Maisie was the first of MGM’s immensely popular series of ten films spanning the war years, starring Ann Sothern as Maisie Ravier, a showgirl picara wandering from situation to situation, setting to setting, job to job, and genre to genre. Beautiful, sexy, honest, endowed with an Irish-inflected proletarian p.o.v., an acute observer with a biting wit, Sothern’s Maisie was an unusual female archetype in the Hollywood ecosystem. (I try to capture the gist of the whole ten-film Maisie enterprise here.)
Maisie was originally intended to be played by Jean Harlow. The core stories of the first two films, Maisie and Congo Maisie, were by Wilson Collison, a Broadway playwright who had also worked as a contract writer for the studio, and whose play Red Dust was adapted into Harlow’s breakout film. Collison’s studio stories about worldly-wise heart-of-gold itinerant showgirls languished in treatment for years; writer after writer took stabs at them (including, improbably, Josef Von Sternberg) without success, until Collison returned to New York and published two of them as romantic potboilers. Maisie‘s script is based on the second of these, Dark Dame (1935), a tough pulp romance about a Brooklyn showgirl out of a job, traveling west to take a hardscrabble gig. She meets a handsome cowboy ranch manager, who tries to resist her charms. The ranch’s owner and his wayward wife arrive unexpectedly, and intrigues ensue. The novel is unremarkable, except for the dialogue given to its heroine. Not yet a blonde, Collison’s Maisie is vivid, smart, and saucy.
Dark Dame is not a comedy. It’s really a noirish mystery set on a Wyoming ranch. How and when it was decided to transform the mood to comic isn’t clear to me. The final script treatment was assigned to Mary McCall, Jr., a contract writer that had worked with Dorothy Arzener, and was soon to become president of the Screenwriters’ Guild. The starring role was handed to Sothern after her performance as a quick-witted blonde in Tay Garnett’s adventure-comedy, Trade Winds. Maisie was the first film Sothern made for MGM, and at the time the studio had no other projects in mind for her. When Harlow was in the mix, the film was intended to be an A-list production, and most likely much less comic in mood. By the time Sothern and McCall took the assignment, it was reconceived as a B-flick, with a low budget, to be filmed on a backlot. Edwin L. Marin was assigned to direct, and J. Walter Rubin to produce — two men near the bottom of the studio’s totem pole. McCall and Sothern recalled that the studio heads expected little and didn’t pay much attention to them at first. In this vacuum, the two created what was possibly at the time the most woman-friendly series in Hollywood history.
Maisie retains some of the plot intrigues of the novel, but in many respects it’s transformed into its opposite. The jumping off point for McCall must have been the colorful Runyonesque language that Maisie was originally endowed with by Collison. McCall and Sothern raised it to new heights. In the course of Maisie’s film career, Sothern ascends to the ranks of the fastest talking female actresses of the era, equal to, if not surpassing, other high words-per-minute comediennes like Carole Lombard, Katherine Hepburn, Glenda Farrell, and Rosalind Russell. And McCall provided plenty of words for her. Her generally reserved male love-interests uniformly give up trying to compete with her — all the more because her patter is wise and righteous. The mood reversal from Collison’s novel comes with a bite. Dark Dame indulges the fantasy of the honest and open West versus the corruption of Big City Chicago. But Maisie‘s Maisie is a city girl. For her, the West is where “the spaces are wide and the minds are narrow.”
The first MAISIE movie is in many ways the most interesting in the series. It’s definitely the one that should be seen first, and even as a standalone. Initially, there may not have been any plans to make sequels. (That said, the existence of Collison’s other Harlow-oriented novel, Congo Landing, gave the studio a free pass to make at least one more low-budget B, and to use the Tarzan sets that had also been used for Harlow’s Red Dust. That’s what happened when Congo Maisie was filmed the following year. It was the last of the Maisie films based on Collison’s stories.) McCall’s script is more literate than the original novel, at least in terms of theme and structure. It follows the arc of a classical romance, following the plucky heroine from abject outsider status through romantic attachment to a wounded male, a painful self-chosen separation, a return involving self-chosen self-sacrifice to save her beloved, and a surprising restoration and bountiful reward of love and property at the end. The satisfying happy ending delivers, for all appearances, our erstwhile picara to the old-school settled state. A marriage and a home. Why should she roam? Well, for one reason, the Comic Spirit saw something in Sothern’s Maisie that it liked better than a well-made play. She serves the Spirit better by not being settled. She’s more useful not being tied down.
Maisie is particularly interesting as a film. Maisie the character is not yet the goofy moralist she gradually evolves into in the course of the series. In Maisie, she is more ambiguous, more cynical, tougher, more familiar with bad treatment. And she’s as sensuous as a noir moll. She knows she’s a knockout, and is not above relying on it. She’s altogether more serious and more crafty. Sothern plays, and McCall writes, the character this way in the next two films as well, Congo Maisie and Gold Rush Maisie. One of Sothern’s great talents was the ability to change moods on a dime, and to make each mood believable and each motive for change plausible. It’s a trait that few of her contemporary comediennes shared. (The young Lana Turner had it in her four early MGM comedies, Two Girls on Broadway, Dancing Co-Ed, These Glamour Girls and Slightly Dangerous.) Maisie exploits it the most, and, not incidentally, the film is a fascinating patchwork of B-movie genre styles, invoking romcoms, westerns, sultry melodramas, whodunits, courtroom dramas and more. And yet it all works because of Sothern’s energy. It’s Maisie’s energy that propels the plot, and it’s Sothern’s energy that gives order to the generic mishmash. All screwball comediennes have prodigious energy. It’s one of screwball’s distinctive traits. With Sothern’s Maisie, that energy includes not only her mile a minute thoughts and words, but her blazing, radiant screen image. We rarely hear Sothern mentioned among the incandescent Hollywood beauties, but she was one of them, and Maisie’s mise en scene captures her special combination of glamor and emotional flexibility.
We are introduced to Maisie in what will become her archetypal predicament: she’s on her own, jobless, having lost a gig through no fault of her own, desperately looking for honest paying work, ready and capable for anything. Her defining characteristic is presented at the outset: she’s out of place. Against the grain. A classy showgirl in a dusty cowboy town, a manly man’s town: Big Horn, Wyoming. And it’s Rodeo time. But there is a fortuitous overlap. It’s also Carnival time.
More than in any of the sequels, Maisie is rife with screwball humor based on the erotic friction between gender and class opposites, an ultra-feminine mistress of badinage and a reticent, female-averse cowboy. (The plot situation was in the air. Samuel Goldwyn had produced the more ambitious and less funny The Cowboy and the Lady, with Gary Cooper and Merle Oberon, the previous year.) While rodeos seem to favor the manly men, carnivals favor the showgirl, who can hawk anything, even a shooting gallery. She excels at words. She informs us that she understands “two languages: English and doubletalk.” Her counterpart, “Slim” (Robert Young), excels at straight shooting.
Like many picaros, and all picaras, Maisie does time in the hoosegow. She’s wrongly accused, victimized by a man, and, the clincher: she’s a woman on her own, without a patron. Status: petty outlaw, a thief, or a vagrant.
Only the generous bad conscience of her tall and handsome wrongful accuser can provide her with the means to get out of town. Freed from jail, though, she insists on being free on her own terms. No handouts. She’ll only take money for work, and she makes sure the men know that it’s not exactly the Puritan work-ethic:
— “If I wanted to do a striptease I would’ve stayed in Denver and got paid for it.”
Maisie‘s Maisie has a noir screwball mouth. Like Stanwyck’s Sugarpuss in Ball of Fire, her words are sexy and scornful, inviting and pugnacious, as contemptuous of the Decency Code as of most of the other kinds of patriarchal codes.
Still, once we know that Maisie is not going to stay out of the picture in her sequels, there’s a lot to admire in the way McCall and Sothern re-imagine Maisie’s first story. Her initial outsider status is clear: she has no job, as a stranger she’s immediately suspected of being a criminal, and once she’s been exonerated, she risks being jailed again as a vagrant. The small-minded town wants her out of town. What’s not abject is that at every step Maisie chooses her own path. She arrives in Big Horn because she’s on her way to work. She fiercely and effectively defends her honor against the charge of dishonesty, the worst charge she can imagine. And she’d be willing to stay in jail as an accused vagrant (even though she’s the living opposite of one) in a way that would force the sheriff to keep her in town. And left to her own devices, she’s willing to share a ride with an animal — even to be mistaken for one — to get moving again. She stows away on Slim’s cattle truck.
Maisie‘s Maisie is a sultry one. For all her sufferings from the “frozen-faced giraffe” Slim, she’s mightily attracted to him, and she wonders, as does the audience, how a red-blooded male can resist her slinky charms. She can bring it like a noir seductress.
Maisie concocts her own solutions. Rather than be kicked off the ranch, she arranges to meet its owner and his wife in tow when they arrive by train, and invents her own job, posing as the ranch’s new maid (without Slim’s knowledge), charming the couple. The owner, Clifford Ames (Ian Hunter), is basically a decent, gallant guy, but an overly fond husband. The wife, Sybil (Ruth Hussey), though, has a roving eye. As her attentions expand to Slim, Maisie notices, as is her nature. And her concern expands, too, for both Slim and Ames, whose gallantry she respects. The scene of woman/fire/match, like everything else, also expands. Maisie’s wardrobe now tamps down some of the smolder. (It remains one of the in-joke mysteries of the series: what exactly is in Maisie’s suitcase?)
In time, Slim finally warms to Maisie’s charms, and notices they are somehow “distributed better.” Maisie, too, understands that perky and cute work better than smoldering embers and “smart-aleck” patter.
Midway through, the romantic speedbumps appear to be resolved. Slim recognizes Maisie’s inherent sweetness, and Maisie drops her prickly defenses. Slim reveals the source of his dour misogyny: he took an embezzlement rap for a girlfriend back in Chicago, and did the time in her stead; she, despite promises, used the time to hook up with a new man. But the script throws a curveball. Having observed Sybil Ames cuckolding her debilitated husband (a la D.H. Lawrence, he has been injured in a car accident) with a non-discarded ex, Maisie insists that she needs to leave the ranch and Wyoming. It just doesn’t feel right to her, and she wants Slim to go with her.
The MAISIE films often showcase a spirited dialogue between Maisie and her current moral antagonist. Maisie’s confrontation with Sybil Ames, who expects Maisie to stay mute about her witnessing Sybil’s cheating from her husband, is the prototype for the future scenes, which usually involve some of McCall’s best writing and Sothern’s sharpest deliveries. Slim’s cute Maisie cedes to Maisie’s righteous razor-tongue.
Innocent Slim is persuaded by Sybil Ames that Maisie has designs on her husband, twisting Maisie’s words to make her appear as the cheap, deceiving gold-digger that Slim once suspected her to be. Maisie is wounded by Slim’s gullibility, which reinforces her need to get away. In a touching scene, she makes her farewell to Ames, who now understands that Maisie is gold and Sybil is poison. (The subsequent Maisie movies will often build on this motif: two men that Maisie is attracted to competing in her mind, only one of which is eligible as a lover. The other one, though, is rarely a buffoonish Bellamy, which creates bona fide dilemmas.)
While Maisie takes a job as a somewhat incompetent manicurist back in Chicago, Slim finds Ames shot to death back at the ranch. The audience suspects that he has done the deed to himself in his marital despair, but Slim is accused of his murder. Hearing by chance that Slim is on trial for it, Maisie rushes back to Wyoming to plead for his innocence. Though courtroom finales like this were cliches, McCall makes this one worthy of Capra. Reprising the earlier motif of Maisie’s honest words being distorted by cynical manipulators, Maisie’s appearance seems to backfire, until Ames’s attorney-ex-machina appears with a letter that Ames had written to Maisie, in which he makes his suicide and its motive clear to the court. Cherry on top: Ames has bequeathed the ranch to Maisie.
In some respects, Maisie suffers a bit from having sequels. It has the integrity of a stand-alone film. It is a very well constructed, well filmed, somewhat minimalist screwball melodrama with heavy noir tones. But the fact that in her next films Robert Young is nowhere to be found, and Maisie is footloose again and again, finding new partners, demands that it be viewed with double vision. From the first film onward, Maisie earns her cake and eats it, too. Unshackled by marriage and patriarchal rules, she’s free to acquire her chosen lovers, and to be on the road again.