Gold Rush Maisie was the third film in the ten-film MAISIE series, and the first that was not based on stories by Wilson Collison. (I take a stab at describing the MAISIE enterprise here.) That freedom allowed scriptwriter Mary McCall, Jr. and the series’s star Ann Sothern to imagine their picara heroine’s trajectory their own way. Still relatively safe from MGM executives’ attention in the backlot cocoon of a B-production, McCall and Sothern moved Maisie into surprising territory. Surprising, but powerfully logical. The two earlier films had placed the itinerant showgirl in different movie genre settings. Maisie, the first, had a female-friendly “Justice in the West” scenario. Its successor, Congo Maisie, was a version of the Rain/Red Dust sultry exotic adventure scenario. Both relied on cliches of turbo-masculine movie genres, which they subtly subverted by placing the ultra-feminine Maisie at the center of both the action and the performance. It was already evident that the core story of the MAISIE series would be that there was no core story. Maisie would retain her endearing archetypal character — a street-smart, witty, feisty, romantic, and wise knockout — as she travels through a multiverse of movie situations with little or no memory of her earlier stories. So the main question for the third film would be: what genre will Maisie wake up in this time? Their choice: put her in a Capra movie.
The film’s release date is July, 1940, one year after Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, six months after Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, and — to me, stunningly — a year before Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels. I say stunningly, because for my money Gold Rush Maisie is exactly the kind of movie that Sturges’s Sully wants to make. Here’s the plot:
Maisie is, as usual, on the road, headed to a job at the Hula Paradise Cafe in “Trucksee,” Arizona, when her beater breaks down in the middle of the night in the middle of the desert. Frightened by the howl of coyotes (she thinks they’re lions — she’s from Brooklyn), she races into a spooky ghost town crying for help. Knocking on the door of the only inhabited house, she encounters Bill Anders (Lee Bowman), a surly, hostile, but tall and handsome hermit living in the outback with his churlish hand, Fred (Slim Summerville). At first refusing to help the damsel in distress, he relents after hearing an earful from Maisie, and allows her to stay the night. He’ll help her get to the city in the morning.
Once she’s in the house, Anders tries to put moves on Maisie by plying her with liquor. But Maisie doesn’t drink. Although Maisie did not expect the sudden change of hermit into wolf, she has plenty of experience dealing with such matters. She shuts him out, infuriating him, and leaving her without any transportation but shank’s mare.
Maisie is ultimately given a ride on the haywagon of a kindly geezer, the only male in the area that isn’t a sullen asshole. Arriving at the Hula Paradise, she’s informed by the proprietor (Charles Judels — instantly recognizable as the voice of Stromboli from Disney’s Pinocchio, made in the same year) that her job has been given to another dancer, given that Maisie is three days late. Out of a job once again, and nearly broke, she manages a meal at a greasy spoon diner, where she encounters more of the same: the surly male proprietor and a wolfish truck driver. She also learns that there’s a gold rush in a nearby town. Enter Jubie (Virginia Weidler), the teenage daughter of a migrant family of dispossessed sharecroppers headed to said gold rush to reverse their bad fortune. Maisie observes with cool disgust as the cafe-man refuses to warm a baby bottle for Jubie, finally shaming him into doing the good deed. The scene includes a strikingly nice moment when Jubie admires Maisie’s hat, immediately followed by the “termite” truck driver’s similar praise for it — and the audience can immediately infer that the driver sees a floozie’s habille, while Jubie sees what Maisie herself values. For the first time in a MAISIE film, the heroine encounters a character with a pure enough heart to appreciate her as she is.
Maisie heads out of town, still on foot after refusing the offer of a ride with the overgrown termite. Jubie’s family stops for her, and she joins them in their beat up but still functional jalopy. Observing the Davis family share their love for each other and optimism about finding gold, Maisie is made aware that her own personal hard times pale compared with the Davises’ noble poverty. And she’s been accepted with generosity, a far cry from the reception she’s received by just about everyone else in her three movies so far.
Beginning with this scene, it’s hard to ignore how much Gold Rush Maisie is a backlot homage to Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, which was not the sort of film one might have expected from the MAISIE franchise. The central premise of Mary McCall’s script was to tell a comic version of the Joad family’s story with a female central character, a nervier concept than it seems as it plays out on screen. The scenes that parallel those of Ford’s great film is are too many to recount, each one inverted and made more woman-centered, leading to the striking ending in which Maisie does not, for once, even imagine or desire a romantic conclusion. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The little group arrives in the shabby boom town, where Maisie spends her last five dollars to buy food for the family. There’s nothing left over for water, however, and the privately owned water costs plenty. (The scarcity of water in the migrant camps is a major theme in both Steinbeck’s novel and Ford’s film, as it was in the actual Okie migration.) Forced out of town in search of it, the group happens to drive past Bill Anders’s ranch. Maisie insists that they demand water from Anders. He refuses, until Maisie tears him a new one.
Maisie stays with the Davises as they prospect the gold fields. In the sweetest scene of the whole MAISIE corpus, Maisie bonds with Jubie, for whom Maisie is a “princess.” In subsequent films, Maisie will bond with a few more innocents, but only in Gold Rush Maisie does the purity of heart escape seeming contrived or laced with wary irony.
The Davises do find some gold. As they await the assayer, they cheerfully celebrate in their tent camp on Anders’s property. Comes a storm. Anders, as usual, is reluctant to allow the family to shelter in his house, and Maisie, as usual, pushes back with a vengeance.
With the storm dying down, and the Davises bedded down in the ranch house, Anders makes a medicinal lemonade toddy for Maisie, who famously never drinks (it’s part of her archetype, as is her occasional accidental falling off the wagon). In a lovely inversion of her usual fiery challenges to male would-be authorities, she relaxes and thanks Anders for being “kind in a nasty sort of way.” And whereas she advised Juby never to give up her right to tell people to jump in a lake, she now encourages the misanthrope Bill Anders to try a little tenderness. Sothern’s performance in Gold Rush Maisie is probably the most varied in the franchise, and shows Maisie at her most complex — tough, sentimental, sweet, wrathful, generous, and giddy. Maisie will never again find herself in such an emotionally demanding predicament.
When the assayer finally arrives, he reveals that the ore is so poor in the area that it’s worth only a few dollars per ton. The migrant prospector families are left with nothing again. But Maisie manages, after reading another riot act to Anders for his cold-heartedness, to persuade him to offer his land and water for the migrants to homestead, and loans to feed their families, in exchange for their labor in cultivating his own crops first. They (rightly) mistrust the deal at first. Anders can’t guarantee their future. Anders, experiencing his own former misanthropic mistrust coming back at him, petulantly takes back his offer. Until Maisie saves the day. The Davises, recognizing how great Anders’s change of heart was, offer their trust, too, and persuade the rest of the camp to join them.
True to form, Maisie hits the road to look for a new job instead of settling down with a romantic male lead. Gold Rush Maisie is the first film that incorporates this theme in the film’s diegetic conclusion. Maisie and Congo Maisie both conclude with the promise of a normal rom-com happy ending, settlement, and marriage — yet the subsequent films ignore their predecessors’ conclusions entirely. (As will Gold Rush Maisie‘s successors ignore its conclusion.) The archetype of Maisie as the mobile, independent picara is now official.
The politics of Gold Rush Maisie‘s resolution is a bit odd. The problems of the Dustbowl migrations were still acute in California (and parts of Arizona, the scene of Gold Rush Maisie‘s action) in 1940. Both Grapes of Wrath and the Maisie film were somewhat unusual interventions in a knotty contemporary social conflict. And among comedies, not even Capra had made a film yet that engaged so proletarian a struggle. The lugubrious Meet John Doe was a year in the future. In some respects, Gold Rush Maisie is more in dialogue with My Man Godfrey than with Capra. The plight of the dispossessed farmers is resolved from above, as in La Cava’s film — here a landowner offers to help those dispossessed by the Depression if they will accept being sharecroppers once again, albeit temporarily. An alert audience would have recognized that this was a version of the solution sought by the government farms in California as alternatives to the brutally exploitative private plantations. But no one would have expected a pro-Roosevelt “leftist” story from MGM, whose head, Louis G. Mayer, was bosom buddies with Herbert Hoover and Henry Ford. The message, such as it is, is that the rich must have a change of heart and do service to uplift the poor. (I discuss the way My Man Godfrey embodies this message here.) The juicy difference between Godfrey and Maisie is embodied in the ultra-feminine Maisie as the mediator. As opposite to William Powell’s urbane, familiar-with-butlers, down-on-his luck patrician male as can be imagined, proletarian-bohemian Maisie doesn’t play the market in secret, she speaks to the heart directly. This feminine distortion can’t lead to a feminist socialism. It’s technically a trust-in-the-heart conservatism. It’s sentimental, all right, but not bullshit. And historians of the Dustbowl migration often discuss the ideological divisions among the migrants themselves on the spectrum of socialist resistance to hardscrabble libertarianism. So, though it’s a particularly feminine woman who facilitates the solution, it’s still not a world she can live in. The migrants become families of farmers, tied to the land — which is technically not even theirs. But Gold Rush Maisie doesn’t even entertain the idea of staying on those conditions. Maisie has helped out her new friends, but it’s freedom she needs, and like a floral-hatted cowboy, she chuggs off in the Davises’ old jalopy down the road again.