Maisie Was a Lady, the fourth film in the MAISIE franchise, is the best made of the nine MAISIE films. (I take a stab at describing the MAISIE series here.) Cinematically, it’s the most polished. Its script is the tightest (the MAISIE dream-team of Mary McCall, Jr. and Betty Reinhardt was joined by Capra-BFF Myles Connolly — an All-Irish team). Its cast is the most accomplished. Maisie’s character is the most carefully developed. And it was the last one in which the eponymous picara’s proletarian rectitude and tear-them-a-new-one tongue was allowed free rein. It was the first MAISIE that showed signs that Fox was taking the franchise seriously enough to consider moving the shoots up from a B-backlot. As a result, Maisie Was a Lady retains some of the raggedy virtues of the first three movies, without being absorbed into the slick conventionality of mainstream Hollywood that becomes increasingly evident in the later films. It’s not my favorite of the MAISIEs (that would be the first one, Maisie), but it’s a close second.
As in all the earlier iterations, Ann Sothern’s Maisie find herself in a new film-genre, with no record or memory of her previous adventures. The new genre is the upstairs/downstairs comedy of manners, a la Holiday and My Man Godfrey. The dreamlike genre management means that Maisie has no real history, other than occasional allusions to her childhood growing up on the rough streets of South Brooklyn. No history maybe, but Maisie Was a Lady for once participates in a dialectic. Her previous adventure, Gold Rush Maisie, made her a Capraesque benefactor of the dispossessed. Among Dustbowl migrants, she’s “a princess.” In Lady, she is thrown among the idle rich, now as a servant, not a princess. In the earlier movies she often speaks with pride about her working class childhood, but her adult self is basically classless. She’s a rootless lumpen-bohemian wanderer with no companions who are in the same boat. She has to struggle for pay and dignity against a whole array of predatory would-be male exploiters, but she’s free. Sometimes too free for comfort, but always independent. In Maisie Was a Lady, she’s cast into a fully institutionalized class structure. She’s a menial, a literal servant.
In the opening scenes, for the first time we see Maisie introduced not out of work, searching for a new gig, but actually at work (such as it is). She’s “Marva, the Headless Woman, ” a carnival attraction. Things get back in the archetypal groove as Maisie loses her job when a drunken young patrician in evening clothes tickles her out of her framework. Maisie is, as always, fired because of a man. And as always, she’s underestimated. She’s announced as “the first woman in history who lost her head and never knew the difference,” but one thing the audience knows about Maisie is that she never loses her head.
To make amends to the furious and penniless Maisie, Bob Rawlston (Lew Ayres), the tickling wastrel, hands her the keys to his poshmobile so that she can drive herself to New York. Unfortunately, the car is well known to the local police; the Rawlstons are established local gentry. Maisie doesn’t have a driver’s license. She doesn’t have proof of ownership. She doesn’t even know the name of the guy that gave her the car. The local motorcycle cop suspects her of car theft and hauls her off to the hoosegow.
Maisie appears before the town magistrate and delivers a self-respecting rant. Sheepish Bob, who has no recall of his previous night’s drunken binge, stipulates to everything she’s said. Now deferential and courteous, and sober, he feels guilty and he’s willing to pay her her lost wages. But no! Maisie won’t accept any money she does not earn, so the judge orders him to give her a job. This is the first film in which a figure of authority comes down on the side of the honest and fiery working woman against unjustified male privilege and wealth. Maisie acknowledges that the judge is “human after all,” and seals it with an “OK, Judgie!” Bob Rawlston is now responsible for her.
Forced to find Maisie a real job, Bob drives her to his family pile. At this point (and for points later), Maisie is uncertain about Bob. His drunken spree cost her her (ridiculous) job, but he now treats her with courtesy and even respect. Like a lady. He’s afraid of offending her by offering her a servant’s job, but for the South Brooklyn proletarienne being a maid is miles better than being The Headless Woman. Besides, she once played a maid on stage.
Comes one of the high-points of the MAISIE films: the meeting of Maisie with Walpole , the family butler (the wonderful C. Aubrey Smith). Incredulous at the introduction of Maisie (whom we suspect Walpole considers a floozie, and seems relieved that she’s “a theatrical person”) into the household employ, the family-venerating butler has to accommodate a particularly challenging new addition to the downstairs.
Walpole is flummoxed: how is it that Maisie has been hired as a maid, yet she’s not to scrub floors, and he is even expected to carry her suitcase? Maisie, for her part, has never seen a house so big. (A funny background detail: the set for the Rawlston house was apparently dubbed by the MGM Art Department as the “C. Aubrey Smith Home,” so often did the actor have roles in it.)
Another lovely scene: Maisie appears reporting for duty, looking perky in her new uniform. Walpole immediately takes exception to the most iconic Maisie accoutrements: her brassy bracelets and her open-toed Mary Janes. (She gets to keep the latter since she doesn’t have any “ground grippers.”) One of the first demands of high society protocol is that Maisie must give up her defining personal accoutrements, the very ones that made her seem like a princess in Gold Rush Maisie.
On her first assignment, she encounters Link Phillips (Edward Ashley), a slick playboy who immediately targets the pretty new maid. He seems to have a lot of experience with such targeting. Sussing that she’s not a real maid, he’s especially intrigued. Even more so as Maisie, who has had even more experience parrying “dirty little boys” like him, contemptuously shuts him down. She’s no deferential menial alright. Too much self-respect to know her place. Maisie then observes slick Link rushing to the embrace of Bob’s refined sister, Abby (Maureen O’Sullivan), who’s clearly in love with him, and to whom, we soon learn, she’s about to celebrate her engagement. Maisie’s disgust is compounded with puzzlement. There’s no accounting for some women’s taste, she thinks.
Maisie’s next task is to deliver fancy dishes to a pool party attended by Bob and Abby’s snobby friends, who have arrived to celebrate the announcement of Abby’s engagement to Link. Maisie expects to be treated as an equal, since she considers herself to be one of Bob’s friends also. The guests and servants alike are shocked by such familiarity from a maid. She’s an outsider to both classes. She in turn is shocked and disgusted by their snobbery. Once again she pushes back. Bob is timidly ambivalent about his connection with her, making a self-deprecating joke out of her situation.
Bristling with indignation, Maisie delivers a blazing rant, first to Walpole, whom she’s treating as a friend, then to Abby, whom she sees as part of the poolside gang. Maisie is stuck and furious about it. Her self-respect makes contradictory demands. She won’t submit to class condescension, but she is due her salary, and she wants to be near Bob, whose earlier courtesy has made an impression. Abby seeks her out to apologize for her crew’s behavior and offers her a more private and respected job as her personal maid. It’s potentially a classical role: the underling as bosom-buddy. Only, Maisie can’t see herself as anything but a moral equal — to anybody.
Maisie’s righteous rants are main attractions of each film in the series. She usually delivers two or three of them, and they build in intensity and moral fervor like virtuoso displays in concertos. In each, she defends her autonomy as a woman who sees through male sexual predation with x-ray eyes, which she increasingly ties to her working-class pride, and ultimately to basic decency. For Maisie, gender, class, and moral obligations are bound together. Her antagonists — most of whom aren’t even aware that she has the power to oppose them — are constantly surprised and back-footed by her withering patter and energy. Few other actresses of the time could match Sothern’s skill in such scenes. Recall that Jean Harlow was intended to play Maisie when the project was first conceived, before her death in 1934. Harlow was herself a master of the righteous rant. I haven’t found any commentary to verify it, but I think it’s plausible that Sothern originally modeled Maisie on how she imagined Harlow might have played her.
Piece by piece, the miseries of the Rawlston family are revealed to Maisie’s penetrating observation. Making up Abby’s room, Maisie observes her collection of dazzling jewelry, all authentic diamonds, emeralds, and rubies, none of which Abby wears. Maisie has never seen the real things up close. (Unstated, because it doesn’t need to be, is that Maisie is partial to jewelry, but can afford only the brassy charms on her bracelets.) Abby explains that her father, Cap (Paul Cavanagh), sends them as presents whenever he can’t physically attend Abby’s important events. There’s lots of jewelry. Maisie notes that Cap must not attend a lot of those events. A penny has dropped. Papa uses riches to stand in for affection. And Maisie knows about another misery that Abby is still unaware of: Link is bad news.
Next, Maisie encounters Bob, plastered again, resentfully insulting the images of his patrician forebears in the drawing room. She’s disappointed. “That man is back again.” Bob is glad to see her and pays drunken court, imagining her accompanying him, arm in arm, at big events, even the opera. His weird justification: “noblesse oblige.” Maisie sees through it as slumming, and she refuses to be his “stooge.” The Good Bob has once again been overcome by the cynical and weak Bad Bob.
She’s had it with the filthy rich. Until, that is, Walpole takes her in hand to show why his loyalty to the Rawlston children, especially Bob, is justified. Bob was once entirely the Good Bob, a young aero-engineering genius, scholarship at MIT, and then… something. He quit school and became a drunk. He’s like a son to Walpole. Maisie thinks he would have been a better father than the one he actually has. Comes a beautiful Maisie riposte. Walpole thinks Bob is going through a phase. Maisie: “yeah, a phase on the barroom floor.”
The action shifts up a gear. Diana Webley, a former amour of Link’s, shows up unexpectedly at the the house. Turns out she was jilted by Link because she wasn’t rich enough. Link persuades Abby to elope with him. Abby, an utter innocent, is ecstatic about it. She thinks it’s romantic, but we, thoroughly influenced by Maisie’s skepticism, know that Link is trying to escape from whatever Diana has in store: revealing the truth to Abby that Link abandoned Diana for Abby’s riches, but intends to continue his affair with Diana. Abby overhears an argument between Diana and Link that lays it all out. And Maisie has happened on the scene, so she hears all, too. Abby, already sad because Cap has reneged on his promise to attend the engagement dinner (he has sent a new Cartier bribe), is devastated. She retreats, and is found by Maisie on the bathroom floor, overdosed. Doctors are called. Abby’s unresponsive. Cap finally arrives after he hears the news. He’s as cold as Maisie imagined. He thought Link was a good match for Abby. She’s “plain” and immature, in his eyes, and he thinks Link’s father is a respected Big Man. Bob, meanwhile, has never intervened, even though he never liked Link. That sets Maisie off.
The scene is one of the best in the whole MAISIE enterprise. It’s one of the moments when we understand that Maisie is not a goofy B-heroine, but a serious, mature player. Harlow would have been proud of her.
Things turn out fine, though. Abby recovers. Cap and Bob have taken Maisie’s words to heart. They have even all agreed that they want Maisie to stay with the family, not as a servant, but as Abby’s friend. For Maisie, it’s a dream come true. Until, that is, Walpole, old fogey that he is, conveys to Maisie what he thinks Bob’s ideal bride would be: beautiful, intelligent, well bred — a “real lady.” For Maisie, this is reality intruding and she determines she has to leave to avoid further heartbreak. She’ll never be a lady.
We next see her as a dancer in a show, back to her old life. Until, that is, she finds Bob in her dressing room. He’s been searching for her for months. He now owns an airplane factory, and he orders Maisie to marry him. Maisie can’t resist.
Yeah, well, just like Maisie couldn’t resist her male leads in her first two movies. Maisie has returned in this genre universe to the lovestruck showgirl. The conclusion is abrupt, but not entirely unexpectable. The genre sort of requires it. Otherwise, Maisie would remain independent at the end, as in Gold Rush Maisie, and the rom-com, and the class-com, would have no traction. But by this point, MAISIE’s audience does not invest much in romantic happy endings. By this point in the series, Maisie has left behind ownership of a ranch and a handsome handy lover in Wyoming (Maisie), a handsome rubber-baron in Africa (Congo Maisie), and a handsome big landowner in Arizona (Gold Rush Maisie). The romcom rush is temporary. Maisie gets the full clinch at the end of each movie, and is footloose and fancy freedom in the interstices.
Maisie was a Lady is the culmination of the trajectory of Maisie’s character in the first four films. Its dialogue and construction are the smartest and best designed of the whole series. After it, something happens. The subsequent five MAISIE films are all less artistically, and psychologically, committed to her. Maybe the wartime consolidation of middlebrow taste had to tamp down Maisie’s subversive feminine authority. Maybe the studio decided the franchise had to be “elevated” from the B-world, and consequently killed the golden goose. I like to think that if the trajectory of the films had continued, the next step for Maisie would have been even more subversive. She might have found sisters in solidarity who would have extended her interventionist female decency into group action, making her a leader, not just a traveling romantic problem solver. Whatever. The MAISIE films that followed Maisie Was a Lady are often amusing, but they are diminished in almost every respect — in art, class and gender consciousness, and moral fervor. Maybe Maisie had to be reined in before she became a conscious feminist ass-kicker. That potential ended with Maisie Was a Lady.