Congo Maisie was the second of the popular MAISIE series starring Ann Sothern as the eponymous showgirl-picara. (I try to capture the gist of the whole ten-film “Maisie” enterprise here.) It was also the last of the films to be based on the novels by Wilson Collison, who had earlier written the play on which Jean Harlow’s breakout film, Red Dust, was based. It’s clearly derivative of that film, in both story and production; it was filmed on MGM’s Tarzan jungle set, as was Red Dust six years earlier. The plot places Maisie in the African jungle, on the move as usual, this time on the way to a gig at a Lagos club (never mind the thousand mile distance between the Congo and Nigeria — in fact, never mind any of the African folderol). Her romantic leading man from the previous film, Robert Young, is nowhere to be seen. The ranch that she inherits in Maisie and her inevitable happy ending in marriage go without mention. She’s entirely on her own. Again. The audience can’t be sure whether the action of Congo Maisie predates that of the earlier film or the action is occurring in a different timespace continuum, one in which Maisie never happened. The disconnect could have been somewhat disorienting but there’s no evidence that it was. In retrospect, it’s the first move in the bold strategy to present our heroine in each film as if the others did not exist. The only thing binding them is the irresistibly gorgeous, sharp-tongued, street-smart blonde powerhouse from South Brooklyn.
The film’s source material, Collison’s 1934 novel Congo Landing, is clearly a variation on the basic plot of his Red Dust. The Maisie character (named Dolly there) is a fortune-telling assistant to a handsome itinerant magician-huckster, whose indiscretions and violent tendencies have forced the team to be constantly on the move from one colonial African stop to another. Arriving at a rubber plantation’s hospital up the Congo River, they are met by its gallant, idealistic resident doctor and his new English wife. She is quietly miserable, lonely, and displaced; he’s an inattentive and unaware workaholic on a healing mission. She falls for Dolly’s magician, who is game for yet another seduction. Dolly intervenes, blocks the impending affair, and encourages doctor and wife to leave the jungle clinic and return to civilization.
Congo Landing is not a comic novel; it’s a potboiler melodrama in an exotic colonial setting, in the vein of Somerset Maugham’s “Rain.” Its only humor comes from Dolly’s patter. Sardonic, worldly, with penetrating wit, Dolly is of a piece with the heroine of Collison’s second novel, Dark Dame, where she acquires the name Maisie. It’s clear that Collison only had one real gift: creating street-smart, independent minded heroines that Damon Runyon would have been proud of. Congo Landing was published a year before Dark Dame, but the adaptations appeared in reverse order: Congo Maisie released six months after Maisie. Perhaps the success of Maisie encouraged the studio to make a sequel; perhaps the two films were conceived together. I’m inclined to think that the latter was the case, because most of Congo Maisie is darker in tone than Maisie — literally, with its jungle-noir mise en scene, while also putting the characters in greater peril. Screenwriter Mary McCall Jr. retained the main plot of Collison’s story, grafting some Red Dust motifs to go along with it. Collison’s itinerant seducer is replaced by a sullen rubber plantation owner, Robert Shane (John Carroll), who, disillusioned with isolation in Africa, abandoned his medical practice at the jungle clinic. Dolly becomes Maisie, who, true to her archetype, is not attached to any man. But the intrigue remains: an idealistic colonial doctor, Dr. John McWade (Sheppard Strudwick), who was once Shane’s assistant at the clinic; a new wife, Kay (Rita Johnson), lonely and alienated from the local population of Black natives; and her dangerous attraction to the suave player, Shane.
The film could easily have become a B-level ripoff of Rain or Red Dust. But the studio knew they had discovered a golden goose in Maisie. If Maisie was in it, it was a comedy.
(Another sign for me that Congo Maisie was in the works when the first film was released is that MGM paired it in theaters with Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan Finds a Son, which was filmed on the same set as Congo Maisie.)
The film begins as MAISIE films are wont to do: she’s on the move to take a faraway gig that’s far from guaranteed, she has almost no cash to her name, and she’s at the mercy of suspect men with all the power. We find her stowing away in Shane’s cabin on a Congo riverboat, having skipped out on her hotel bill, clad in her archetypal attire and carrying her iconic suitcase. Shane throws her out and the boat’s captain has nefarious designs, but she’s used to it and has her defences. In McCall’s memorable line, she has “a right cross known from Zanzibar to the Gold Coast.” (We learn in later films that her father was a prize fighter who fought John L. Sullivan — she’s a fighter’s daughter). That may protect her for a while, but she discovers to her horror that the boat is taking her “up the river,” away from her destination.
Given the unadulterated colonial white-supremacist mentality of Hollywood’s African adventures, one has to expect extreme racist depictions of Black African natives; the more so, in B-films. But there were degrees. Starving, Maisie makes a deal with the boat’s African cook Jallah (Everett Brown). She trades her bangles for “chop.” The nuance in the scene lies in the difference between Maisie’s friendly trade relations with Jallah, compared with the captain’s unsuccessful attempt to intimidate him. The scene is richer than it might first appear. From one angle — a classically colonialist one — Maisie has duped Jallah the way white settlers stereotypically duped the primitive natives. Maisie procures sustenance in exchange for mere beads, leaving Jallah behind the 8-ball (one of the charms on Maisie bracelet). From another angle, though, it’s a fair exchange. The working-class girl, abject and hungry, discarded by the captain and the plantation owner, trades the costume jewelry that the audience already knows from the first film is part of her identity, for food, which, after all, Jallah doesn’t actually own. The captain’s bullying has no effect on Jallah. Who is behind the 8-ball in the end? Maisie simply worked around the colonial authority figures. It’s also a nice dig at the racist cliche that hypermasculine native men naturally lust after white women. Unlike the white captain, Jallah not only makes a fair trade, he makes it for feminine artifacts. Where Maisie goes, one must temper expectations.
The cinematic conceit of Congo Maisie is that it places the newly minted comic female-picara series into the well-established jungle adventures of the B-serials. Most of the latter were produced by minor studios like Columbia, Universal, and Republic, with shoestring budgets, hack actors, and maximally pulpy scripts. MGM occupied the jungle-genre penthouse with the Weissmuller’s Tarzans, which began in 1932 and lasted until 1943, when MGM basically abandoned them; RKO picked them up and returned them to solidly lumpen pulp status. Even though MGM had tried to make the stories slightly more character-centered, the archetype of the jungle adventure did not change much: a personally powerful white male autarch lives in isolation from Europeans, among brutish, superstitious natives associated with wild animals, whom the white phallic authority either rules or fights. His power lies in his superior science, specifically weaponry, which he manipulates in ways that make the natives treat it as magic. A nubile white woman lands in the scene, representing either European values (like Tarzan’s Jane) or female power (like Haggard’s She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed). In many of these tales the colonial Europeans are represented as divided between missionaries of the Enlightenment and greedy villains — the latter are negotiable, but it’s rare for a story not to place a great white power-figure at the apex.
How does one fit a wisecracking Irish-inflected working class Brooklyn showgirl into such a frame? I’ve mentioned the story’s links with Maugham’s “Rain” and Collison’s Red Dust and Congo Landing. Those stories owe more to Joseph Conrad than Rider Haggard — the white male colonials are fairly weak and vulnerable, out of place in the human and natural wilderness. Not the stuff of Saturday matinee serials. Screenwriter Mary McCall was presented with a challenge: keep most of the classic colonialist structure, but counterbalance it with a subtle sardonic irony, an irony neither “meta” about the genre nor overtly critical of it.
Back to the story. We discover some things that we expected from the genre. Shane was not always a cynical asshole. He was once the clinic’s head doctor and was beloved by the natives — Varnai (Ernest Whitman), a village elder, has named one of his sons after him. Meanwhile, Kay McWade is attracted to Shane, a far more charismatic figure of a man than her husband, whom we haven’t even seen yet — he’s an idealistic workaholic working on a cure for sleeping sickness. He barely has time for his elegant, attractive wife. The native elder appeals to Shane to heal his son of a mysterious illness that the local witch doctor cannot do. In the exchange, we learn that Shane speaks the local language fluently, while Kay not only does not, but is busy teaching the natives pidgin English. Shane is obviously reluctant to revert to his do-gooder life, but he feels the tug of responsibility for the African who has treated him as a saint. Throughout, Maisie observes. As she puts it, she “doesn’t miss much.” She sees Kay’s attraction to Shane. She sees Shane’s smug flirtation with another man’s lonely wife. And, surprisingly, she also sees the colonial racism of both the story and the genre. “Are they still playing Uncle Tom’s Cabin?” she asks.
The core intrigue appears to be a variation on the loose adventuress/displaced genteel European woman/rakish, half-embedded colonial in-charge-male triangle of Red Dust. It’s easy to see why Jean Harlow would have been attracted to the role of Maisie in the story. Sothern ‘s performance so far is an homage to Harlow. This is the toughest Sothern ever made her character. Maisie’s been around so much she can’t be intimidated by a wolf even on his “night to howl.”
Maisie’s penetrating emotional intelligence, though, is hard to fit into the frame. She has x-ray eyes, but she’s a busybody. To make things worse, she’s not just a stand-up girl, she’s a hot one, too — she’s what the blues would call “a grown woman.” She’s attracted to Shane herself, despite seeing through him. What’s more, she proves she’s the one who would be able to make a go of living under African skies, by assisting Shane as he performs an emergency appendectomy on McWade, a job that Kay, who can’t stand the sight of blood, cannot do. After proving her spunk and skill, despite having no medical training, Maisie must deal with her emotional dilemmas. McCall and Sothern create a remarkable scene for a B-adventure. Kay and Maisie’s dialogue about Shane certainly wouldn’t pass the Bechdel Test, but its intensity and empathy is more like that of Stage Door and The Women than a jungle B.
Maisie has been a witty character for most of the film, but we’re still far from comedy. Stakes are raised even higher when the witch doctor who was unable to cure Varnai’s son leads the tribe in an attack on the clinic. The scene is typical of the climaxes of many a jungle adventure — and this is where the film decides to turn on the comedy. Classically, the white hunter-boss will threaten the natives with weapons that the benighted think are magical fire-sticks. Alternatively, the boss will use some scientific foreknowledge, as say anticipating an eclipse, which he will sell as a magical power. So what does Congo Maisie do with it? Drawing on her time as a stage magician’s assistant, Maisie decides she’ll also use white people’s magic to save the compound’s bacon. But it’s the “magic” of a country fairground. Dressed in a wild, tacky, exotic stage costume that is already an imitation of the ceremonial plumage of a New Orleans Big Mama, she pretends to bring on a cloudburst with a cheap concealed squirter. Of a piece with the scene with Jallah on the boat, the scene is double coded. On the surface, the natives are so benighted they fall for the cheapest trick in the book. From another angle, Maisie is playing (for keeps, as it happens) with an audience of rubes, the usual audience for her hardscrabble performances. It’s sort of unnerving, but it’s funny. Even Shane has some rube in him — how did she do that? It ain’t science, but it’s also not weaponry, and we know Maisie knows from experience that Black African tribal natives aren’t the only rubes in the world. (For what it’s worth, the scene is almost certainly a send-up of both Haggard’s She and a climactic scene in Universal’s 1937 serial, Jungle Jim.) In the phallus-and-fetish game, Maisie has all the concealed cards — and a squirter, to boot.
With one big public problem resolved, there’s an equally big intimate one. Against her better judgment, Maisie’s still weak for Shane, and now he’s turned his ardent attention toward her. By luck, she maneuvers him into declaring his love for her just as Kay enters the room. That little trick saves Kay from her infatuation with Shane, but what is Maisie to do about hers?
The final resolution is unearned, to put it mildly. Despite all her clear-headed arguments about Shane being “the same old car,” she’s swept off her feet by his sudden promise of marriage and a family — all in less than a minute. It doesn’t make sense. After all, Shane’s new admiration for Maisie comes from witnessing her fast thinking and courage. She’s great in an adventure. But family? roots? Shane hasn’t shown any interest in such bourgeois shackles. But in the great scheme of things — “things” being the MAISIE enterprise — it doesn’t have to make sense. Just like her settlement in the previous film, Maisie, it’s all just illusion. At the beginning of the next one, Gold Rush Maisie, she’s on her own on the road again, without even a mention of Shane, marriage, or her big African adventure.
If the first MAISIE film established the unwavering archetype of Maisie’s character and Sothern’s witty and sultry embodiment of it, Congo Maisie is the film that establishes the dreamlike norms of the series. In subsequent films we learn a little about Maisie’s Brooklyn Irish childhood, but the stories of her adult adventures are never linked into a history. In fact, those adventures become about her character being placed in markedly different movie genres, while she never changes her values, her affect, and her mile-a-minute patter. Though she keeps waking up fully grown in different movie-worlds, she’s never phased. She may not recall any of her earlier adventures, but that’s a source of her strength as a character — Maisie is a character-archetype who isn’t changed, no matter what genre-archetype she’s thrown into.