Maisie Goes to Reno (1944)

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In a somewhat baffling move, the makers of the Maisie film series decided, in the eighth of ten films and at the eleventh hour, to suddenly start paying some lip service to continuity between the comic outings of our beloved Maisie Ravier (Ann Sothern). When we last saw our heroine, she had joined the war effort as a riveter at Victory Air, and this film opens with her still in this job. Sweet Maisie has been burning the candle at both ends, continuing to work her swing shift while volunteering at the nursery to support the mothers working the day shift. Unfortunately for her (and to the comic delight of the audience), this has led her to develop a facial tic, causing her to wink frequently, usually at the most inopportune times. The doctor prescribes her two weeks paid vacation, and as luck would have it, an old friend is passing through on his way to Reno, where they could use a song and dance girl for a two week engagement at his hotel. Last time, we got to see just how far she would go to prevent a patriotic soldier from marrying the wrong woman. This time around, we get to see how willing she is to put herself in danger to stop a woman from divorcing the right patriotic soldier. Specifically, after buying the last plane ticket off of a woman who has rethought her Reno divorce, Maisie meets a young soldier named Bill Fullerton (Tom Drake), whose wife Gloria (Ava Gardner) has gone to Nevada under the mistaken belief that Bill married her for her vast family fortune, when the boy didn’t know anything about it until after the marriage. Maisie agrees to personally deliver a letter to Gloria, and sets out west for adventure (again). 

Shortly after arriving, Maisie meets this film’s love interest, “Flip” Hennahan (John Hodiak, who would star in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat the following year), a blackjack dealer at the hotel where they are both employed. Flip agrees to take Maisie to the ranch where Gloria Fullerton is staying, and although the reception Maisie meets there is cold, she feels satisfied in having done her duty. When she realizes she’s accidentally made off with Mrs. Fullerton’s matchbox, she asks to go back, but Flip admits that she can meet her basically any time, as the hotel’s manager is serving as the legal witness to Mrs. Fullerton’s residency for her divorce proceedings, and as such she comes to the hotel daily for lunch. Maisie’s quite taken with Flip’s willingness to sacrifice his gasoline rations on a frivolity just to spend the day with her, but the plot takes a turn when she recognizes “Gloria Fullerton” the next day. The woman in question is actually the real Gloria’s traitorous secretary Wini Ashbourne, who is in league with Gloria’s business manager Pelham (Paul Cavanagh, who previously played the largely absent patriarch in Maisie Was a Lady) to get Bill out of the picture so that they can embezzle Gloria out of house and home. To that end, they’ve employed master forger Clave, who’s staying across the hall from Maisie in the hotel. Rounding out the supporting cast is a truly charming performance by nascent choreographer (and future model for Disney’s Peter Pan) Roland Dupree, as a bellboy whose infatuation with Maisie leads him to play sidekick for her, even as she goes to increasingly extreme measures to stop the Fullertons from divorcing. Oh, and if you were worried about what happened to Breezy from Swing Shift Maisie, for once we also find out what happened to Maisie’s last boyfriend; specifically, “He got a little too interested in the native dancers … of Dallas.” 

This has all the hallmarks we’ve come to expect of a Maisie picture. Once again, her love interest is a man with a silly nickname (“Slim” in Maisie, “Skeets” in Ringside Maisie, “Hap” in Maisie Gets Her Man, and “Breezy” last time around). Maisie herself is brassy, funny, and occasionally pouty. She gets to do a big song and dance number, entitled “Panhandle Pete,” in which she pretends to make trick revolver shots and is pulled into and out of the performance area on a wheeled pony, to show off Ann Sothern’s talents at both. But there’s also some great novelty in this go-round as well. Flip is a different kind of love interest for Maisie, one that she’s interested in but doesn’t have to protect from the wiles of any other women, and Hodiak plays him as both quite taken with Maisie while also being frequently frustrated by her, and it’s a nice dynamic. He’s occasionally flustered by her endless questions, although “Are you married?” and “Are you a draft dodger?” are fairly reasonable ones to ask, all things considered. I was slightly disappointed that Swing Shift Maisie didn’t decide to go all in and have an espionage plot, but the filmmakers make up for that this time around. Although the scheme to defraud and embezzle Gloria isn’t exactly a spy thriller, it plays like one, so much so that when the three co-conspirators corner Maisie in her hotel room and hold her at gunpoint, it feels for the first time that Maisie is in real, actual danger. Pelham even slaps her across the face to shut her up, and I gasped aloud at this sudden intrusion of realistic violence into a series of films that, the potential starvation of the dust bowl migrants in Gold Rush Maisie aside, has had stakes about as high as an episode of my beloved I Love Lucy. 

The ending is high octane and slapstick in equal measure. Maisie has allowed Jerry the bellboy to come to believe that she’s working for the FBI after he catches her getting Clave drunk in order to get a confession out of him. Flip has become completely convinced that Maisie’s accusations of massive fraud and potential identity theft are the results of a breakdown; it’s patronizing, but the fact that Maisie was given leave from war work due to a nervous condition means that he has some decent grounds to believe that Maisie just needs help. With no evidence other than her word, Maisie enlists Jerry to help her kidnap Gloria from the courthouse before her divorce proceedings can begin, just to hold her long enough for Bill to arrive, as he’s finally been granted leave from the army, but won’t be in Reno until the afternoon. When they accidentally also abduct Wini, who was posing as Gloria to divert the paparazzi, all four of them are taken to the jailhouse by a traffic officer. There, Maisie must plead her case, while Flip arrives with a psychologist to try and convince the board to release Maisie into his care rather than be imprisoned. Maisie feigns a fainting spell and pretends to be completely out of it, which drops everyone’s guard long enough for her to escape custody, find Bill, and sprint to the courthouse to stop Gloria before it’s too late. In the end, they all end up locked in the judge’s chambers with dozens of looky-loos and court reporters trying to break the doors down. It’s terrific stuff, and I’m starting to feel a little disappointed that the end of the Maisie series is approaching, with only two features left. This one is definitely in the top three so far, and they’ve only gotten better as the movies have gone along. Nevertheless, the next time we see Maisie, the war will be over, and I can’t wait to see what our heroine is getting up to then. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Swing Shift Maisie (1943)

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We’ve met Maisie, seen her take a misguided detour on the Congo River, watched her riff on Grapes of Wrath and Knockout, get paired off with Red Skelton, and even be a proper lady. At last, in 1943, we get to see Maisie (Ann Sothern) join the war effort in a film that could alternately be titled Maisie the Riveter. We once again find our heroine at the foot of her Sisyphean mountain: broke, single, and working a lousy showbiz job. This time, she’s in a dog circus, although she gets let go from this when test pilot “Breezy” McLaughlin (James Craig) gets into an argument over the phone with his employer about Breezy’s voluntary enlistment in the air force. The repartee that follows Breezy and Maisie’s meet-cute leads her to decide she’s going to go get a job at Victory Air Co., declaring that “if [he] can fly planes, then brother [Maisie] can build ‘em.” 

Maisie hits a snag early on when she’s unable to present her birth certificate (“You can see I was born,” she says, “There’s not much doubt it was in Brooklyn”), but she convinces a man to perjure himself by swearing an affidavit that he’s known her all his life and can vouch for her citizenship. She also settles into a boarding house run by matronly Maw (Connie Gilchrist), where she meets former Abilene beauty queen Iris Reed (Jean Rogers) in the process of trying to suffocate herself with an open gas pipe after failing to find acting work. Maisie encourages Iris to get a job at Victory Air with her, and to leave her private room and share one with Maisie, to help her money stretch further. Iris agrees, and initially the two of them hit it off rather well, before Iris meets Breezy and begins to make designs to steal Maisie’s man. Before he’s sent out for training maneuvers, she’s succeeded, and the two of them confess to Maisie that they’re planning to wed. Maisie has no hard feelings, and even promises to look after Iris on Breezy’s behalf while he’s away, but this ends up proving more difficult than expected when it turns out Iris has no intention of remaining true to Breezy in his absence. 

Rogers plays Iris as a hell of a vamp, and having a true heel to play against makes for a very strong comedic outing this time around. Maisie’s attempts to keep Iris from wandering astray by trying to get her involved in several of the social clubs in the boarding house and the surrounding neighborhood make for a humorous, if not uproarious, montage. Iris has to be dragged away from the photography club because the teacher is a little too eager to take her into the darkroom for private instruction; Iris surreptitiously sneaks away from the lady’s singing club during a high note; Iris lies in order to leave a meeting of the virtuous wives and girlfriends’ club. When Maisie catches her in the last of these, Iris claims she’s simply going for more knitting wool, to which Maisie retorts, “To pull over whose eyes?” All of Maisie’s ministrations of morality come to naught, however. Iris’s consistent refusal to wear her safety scarf results in her hair getting caught in machinery, and when she explodes at the foreperson afterwards, she’s fired, but quickly accepts an offer from one of the men in the factory to let him pay for a room for her in his building. She makes sure to shake down Maisie one last time on the way out. 

When Maisie first talks to Iris about the factory job, there’s a bit of a to-do about Iris’s birth certificate, and at first I thought that this might be leading up to the revelation that Iris was a spy, which would have been a very bold direction for a Maisie picture to take. Instead, it comes back around in a different fashion, and puts Maisie in some of the worst real danger she’s been in. After a series of misunderstandings, including being caught slipping encouraging notes into the cockpits of planes she’s working on and being observed reuniting with some German expatriate acrobats of her acquaintance (and doing a poorly considered old routine with them), Iris decides to rid herself of the nuisance that is Maisie Ravier. When Breezy lets the girls know that he’s taking leave in order to come back and get married to Iris sooner than later, Iris throws up as many roadblocks between Maisie and Breezy as possible, including telling the authorities about Maisie’s forged affidavit letter in order to paint Maisie as an enemy infiltrator, which leads to her detention by the authorities. Maisie, caring more about making sure that Breezy doesn’t marry an unfaithful woman, falsely confesses to this in order to get the police to stop Breezy and Iris from leaving town by claiming that they are co-conspirators. 

I do think it would have been more fun if Iris had been a Nazi spy, but it’s still a blast to see Maisie with such a strong foil for once. Jean Rogers brings a bit of prestige to the piece, and her breathy, narcissistic performance as Iris is a delight. The elements of war pictures that you’re more likely to associate with the time—intrigue, pining women who long for the return of their brave soldiers, the duty of sacrifice—are pretty absent here. Instead, we get a bit of a propaganda piece about staying true to the men who are over there sticking blades in Nazi guts, with the audience of virtuous women seeing themselves represented on screen as steadfast and loyal, those who are too cowardly to break things off or are using the men for their own ends get to be told off by Maisie through an on-screen avatar, and our boys over there can rest assured that Maisie’s keeping their girls back home in line. It’s not as emotionally honest as, say, To Be or Not To Be or Trouble in Paradise, but it’s great to see Maisie really go toe-to-toe with someone who can hold their own against her. Definitely a top tier outing for our girl. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Time and Water (2026)

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Sara Dosa’s latest nature doc Time and Water is the frosty yin to her previous doc’s fiery yang. All of the grand romance & scale of Dosa’s 2022 documentary Fire of Love is on full display in this year’s Sundance-premiered follow up, except the temperature has plummeted to new, icy depths. In Fire of Love, Dosa profiled the love life and scientific research of famed volcanologists Katia and Maurice Kraft, all the way up to their tragic end during an especially violent volcanic eruption. In Time and Water, she instead profiles the life and work of glacier observer Andri Snær Magnason, which allows her to capture the same scale of natural phenomenon while still exploring new territory. The iciness of the subject isn’t entirely literal, either. Magnason’s personal relationship with glaciers is much more mournful than the Krafts’ relationship with volcanoes, as he is most famous for having written the first ever obituary for a dying glacier, not for his passionate love for the living ones. As a result, Time and Water is a chilling ice bath intended to shock its audience into realizing how quickly & permanently we’re losing glaciers to climate change, as communicated through the personal archives & heartbreak of those natural wonders’ volunteer spokesman.

An Icelandic literary luminary, Magnason’s advocacy for glacier preservation is more poetic than scientific. He descends from a lineage of natural explorers with a long history of first-hand scientific observation of Icelandic glaciers’ declining health, but his own professional work on the subject is much more abstract. In somber voiceover, he conveys local folktales about glaciers’ role in creating & shaping his homeland. He defines the mountainous ice blocks as “ice that has come alive,” which I doubt meets the criteria for a scientific designation. Glaciers are “alive” in the sense that they are cyclically melted & rebuilt by Arctic temperatures, though, which technically means that they can also “die.” Magnason first used his literary notoriety to draw attention to glaciers’ terminal health condition in the new climate change paradigm by writing an obituary for the first fallen glacier in 2019, immortalizing in bronze, “Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.” Following that logic, this cinematic adaptation of that obituary does not spend much time explaining the capitalistic profit motives that are accelerating climate change year by year, but instead quietly mourns what’s already been lost while hoping to preserve its loving memory for a distant future.

For all of his cultural concerns as an Icelandic literary voice, Magnason’s investment in the future is largely familial. He narrates this eulogy as if it were a family photo slideshow, which Dosa punctuates with the clicks & whirs of a photo slide carousel. Alternating between the 16mm footage of his ancestor’s glacial explorations and his own digicam records of modern Icelandic homelife, Magnason hopes to visually represent the dramatic before & after of how the local natural landscape has changed while vocally apologizing to his future-adult children about the half-dead world that has been left for them to inherit. The focus on his family’s archival photography is thematically linked to the glaciers’ own natural archive, in the way they can trap vocalic ash and other particulates in ice as a record of passing time. Magnason sees that ice melting away as a kind of environmental dementia, which he’s watched creep into his own aging parents & grandparents as the years pile up on tape. It’s unavoidable to point out how tonally glacial that familial history plays out onscreen — both cold in its mournfulness and slow-moving in its monotony. As a time-elapse portrait of Iceland’s recent decades in environmental crisis, however, it lands a dramatic gut punch that leaves the audience doubled over, breathless.

If Dosa wanted to repeat Fire of Love‘s critical & commercial success, she could have hired Björk to cryptically narrate Magnason’s story the same way Miranda July narrated the Krafts’. Dosa did hire Dan Deacon to echo her previous film’s synth-abstracted score (provided by Air), but Deacon is usually restrained & icy in his own way here — only flashy in momentary flourishes of tape-warp sound effects. The overall mood of the piece is substantially more subdued than Dosa’s previous outing, which is entirely appropriate for a profile of a writer who’s most famous for issuing death certificates to glaciers with the official cause of death listed as “extreme summer heat.” As hard as Magnason works to convey how much his homeland’s beauty is in peril, that subdued mood and the Planet Earth-style nature footage of Iceland’s surviving glaciers does ironically function as a kind of travel ad for the nation, which is likely counterproductive if the end goal is to slow the effects of climate change. It says a lot that National Geographic picked up its distribution out of Sundance; if you caught it on a muted television, you might mistake it for a standard doc about how cool & beautiful glaciers are and not a heartbroken eulogy predicting their certain, mass, impending deaths. Magnason’s voice might not be the most exciting element at play here, but it’s what gives the picture meaning beyond its surface-level beauty, and Dosa was right to cede him so much room to speak from the heart.

-Brandon Ledet

BloodSisters (1995)

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American sex education is in such shambles that queer filmmakers have found the need to make D.I.Y. classroom tools to teach each other how to have safe, healthy sex, despite the fact that no legitimized classrooms would ever actually show them. From the PBS-special textures of Marlon Riggs’s AIDS epidemic screed Tongues Untied to the green screen psychedelia of Annie Sprinkle’s how-to guides like the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop, there’s a 101 classroom lecture quality to a lot of queer video art, spreading the good news about good sex one VHS cassette at a time. Take, for instance, 1995’s BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes, and Sadomasochism, a D.I.Y. camcorder documentary about the San Francisco lesbian kink scene. Ostensibly, that doc is meant to serve as a collection of oral histories from local kinksters about their personal relationships with BDSM, but the longer the interviewees pontificate about the subject the more instructive and abstract their testimonials get. It plays less like a direct-to-camera confessional from heavy-leather subculturistas than it does the orientation video you’re forced to watch before you can be issued a membership card to your local sex club.

We get a glimpse of why this kind of educational video might be necessary in an early sequence of HBO Real Sex-style street interviews, asking anonymous passersby how they feel about sado-masochistic sex. Most recoil in embarrassment, expressing a knee-jerk disgust with the subject and visible regret for having agreed to appear on camera. Then, heavy leather lesbians with stage names like Skeeter, Rainbeau, Peggy Sue, and Queen Cougar sit down for lengthy confessionals about their personal experiences on the kink scene, intentionally working to legitimize & destigmatize the practice of inflicting & receiving pain during sexual roleplay, all in the name of “cumsent.” While they explain BDSM’s political & therapeutic applications in casual, laidback chatter, graphic documents of the sexual acts being described (mostly of the spanking, whipping, and nipple torture variety) intercut & overlay their interview footage. As serious as BloodSisters is about conveying the legitimacy & ethicality of kinky sex, it also openly acknowledges that the scene profiled is mostly populated by nerds having fun playing dress-up. Everyone interviewed dons intentionally intimidating leather costumes, but they’re also reasonable, approachable people. If anything, they’re directly encouraging you to approach them at the leather bar as soon as the tape runs out and you pass the prerequisite vocabulary quiz for glossary terms like “soft butch,” “pushy bottom”, and “topping from the bottom.”

Kink education isn’t as niche of a field as it used to be. The kind of work BloodSisters was attempting to accomplish in the 90s has long had a brick-and-mortar institutional hub in The Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago. Its 101 classroom lecturing has continued on in recent docs like A Body to Live In, which explains the spirituality of body modification, and Rebel Dykes, which offers a similar collection of oral histories detailing heavy-leather lesbianism in London. The film was massively important for arriving early and aggressively to that conversation, though, and thus its most vital details are in the datedness of its vintage stylistic touches: its animated punk zine credits, its cracked whip screen wipes, its rainbow colored tints, its Greek chorus of kink novelty songs from Bay Area punk band Frightwig, etc. The movie is unmistakably of the 1990s, which underlines just how important its political advocacy was both inside and outside the lesbian community. When subs & doms in an especially heavy scene start playing with bloodletting & needles, it means something different knowing what conversations about AIDS were happening offscreen in the background. Likewise, knowing what conversations about what kinds of lesbian sex do or do not reinforce the patriarchy in nearby feminist circles informs a lot of what’s said onscreen, even though that side of the “debate” is thankfully denied equal time. So, the concluding all-caps battle cry “FIST FUCK THE SYSTEM” wasn’t just included as a cheeky punchline; it was a timely, literal call to arms. Given how dated some of its defensiveness about kink feels today, it seems to have done some good.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Leather Jacket Love Story (1998)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss David DeCoteau’s uncharacteristically sincere romance drama Leather Jacket Love Story (1998).

00:00 Spacecon
14:55 Masters of the Universe (2026)
22:31 Swing Shift Maisie (1943)
26:00 Maisie Goes to Reno (1944)
31:20 All the President’s Men (1976)
35:55 Ministry of Fear (1944)
40:31 Die Nibelungen – Kriemhild’s Revenge (1924)
45:40 Blades of the Guardians (2026)
50:30 Ramekin (2018)
58:07 The Doll (1962)
1:01:55 Across the Hall (2009)
1:08:15 The Currents (2026)
1:11:45 Relic (2020)
1:16:40 Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round (2026)

1:21:14 Leather Jacket Love Story (1998)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Maisie Gets Her Man (1942)

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May is getting far behind us, but in my heart, it’s still Maisie May. It’s once again time to check in with our favorite perpetually down-on-her-luck showgirl, Maisie Ravier. Not since Maisie has Ann Sothern shared equal billing with anyone (where she was, bizarrely, credited behind co-star Robert Young). This time, it’s presumably because her co-lead was an honest-to-goodness star. 

Maisie’s Sisyphean existence continues, in which she finds herself beginning every film in dire straits with no mention of her past loves or fortunes. This time, she’s the living target for a knife-throwing stage act, but when the great Professor Orco allows his recent break-up to influence how he feels about women and how careful he is with his act, nearly killing her, she once again finds herself pounding pavement. Maisie takes an offer from a man who operates a strange kind of boarding house. Like Gold Rush Maisie, Maisie Gets Her Man draws on then-current events, with a contemporary review of the film from The New York Times citing that the place Maisie finds herself is a “background that seems to have been suggested by A. J. Liebling’s Jollity Building series in the New Yorker.” (That A.J. Liebling was already writing pieces about boxing for the New Yorker which would eventually lead to the publication of The Sweet Science is also probably not a coincidence.) Pappy Goodring (Allen Jenkins) owns a building where he rents out office spaces, although many of them are also currently occupied by people who can’t afford real lodgings. Everyone there has fallen on hard times; basement cafe operator Jasper is hypervigilant about potential dining and dashing, Ears Coffin (Rags Ragland) is a former wrestler who has become a talent agent who couldn’t book St. Paul on TBN, and Pappy himself is staring down bankruptcy, in no small part because of his soft heart for his tenants and their hot checks. The operation gets a cash injection with the arrival of Marshall Denningham (Lloyd Corrigan), who has come to the city to market his new mineral water. 

You may have noticed that Red Skelton isn’t mentioned at all in that paragraph. Frankly, this movie would almost be better without him. Skelton plays Hap Hixby, a wannabe comedian who’s come to the city from the sticks to try and peddle his particular brand of annoying prop comedy. He and Maisie first meet each other in Ears Coffin’s office, and he’s extremely obnoxious right out of the gate. Maisie seems exasperated with him from the first scene that they share, which leads me to believe that he’s supposed to be unpleasant, but the comedy of that only works if a character is annoying to the other characters and funny to us in the audience, which Hap is decidedly not. Luckily, we only have to put up with this for a little while, since the first time that he actually goes on in front of an audience (with Maisie as his plant), he freezes with such stage fright that he drops most of his more exhausting bits for the rest of the film. After a bunch of rigmarole, Hap ends up as vice president of Denningham’s Sapphire River Tonic, and the success of the business means that Pappy is able to fend off the bankruptcy proceedings of his creditors, a process that is helped along by Maisie accidentally getting drunk with said creditor on Denningham’s Sparkling Tonic (which is just tap water and hard liquor) and giving him the old Maisie speech. 

She and Hap confess their love for one another, but the following morning, his fiance from back home arrives in Chicago, and Maisie once again leaves without saying goodbye. As with Maisie, she finds out later that her former beau has gotten himself into legal trouble, namely that Denningham’s con has been found out and that he had taken on Hap as his partner so that he could leave him behind to face the ramifications while he skipped town. Unlike last time this happened, however, she has a much more active role in the action. Having joined a traveling song and dance troupe, she finds Denningham in the midst of his next scam and is able to trick him into telling her all the details while she sends for the police. She next sees Hap when her group performs a USO-style revue at the camp where he’s enlisted, which is the first time that any of these films have alluded to WWII at all; she does a patriotic number entitled “Cooking with Gas,” and the end card encourages the audience to buy war bonds and stamps in that very theater. It’s a strange tonal dissonance that seems to come out of nowhere, but at least the music is lively and the film ends on an upbeat note. 

This film has some of my favorite Maisie-isms so far. When she manages to fend off an apoplectic Professor Orco, she commands the men who intervene to “Let him loose boys, so [she] can claim self-defense.” After Ringside Maisie’s lamentation asking what kind of stars must have been over Brooklyn when she was born, Maisie this time says that “They must have repealed the law of averages when [she] was born.” She’s able to really give it to Hap a few times, too, with my favorite line being “Go ahead and open it; they don’t mail summonses, honey.” Unfortunately, this does very little to counterbalance the extremely unfunny third of the film that features Red Skelton trying and failing to find the line between annoying to Maisie and annoying to the audience. As that aforementioned 1942 NYT review said it best: “Maisie, no doubt, will recover. She will dismiss her failure with a shrug, then brighten up for her next adventure. We like her, cheap tinsel and all. We hope she gets her break next time.”

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Ringside Maisie (1941)

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Ringside Maisie is a film in one of my least favorite genres: a sports comedy. Despite this, it manages to be pretty good. Considering that most of the sports films that I do end up liking generally tend to be ones about boxing or martial arts (like Creed), I suppose this shouldn’t come as a surprise. 

Once again, Maisie Ravier is en route to another job, and she’s run out of money, which prompts her to be ejected from the train on which she has stowed away. Why she needs to work after falling in love with a rich bachelor who was ready to settle down at the end of Maisie Was a Lady is unknown, just as we never hear why she never went back to the Bar-O Ranch that she inherited at the end of Maisie, or if/why things didn’t work out with Slim, her love interest in that film. Walking along the tracks, Maisie gets picked up by a young boxer named Terry Dolan (Robert Sterling, Ann Sothern’s real-life husband), who takes her back to the training facility. Terry’s manager, “Skeets” Maguire (George Murphy), is immediately suspicious of Maisie, assuming that she’s an athlete chaser of some kind, but he softens to her as the two get to know one another better. Terry admits to Maisie that he and his girlfriend Cissy (Natalie Thompson) are currently lying to Terry’s mother (Margaret Moffatt) about Terry’s line of work. When Maisie is fired from her job as a dancer for refusing to put out for her boss, she finds work as Mrs. Dolan’s companion, which gives her more time to develop a fondness for Skeets. When she learns that Terry wants to quit boxing and open a grocery store like the one his father ran before they lost their savings, Maisie encourages him to tell Skeets, insisting that the manager will understand, but Skeets instead insists that Terry must finish out his contract. When his next bout results in Terry being blinded, perhaps permanently, Maisie once again delivers an impassioned speech that makes everything right. 

Despite this being the longest Maisie picture so far, clocking in at 95 minutes, there’s not much more substantial to say about this one than any of the others. That having been said, I enjoyed this one immensely. I didn’t really buy the budding romance between Maisie and Skeets (perhaps because she has, naturally, more chemistry with Terry), but I did like the sweet relationship that forms between Maisie and Mrs. Dolan. Maisie is a woman for whom her forthrightness is a virtue, and she can’t be relied upon to be dishonest for very long. I was also shocked by the late-in-the-film sudden change in Cissy, who had theretofore seemed like she really and truly loved Terry, but who was ready to ditch him immediately. Watching Maisie tear into her for her fairweather love was as fun as it was watching her give Skeets a talking-to about his treatment of Terry. The tension continues to build throughout, especially once a specialist is brought in from Boston to perform a hail mary operation on Terry to reduce the swelling in his brain and restore his eyesight, which has the most immediate stakes of any of these films. It’s a fun watch, perhaps second only to Maisie Was a Lady so far. Will this love between Maisie and Skeets last? I doubt it, given that the next film is titled Maisie Gets Her Man. We’ll find out together, next time. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Ministry of Fear (1944)

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As we browsed our local video store last weekend, my friend and I were at the directors’ wall and I picked up Ministry of Fear, prompting my companion to tease me for being on such a Fritz Lang kick lately. I’m now decently familiar with his pre-Hollywood films, having seen (and loved) Metropolis, M, and Die Nibelungen, and I’ve seen some of his Hollywood noirs both pre-(Fury) and post-(The Blue Gardenia) WWII. I was curious what he was up to in the years leading up to and during the war, however, especially if he was doing any of the same kind of espionage thrillers that Alfred Hitchcock was churning out consistently, with his pre-war thrillers (The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Sabotage, and The Lady Vanishes) presaging the troubles to come, his wartime pictures (The Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur) highlighting the contemporary cost of war and the paranoia of the homefront, and his immediate post-war films (Notorious) dealing with the aftermath. Lang, perhaps because he was more personally affected by the war, didn’t deal with the subject very much at the time. His 1943 film Hangmen Also Die! was loosely based on the assassination of Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich, with his following feature in 1944, Ministry of Fear, being the only other time he touched on the subject, other than in post-war flick Cloak and Dagger, which echoes Notorious in that it follows someone tasked with finding Germans who have run to ground. 

Stephen Neale (Ray Milland) departs the Lembridge Asylum, where he has lived for some number of years. He makes his way to the train station, where the ticket clerk recommends he visit the village’s fundraising fête to kill time while waiting for passage to London. After entering the drawing to win a cake by guessing the exact weight, he goes to the fortune teller’s tent. Once he crosses the matronly Mrs. Bellane’s palm with silver, she gives him the ordinary spiel about love, but when he grows defensive about a past relationship, she instead tells him the precise weight of the cake, which he wins. Neale departs with the cake over the protests of a young man who arrives just as he’s leaving, and it’s clear that he was the one who was “supposed” to win. Just before the train to London leaves the station, Neale is joined by a blind man in his carriage. When he offers a piece of the cake to the man, he notices that he’s crumbling it instead of eating it, as if searching for something, but before he has much time to ponder this, the train stops due to a Nazi air raid, and the “blind” man makes off with the cake after beating Neale with his cane. Neale pursues him, and the man takes shelter in a derelict cabin to shoot back at him, only for the raid to blow the structure to pieces. 

Once he makes it to London, Neale engages private detective George Rennit (Erskine Sanford) to help him figure out who’s trying to kill him, and their investigation leads them back around to the Mothers of Free Nations, the charity that had organized the Lembridge fête. Neale meets siblings Willi (Carl Esmond) and Carla (Marjorie Reynolds, of Holiday Inn) Hilfe, who run the organization, and Willi agrees to help Neale make sense of things. To that end, they visit Mrs. Bellane, only to discover that, instead of the older woman Neale met in Lembridge, she’s a young, beautiful woman (Hillary Brooke, who appeared as one of the inconsiderate houseguests in Maisie Was a Lady). She invites them to attend the seance she’s hosting, and Neale meets fellow guest Dr. Forrester, a psychiatrist. The last person to arrive is the same man who tried to take the cake from Neale at the fête, and who is introduced as Mr. Cost. During the seance, a woman’s voice calls out, accusing Neale of killing her. Neale grows upset, and a shot rings out. When the lights come up, Dr. Forrester pronounces Cost dead, and suspicion falls upon Neale, who escapes. He attempts to reunite with Rennit at his office, but finds it ransacked. When another bombing forces him to take shelter with Carla, he explains the reason that he was institutionalized in Lembridge, and what it had to do with his wife’s death. With an unknown man (Percy Waram) tailing him everywhere he goes, presumably at the behest of the spy ring that has infiltrated the Mothers of Free Nations, he begins to fall for Carla, while remaining unsure where her allegiance lies. When he learns that Forrester has connections within the British government, he sets out to expose the league of spies before they can deliver intel about troop deployments to their German allies, but his veracity is challenged by his troubled past. 

Unfortunately, Ministry of Fear is little more than a knockoff Hitchcock, complete with a McGuffin, a wrongfully accused fugitive, a fight on a train, and a blonde love interest. In fact, one could easily mistake this for a Hitchcock film, were it not for the fact that the police in Ministry are shockingly competent. It has a few interesting things going for it, but it’s ultimately fairly run of the mill. This appears to have been a product of executive meddling, as reportedly neither Lang nor Graham Greene, who wrote the novel on which the film was based, were very happy with the final product. By opening with Neale being released from an asylum, rather than a prison, the film implies that he might have been there for reasons relating to his mental state, and there was a potentially rich narrative question about just how much we could trust our lead which could have been mined, but the film never chooses to go there. Some of Lang’s trademark visual flair comes through; the obliteration of Neale’s “blind” attacker by an air raid is a shocking site, and I was also particularly taken with a sequence in a tailor’s shop near the end that’s shot mostly in the reflection of a floor-to-ceiling mirror. The seance sequence is effectively spooky as well, and it was an inspired touch to have the only light in the final gunfight sequence be provided by the flash of muzzle fire. Alas, it’s not quite enough to propel this one to greatness, and I can really only recommend this to Lang completists and anyone curious about what his take on a Hitchcock style plot would be.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild’s Revenge (1924)

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On the trivia subpage for Die Nibelungen on TVTropes, which treats this film and its predecessor as a single work, there’s a notation that Kriemheld’s Revenge is generally considered the superior work. Since the expansion of Google into mostly pyramid schemes of search engine optimization, I’ve had a hard time verifying that against any academic texts, but the few blog posts I’ve found seem divided roughly down the middle. Most viewers are in agreement that one part is good and the other is great, with proponents of exalting Kriemhild over Siegfried mostly noting that the former ejects all of the more fantastical elements of the latter, instead going for more grounded spectacle in the form of massive battles. I found Kriemhild to be a bit of a letdown after all of the filmic magic of Siegfried; it’s still a lot of fun, but it didn’t live up to its first half. 

When Kriemheld’s Revenge opens, we find the grieving Kriemhild attempting to use Siegfried’s gold hoard to win over the commonfolk of Burgundy to rise up and avenge the death of her husband at the hands of the monster Hagen Tronje. Hagen, who is forever up to no good, discovers where the hoard is hidden and throws it into the river to cut off Kriemhild’s support (it was also Siegfried’s wedding gift to her, to further underline the betrayal of the act). Rudiger, a military commander and vassal of King Etzel (better known to us as Attila the Hun), comes to Burgundy to seek Kriemhild as a bride for the mighty warrior king. Although initially reluctant, she realizes that this may be her only chance to see Siegfried’s killer see justice, and she agrees on the condition that Rudiger swear an oath to help her kill Hagen. Before she leaves her homeland, she stops at the same spring where Hagen murdered her late husband, and digs up several handfuls of earth to take with her to her new home. 

Some time later, Kriemheld has solidified her alliance with Etzel by bearing him a son, and she requests that her husband invite her family to celebrate the Midsummer Solstice with them in the Hun kingdom. The Huns themselves have grown restless as they believe that Kriemhild has tamed their king; outside of his fortress, they speak traitorously among themselves, asking “What is in the mind of our King?” and replying “Lord Etzel sleeps; the white woman stole our lord! She uses her golden hair to bind him!” Kriemhild herself believes that she has this power over Etzel, as she comes to him to beg him to fulfill his oath, saying “He who murdered Siegfried is now in your hands.” Etzel, who knows that Kriemhild does not love him, tells her that he can’t, as he and his people hold the responsibility of hospitality sacred. Kriemhild then bribes the rebellious Huns instead, asking only for the head of Hagen Tronje but for her family to be spared. They kill most of the Burgundian envoy in the caves beneath the feasting hall, with only one knight escaping to tell the royal family, prompting Hagen to murder Etzel and Kriemhild’s baby on the spot. All out war then erupts, with the remainder of the film playing out as the Burgundians barricade themselves in the feast hall and attempt to fend off wave after wave of attacks. Kriemhild makes several overtures to her brothers, promising to spare them if they will simply deliver up Siegfried’s murderer, but they stubbornly refuse. By the end, the feast hall has been burned to the ground and Hagen meets his death, and the entire dynasty of Burgundy is dead, Kriemhild included. Her revenge has been wrought, and it cost her everything. 

Narratively, there’s not as much to discuss this time around. It’s essentially an extended version of the Red Wedding from Game of Thrones (a comparison a Redditor made eleven years ago, so I’m somewhat late to this party), with a forty-five minute battle sequence that is unfortunately somewhat repetitive. One of the things that I found my mind wandering to as the fight wore on (and on) was an exhibit of illustrated manuscripts that I saw at the Blanton Museum several years ago. At the time, I was struck by a tendency of medieval artists to depict all of history through a contemporary lens: every event, from the Bronze Age through the life of Christ, was depicted with then-modern fashion, weapons, and armor. Setting a Biblical story in modern times (or even modern raiment) is something that, in the present, would be considered virtually heretical to contemporary believers, so much so that I’m hard pressed to think of a TV or film production that tries it. There was the short lived NBC series Kings, which was a modern retelling of the life of King David, but when it comes to updating the gospel narrative, I can only think of Tyler Perry’s ill-fated TV movie spectacle Passion and the recent evangelical-owned Angel Studios’ Testament. To get back on topic, Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen is twice removed from the original story’s origin. As the presence of Atilla the Hun indicates, whatever real life events were narrativized and mythologized in Nibelungenlied had to have happened at the tail end of the Classical Era, in the 5th Century C.E. Nibelungenlied, or The Song of the Nibelungs, was, as best we can tell, first recorded in print in 1200, and as such has all the trappings of medievality, including the reimagining of 5th Century characters in the armor, ornamentation, and fashions of the beginning of the 13th Century, all captured on film in the 20th. It’s artifice upon artifice upon artifice, and it’s a fascinating thing to behold. I was still having more fun watching Siegfried talk to birds and turn invisible last time, but this one gives you time to meditate on what it means as an artifact, mythologized all the way down. 

In all of the intertitles, the first letter of the dialogue is ornamented, in the style of an illuminated manuscript, and the speaker is indicated by what appears in the illustrated first letter. In accordance with his legendary ability as a horseman (and many horse-related justifications for the etymology of his name), Etzel’s icon is that of a horse, and Kriemhild’s cowardly brother Gunther’s is a crown. Kriemhild’s lines are denoted by a unicorn. To a medieval audience, this would suggest nobility, suffering, and salvation, and it’s something that appears to be an intentional choice of Lang’s rather than something taken from a pre-existing text (although I am not an authoritative source on this). From what I’ve gathered in my reading, Nibelungenlied is a tragic story about how revenge only begets further violence, with long periods of scholarship centered around two women, Brunhild and Kriemhild, and how they brought down an entire dynasty through their wiles. I think that Lang’s use of the unicorn for Kriemhild is a sly acknowledgement that she’s soldiering on in sacrifice in order to see justice done, even if the ultimate end of her endeavor is the death of her entire family line. Earlier audiences would have seen Gunther’s forcible capture of and marriage to Brunhild as the natural thing for an ancient king to do, something that we in the present “can’t judge” via the same moral lens as we would the same thing happening today. 

Perhaps Lang had already seen the writing on the wall with regards to the path that Germany was headed down, because if we view this narrative through that aforementioned modern lens, it’s clear that the real villains here are King Gunther and his evil buddy Hagen. Gunther, a legendary Germanic figure, is a sniveling, craven man, unfit to lead his nation and who commits the real “original sin” of this story that sets all the tragedy in motion: invading a sovereign nation with no justification other than his desire to expand and control, and—let’s not mince words here—raping the Icelandic queen Brunhild. He and his brothers’ commitment to protecting his inner circle is the embodiment of cronyism, as they take “bros before hoes” to an extreme end, refusing to allow Hagen Tronje to meet his just reward even at the cost of their family honor and, eventually, their lives. Gunther is a shortsighted despot who lacks the will to take accountability for his poor decision making, and in so doing, brings a nation to ruin. Does that remind you of anything? The fact that this film predates WWII by over a decade is merely testament to the fact that history is alive and forever repeating itself, and that artists can always see the pendulum swing back into darkness that lies just over the horizon. As established last time, that didn’t protect Die Nibelungen from being used by the Nazi propaganda machine (and it’s worth noting that the racist presentation of the Huns here shows them as being so alien and ugly that it can’t be justified), but I do think that Lang was trying to send a message to his adopted home before it was too late. Or perhaps, sometimes, a unicorn is only a unicorn. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Masters of the Universe (2026)

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The objectively, morally correct thing to do is to reject all generative AI slop in artistic spaces, which of course means rejecting all movies wholly or partially generated by AI prompts. Generative AI may be attractive for movie studios looking to avoid employing human artists by plagiarizing their pre-existing work, but what the audience gets on the other end is a clinical amalgamation of things we’ve already seen, a systematically averaged-out, artless mediocrity. Of course we should resist that. I would argue, then, that our resistance to AI slop should extend to rejecting corporate studio schlock that just happens to look & feel like generative AI, even if it was technically made by human hands. The new Masters of the Universe adaptation, for example, is spiritually AI: a soulless averaging out of recent decades’ IP action blockbusters into a meaningless mush indistinguishable from what an AI prompt to generate “a live action He-Man movie” would produce. There is no discernible artistic impulse behind its creation beyond using vintage 80s pop culture nostalgia as a vehicle to deliver product placements for companies like Coca-Cola and Amazon. As a result, the only useful service something like Masters of the Universe can provide is to offer a summation of everything that’s currently wrong with big-budget corporate filmmaking in one convenient, insultingly middling package. It’s just as dispiriting as it sounds.

The #1 issue with modern blockbuster filmmaking, as exemplified by Masters of the Universe, is bloat. This is a movie adaptation of a cartoon that was designed to sell toys to children in the 1980s. There is no possible justification for its production costing over $200 million, for its runtime stretching beyond 140 minutes, or for its screenplay saving its source material’s most exciting ideas for a promised sequel (which, thanks to the disastrous first-weekend box office results, is never coming). A lot of that bloat is a result of Masters of the Universe suffering a lethal case of the Surf Draculas, indulging in a full hour of narrative place-setting before He-Man fully becomes He-Man, needlessly having him tread water on Earth as a displaced Prince Adam for the entire first act. If this movie is Mattel’s attempt to create a Barbie for Boys opportunity with one of its other signature toy brands, the company could’ve learned a lot by paying its four(!) credited screenwriters to study Gerwig & Baumbach’s Barbie screenplay, which has the good sense to start with a fully formed Barbie living her daily life in Barbieland. Instead, we meet Prince Adam as a young whiny child, then watch him travel via magical portal to Oklahoma City and waste fifteen years’ worth of the audience’s time growing into an even whinier adult (Nicholas Galitzine), who has to work a desk job and sit in on conflict-resolution meetings while biding his time until he can find his back to the faraway planet of Eternia. No one on Earth nor Eternia could possibly give a shit. The idiotic beauty of the original Masters of the Universe series is that it’s all surface and no backstory, so simple that even a toddler could instantly understand its appeal. It’s a cartoon universe populated by literal action figures come to life, so why delay the joy of seeing those absurd characters in action?

A major issue with the film’s bloated, years-long production is that its multiple screenplay drafts have left it thematically & politically incoherent, dangerously so. While wasting his youth at an Earthbound desk job, Adam’s potential as the muscled-up master of the universe is held at bay by wimpy HR types and visibly queer-nonbinary coworkers. His cubicle’s nameplate includes “he/him” pronouns, which is intended to read as a joke about his destined transformation into the redundantly named He-Man, but also opens the movie up to political interpretation as a right-wing screed about how masculinity is in crisis because of the pervasive wokeness of modern office culture. Adam’s muscles are just aching to burst out of his baby pink button down, but the fascist feminazis who employ him are weighing him down too much to flex. Was there an early draft of Masters of the Universe that borrowed Barbie‘s fish-out-of-water gender commentary by contrasting the fully roided-out He-Man of the cartoons against the post-“toxic masculinity” culture of the modern era? It certainly feels like some scraps from that draft have been scattered throughout this final product’s opening act, which the rest of the movie leaves thematically & politically unresolved. So, it just takes as a given that the audience finds the sinisterly feminizing forces of modern life to be a grave social ill, encouraging us to cheer on He-Man’s journey back home to the Manosphere of the 1980s as a small victory for macho men everywhere.

While the final screenplay seemingly lacked attention to revision in theme & intent, it clearly was submitted for several drafts of Joss Whedon-style joke punchups meant to lighten the mood. Masters of the Universe is so jokey, in fact, that it’s outright apologetic about its own existence — fully crossing over from self-deprecation to self-hatred. The basic concept of He-Man as a sword-wielding space prince who fights against the tyranny of skull-faced Bad Guy with an army of action figure cartoon mutants is already ridiculous enough at face value. There’s no need to constantly nudge the audience in the ribs with “What the???” and “That just happened!” jokes pointing out the absurdity of the scenario. Say what you will about the live-action Golan Globus adaptation of Masters of the Universe from the 1980s (another notorious box office flop), but at least that version was sincere in its over-the-top goofballery. This modern reboot shamefully shields itself from any potential accusations of sincerity, pointing out how stupid and dated every character design is while actively hiding their most absurd details from public view. He-Man’s trademark Prince Valiant haircut has been reworked into a feathered blow-out; the Sorceress’s trademark eagle headdress is simplified to a vaguely birdlike cowl. The cowardly green tiger Cringer’s transformation into the courageous, armored Battlecat is largely kept offscreen and treated as a throwaway punchline. The floating smartass wizard Orko is saved for an end credits gag, in hopes that most of the audience would’ve already made a hasty exit without ever seeing him. He-Man’s brothers in arms against Skeletor are also deployed mostly for sex jokes about fisting (Fisto), giving head (Ram Man), and penis size (Power Sword) which, along with the constant violent murders of the back half, undercuts the movie’s potential marketability to the only audience who could possibly find any of this remotely entertaining: 10-year-old boys. In short, everything’s a joke, and nothing’s funny.

I won’t even get into the ugly intangibility of the film’s green-screen CGI effects, which places actors you know & love (most embarrassingly, Idris Elba & Alison Brie) in a soundstage otherwold where they look entirely disconnected from their environment and from each other. You’ve seen a Marvel movie before; you get the picture. Crucially, that general cultural familiarity with the past couple decades of corporate superhero filmmaking means that you can close your eyes and picture Masters of the Universe without ever watching a frame of it. It’s exactly what a computer would regurgitate onscreen if you prompted it to “imagine” He-Man in the MCU. The only glimmer of hope that this project might have produced something more substantial than that was the hiring of Laika figurehead Travis Knight to direct, as he had previously done the impossible by delivering a watchable, likeable Transformers movie a decade into that toy-marketing movie franchise (2018’s Bumblebee). There is no personal, authorial stamp to be found on this material, though. It is the exact amalgamated median of modern blockbuster aesthetics, with He-Man plugged into its predetermined proper-noun slots like a Mad Libs template. By the time it attempts to borrow some Guardians of the Galaxy charm in its mid-battle Queen needledrops and Brian May guitar work (hoping that the audience might misremember the 80s Masters of the Universe movie as having the Flash Gordon soundtrack), you might as well take a nap in the theater and watch the rest of the movie play out in your dream. You know exactly where it’s going because you’ve already seen everywhere movies of this type have been. It may not technically qualify as generative AI slop, but that’s a distinction without a difference. The only positive thing to come of it that some below-the-line workers got a paycheck instead of being plagiarized by a computer program.

-Brandon Ledet