroughly integrated into the dominant capitalist culture, but Hollywood still treated them as idiosyncratic and volatile, the stuff of stereotypes. While a few actors like James Cagney and George Murphy were embraced as hero-material, the figure of the female Irish protagonist was rare, and had a short window in the 1940s. Maisie (it’s good to recall that “Maisie” is a Scots-Irish nickname for Margaret, a common name among the Irish Catholic diaspora) represents a position somewhat to the left of the characters played by the only prominent Irish-identified Hollywood actress of the time, Maureen O’Hara. (The other dominant female Irish actress in Hollywood, Maureen O’Sullivan, rarely if ever played an Irish stereotype. O’Sullivan actually plays a tepid ingenue opposite Sothern in Maisie was a Lady.) While sharing O’Hara’s fiery, romantic, and resistant temperament, Sothern’s (and McCall’s) Maisie has a somewhat more urbane and skeptical outlook. She’s been around a lot more. She’s from Brooklyn. Her fellow-characters don’t take notice of all this (most of the time they’re distracted by her low-class habille or her drop-dead looks), but she takes pains to alert them. Her work ethic is a core part of her self-respect. She’s uncompromisingly a “working girl” in the old sense of the term. But she wouldn’t mind a vacation with the right man.
One of the most striking things about Maisie is her mobility. Unusual for female protagonists, and unprecedented for a series heroine, Maisie travels all over — even to Africa in Congo Maisie — and she does it solo. One of her iconic comic accoutrements is her suitcase.
A Brooklyn girl, she can be afraid of coyotes in the wild, but never of human wolves. She can handle herself. And because she has had so many different jobs, and has been good at most of them, she has seen a lot of social worlds. And because she has lost so many of them, she has no professional or family anchors. As a result, she also has the social mobility and the experience of a picara. Such a character would have been inconceivable in the 1930s.
Maisie has no real flaws. She’s a do-right woman, through and through, but she also knows her looks and manner are not a disadvantage. That is, until that’s exactly what they become, and she has to call on her tried and true strategies of resistance. She has a temper, but it’s always because of righteous indignation. She’s not quiet about wrongs. Maximally feminine by the standards of the time and the medium, Sothern’s Maisie spends her time in men’s wild worlds — the west (Maisie), the African jungle (Congo Maisie), migrant camps (Gold Rush Maisie), upper-class snobbery (Maisie Was a Lady), carnivals (Maisie gets Her Man), prize fighting (Ringside Maisie), war (Swing Shift Maisie), and the like.
Maisie is a force of moral nature in a world that expects nothing of the sort from an itinerant showgirl. She keeps encountering unfaithfulness and exploitation — sometimes she’s the victim, but more often than not the victims are others who have shown her kindness. Like Deanna Durbin’s characters, she can’t help but stick her nose in other peoples’ troubles. She just can’t help it. She’s an interventionist. Surprisingly (at least for me), she has few if any female sidekicks to lean on in a pinch. She invariably works face to face, which justifies the almost obsessive use of one-on-one dialogues that carry the action in most of the films. (The films were on B-budgets. The scripts are great examples of how to make the most of them.) The MAISIE films are masterpieces of two-shot mises en scènes. Maisie does not change. Her environments, situations, and generic frameworks do.
And over time, the quality of the films change, too. For me, the period of MAISIE glory runs from 1939’s Maisie to the seventh (of ten) iteration, Swing Shift Maisie in 1943. After that, the Great Consolidation of American/Hollywood conformity asserts full control, and the character of Maisie is kneaded into the middlebrow mainstream. McCall is still credited with 1944’s Maisie Goes to Reno, but the final two films were not her work, and it shows. Well, that’s how it goes, even today. An iconoclastic and yet popular figure is transformed into a tepid, vacuous simulation of its former self by folks who had no idea why it became popular in the first place. Sothern adapted well to the changes in her later career. There was a popular MAISIE radio series in the 1950s. Sothern became one of the most successful TV comediennes in the ’50s and ’60s, and there’s no doubt that memories of her MAISIE career contributed to it. But, all things considered, by the time the war was over and US culture was fully enclosed in its triumphant and puritanical bubble, Maisie’s time was over, too.