Maisie Was a Lady (1941)

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For the first time, we open a Maisie picture (this is the fourth) with our leading lady already employed. It’s not very dignified, unfortunately; she’s in a carnival sideshow set up in a contraption with a mirror that makes her appear headless. When troublemaking wealthy alcoholic Bob Rawlston (Lew Ayres) tickles her on stage and costs her the job, he allows her to borrow his car to get into town. Maisie takes him up on this offer but ends up spending the night in jail after being pulled over on suspicion of stealing the vehicle. When the judge lets her off per Bob’s admission of complicity in Maisie’s firing and his permission to use the car, he also requires Bob to pay Maisie the amount that she was supposed to receive for the remainder of her sideshow contract, Maisie refuses to take money for nothing, and it all shakes out that Bob will keep her on for the two months of her contract at the sprawling Rawlston manse as a maid. Maisie is taken to the house and introduced to family butler Walpole (C. Aubrey Smith). 

On her first day, she meets Bob’s sister Abigail (Maureen O’Sullivan) as well as her fiancé, Link Phillips (Edward Ashley), but is not aware of their relationship until after Link has tried (and failed) to make a pass at her. The house is full of guests who will be in attendance at the upcoming engagement party for Link and Abigail. They’re all rather hoity-toity and rude to Maisie, embarrassing Abigail so thoroughly that she asks Maisie to be her personal maid, to which our heroine agrees. We get to spend some time with Abigail and learn that, despite all her wealth and finery, the Rawlston family is in disarray; after Mrs. Rawlston’s death, the family patriarch, “Cap,” has become a largely absent presence, sending jewelry that Abigail never wears or cares about in lieu of being present in her (or Bob’s) life. We learn about most of this from Abigail herself, while Walpole relates the same is true for Bob, who won a scholarship for some kind of aviation innovation, but for whom a lack of fatherly interest meant that he abandoned all of his ambitions. Tensions in the house reach a boiling point with the arrival of Diana Webley, a woman Link Phillips previously spurned; he doesn’t see any reason that his money marriage to Abigail should spoil all of the fun that they could have together, and it’s up to Maisie to, once again, save the day. 

Maisie Was a Lady is the best of the Maisie series by a decent margin. Maisie wasn’t terrible, of course, but it wasn’t all that memorable, either, whereas this one hits the ground running right out of the gate. Maisie is still independent, witty, and vivacious, and as the series goes along, she’s simply dropped into place until she gets the chance to observe everyone’s foibles, then deliver a no-nonsense monologue to give them the what-for that sets everything right. For the first time since Maisie, she also gets a love interest in the form of Bob Rawlston, even if their sudden affection for each other comes out of left field in the film’s final moments. With peace restored to the Rawlston household, Abigail asks Maisie to go to Honolulu with the family and to stay on as her companion. Maisie’s eyes light up as she considers it, possibly considering what adventures she might get up to in Honolulu Maisie, but then asks Walpole what kind of woman he foresees for Bob, prompting the old butler to rattle off a description of old money gentility that causes those lights to dim. After the leading men in Congo Maisie and Gold Rush Maisie both turned out to be false flag romantic leads, perhaps I should have seen it coming that Bob was going to win Maisie’s heart in the final moments even if there was no indication of that kind of affection between them in the film’s first hour. It almost feels like this was hastily added at the end to give Maisie a happy ending, should this be the last time that we saw Ann Sothern in this role. 

The screenplay for this one is credited to Betty Reinhardt and Mary C. McCall, Jr., just as the previous films were, but this is the first time that there’s no credit given for Wilson Collison, other than “characters created by.” Reinhardt shares story credit with frequent Frank Capra collaborator Myles Connolly, which may be why this one soars out of all the Maisies so far. It’s almost an obvious choice to have Maisie play “downstairs” in a rich family’s home; this gives her the opportunity to have comic friction with both the guests and the other servants, who are accustomed to the kind of bowing and scraping that it never even occurs to Maisie to consider. It’s all in good fun, although it takes a melodramatic turn in the final act that’s very similar to the one that set up the final events of Maisie. Since these films are all essentially self-contained, it really doesn’t matter if you decide to pick one up at random and give it a chance, and this one is the best so far and doesn’t really require you to know anything about the previous; you could treat this as a standalone picture and have just as much fun (if not more) than if you didn’t know who Maisie was in the first place. 

The film has its old-timey moments, of course. When Mr. Rawlston finally returns to the manor after the one-two punch of his absence and the revelation of Link’s gold-digging nature sends poor Abigail over the edge, Maisie reads him the riot act. Notably, she compares him unfavorably to the abusive fathers of her Brooklyn neighborhood, because at least they knew their children, and, according to Maisie, “Givin’ em the flat of your hand stacks up against giving them nothing.” It’s the only noteworthy tone-deaf moment in an otherwise blistering scorcher of a dressing down, so it gets a pass. Maisie Was a Lady gives us a heaping helping of the gal we love, and, though predictable in the extreme, is worth the eighty minutes it’ll cost you.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Gold Rush Maisie (1940)

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After her little outing to Africa, Maisie Ravier is back stateside. She’s not headed to check out the ranch she’s supposed to have inherited at the end of Maisie, though. Instead, we find her once again trying and failing to get to her next cabaret job, this time in Tucson. A car that she bought for a bargain to get her the rest of the way breaks down in the desert at night, and she finds her way to a ghost town whose two sole inhabitants are a gruff, hostile young recluse named Bill Anders (Lee Bowman) and his ornery hired hand, Fred Gubbins (Slim Summerville). Bill warms up to Maisie enough to pitch some woo her way, but she won’t have any of it, and the two men are less than receptive to her friendly overtures the following morning. When her car still won’t start after Bill takes a look at it, Maisie sets out on foot, finally arriving at her destination, a few days too late; the cafe owner has already hired different talent when Maisie didn’t arrive as expected. While ruminating on her next move, Maisie learns that there’s a gold rush boomtown developing near Anders’s property. Her kindness to a young girl whose family are following the gold rush earns her a place in their car, and she returns to get her car back and set out for her next adventure, but ends up invested in the future of the Davis family. 

The Davises are bargain bin Joads, former tenant farmers from Arkansas who lost everything in the Dust Bowl. Patriarch Bert remains cheerful and appreciative of his wife Sarah (Mary Nash)’s long-suffering patience, and Sarah herself is the kind of sweetheart who goes hungry so that her family can eat. The family has three children including a baby; the other two are played by notable child actors of the era. “Jubie” Davis was portrayed by Virginia Weidler, who appeared as Katherine Hepburn’s younger sister in The Philadelphia Story the same year as this film, and the perpetually hungry Harold was played by former Little Rascal Scotty Beckett, whose Rascal career as Spanky’s best friend came to an abrupt end once Alfalfa appeared on the scene. Overall, the Davis clan is likable and charming, and it’s easy to believe that Maisie would be willing to spend her last few dollars getting them some groceries and helping them stake out their claim. Of course, there has to be something to keep her present in Arizona to give her rough charms time to thaw Bill Anders’s stony heart so that he offers up his land for the disenfranchised farmers to homestead on when the gold in the area turns out to be so low in concentration that it’s not worth the effort of mining. It’s even less of a romance story this time around, too, since there’s no indication that Maisie has any designs on Anders, other than to get him to warm up a little. 

The format of these movies is starting to emerge, with Maisie as a kind of folk hero who goes from place to place, gets involved in people’s lives, and then moves on like Charlie Kale in Poker Face or Huckleberry Finn. There’s no real continuity to speak of, but one imagines that the studio must have been conscious that people would remember Slim from the first film and Maisie’s relationship with him even if he goes unmentioned, as Maisie’s further adventures are largely free of romance. She pretended to be into the male lead of Congo Maisie only so long as it helped her save another woman’s marriage by demonstrating how poorly suited the man was for love. One would expect that Maisie and Bill would have some romantic entanglement here based on their positioning in the film’s poster, but other than a couple of quick, chaste kisses, there’s nothing to indicate that Maisie reciprocates the tender feelings that she inspires in Bill. If anything, it feels like the first two films were aiming for that Ernst Lubitsch adultery comedy and missing the mark a bit, and decided to drop that entirely to just have Maisie wander the earth like David Banner (ironically, Scotty Beckett would go on to portray the child version of Don Ameche’s character in Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait just a few years later). 

Wilson Collison is credited with the story on this one, just as he was for Maisie (which was based on his novel Dark Dame) and for Congo Maisie (which was based on his non-Maisie novel Congo Landing). I’m not entirely sure that’s a worthy credit, however, given that the screenplay was actually pinned by two women, Mary C. McCall Jr. (credited for eight of the ten Maisie pictures) and Betty Reinhardt (who would later co-write Otto Preminger’s Laura and Give My Regards to Broadway). I’m not sure how much credit Collison really deserves for grafting the character of Maisie into a riff on The Grapes of Wrath, which would have been a hot commodity at the time, as John Steinbeck’s novel was published only the year before and the John Ford film adaptation reaching theaters only four months and 11 days before Gold Rush Maisie. That’s important context, since it also means that the somewhat corny-sounding dialogue of the Dust Bowl Okies (ex: “Tarnation, it’s nigh on to supper already”) is actually contemporary. 

Ann Sothern continues to shine in these, and while a lot of her non-comedy dialogue in the first two films had the ring of melodrama about them, her indomitable spirit comes through most clearly here. There’s a real sense of gravitas in her voice as she explains to Bill that the would-be miners have learned that the ore is useless and are holding a meeting about where each is going to go, since they can’t all try to go work the same temporary farm jobs. They’ve got to part for various different destinations, “spreading the starvation around a couple of states and not bringing it on each other,” and it’s quite good stuff. And this time, we get to see Maisie drive off into the sunset, off to spread barbs and charm elsewhere, the next time we see her in Maisie Was a Lady. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Congo Maisie (1940)

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I’m pleased to report that Congo Maisie is not as racist as I had feared. Make no mistake; it’s still racist as fuck, presenting every African with whom the white characters interact as a pidgin-speaking stereotype, universally superstitious and fearful of local witch doctors, and very quick to both bow and scrape. Even the film’s only noteworthy highlight—the finale in which Maisie puts on a performance for the attacking natives to convince them that she’s more powerful than the witch doctors—is still infantilizing and insulting. It’s deeply unpleasant, but at least we don’t hear our hero use any slurs (other than, of course, the ubiquitous use of “boy” to refer to grown men). 

When we last saw Maisie, she had just received the happy news that the late Mr. Ames had left his fortune, including the Bar-O Ranch, to her, and she planned to run it with her newfound love interest Slim. Despite this, when we catch up with her in Congo Maisie, all indication that this was where we left her has vanished. She’s once again a showgirl on the lookout for the next big opportunity, which is what has brought her to Africa in the first place. She runs out on her hotel bill in (fictional) Kurmala, West Africa, and stows away on a riverboat that she believes is bound for Lagos, where her next engagement is, but turns out to be headed elsewhere. She’s discovered hiding in one of the cabins by Dr. Michael Shane (New Orleans native John Carroll), the foul-tempered manager of a rubber plantation. He’s journeying up the river to his place, but when the boiler on the boat overheats and explodes, all passengers are put ashore. Shane was previously the physician in residence at a different colonial plantation that’s nearby, and he and Maisie make the trek to it in order to find a place to stay until the boat can be repaired. 

The new plantation hospital doctor, McWade (Shepperd Strudwick) and his wife Kay (Rita Johnson), welcome them, and the cracks in their relationship are evident immediately. Kay is lonely and misses home, friends, and family, while Dr. McWade’s devotion to researching a cure for sleeping sickness drives him to work for long hours, and his own health is worsening as a result. Shane’s reunion with a local with whom he had become friends is marred by the revelation that the man’s son is very sick and he is afraid to bring him to McWade for fear of reprisals against his family from the local witch doctors, who act as the villains of the film who stir up fear and discontent against McWade, Shane, and the other settlers, who are our protagonists. Somehow, in all of this, Shane also finds the time to try and woo Kay, and she’s a receptive party given her isolation from familiar people or sights. Maisie, perhaps having learned something from Sybil Ames in Maisie, then allows Kay to witness as she herself flirts with Shane, who has no loyalty to anyone. In the final act, the locals, at the behest of the witch doctors, arrive at the plantation hospital mere minutes after Shane has completed successfully removing McWade’s appendix with Maisie acting as nurse and begin trying to tear the place to the ground. Maisie, thinking fast, dons one of the costumes from her act and does some stage magic, stalling long enough for an inbound thunderstorm to break and for rain to fall so that she can pretend that this was her doing, and turn the locals back on the witch doctors. 

The only reason any of this works is because of Ann Sothern’s performance as Maisie. Even when the movie itself is grossly colonialist and imperial, Maisie herself remains an undaunted, lovable figure. This is based on a totally unrelated book entitled Congo Landing, which I’ve been able to find very little information about other than a contemporary NYT book blurb that names the main character as Dolly, and describes her thus: “Her savoir faire is undisturbed by the deadly tropical heat, the pestiferous mosquitos, or the explosion of the boiler on the rotten little Congo River boat. Under a hardboiled exterior she has really a heart of gold and a shrewd, intelligent mind.” That also describes Maisie, and it’s clear why someone reading Congo Landing might see this as a perfect vehicle to quickly develop into a sequel to Maisie, with Congo Maisie appearing on screens a mere seven months after the character debuted in the previous film. There’s only a singular rating of the novel on GoodReads, although there are a few very low star ratings for Das Haus am Kongo, which appears to be the German translation; the one review for Das Haus cites that the reader “found the casual racism referring to all of the [B]lack characters unbearable.” I imagine it probably is worse in the book, but that doesn’t make this film any good. Utterly unworth preservation. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Microcosmos (1996)

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Back in my college days, the go-to TV series to get stoned & zone out to was the BBC’s Planet Earth, a soothing nature doc series shot in then-astonishing HD clarity. I couldn’t afford cable back then, though, so I only caught snippets of it while drifting through friends’ & strangers’ living rooms, occasionally mesmerized by a glimpse of the Northern Lights or an insect-destroying fungus before moving on to the next mindless activity. My own personal Planet Earth back then was a much-rented DVD stocked at the off-campus Blockbuster, a 2005 French documentary titled Genesis. In it, an African mystic stirs a bucket of water to create a small whirlpool, which he then uses to explain the history of the planet and the evolution of all the life it hosts. Much like David Attenborough’s dry script-reads in Planet Earth, the narration never stops, with the mystic constantly explaining the subsequent nature footage that illustrates the evolution of Earth life in astonishingly gorgeous close-up photography. Genesis is a little hokey, but it’s less than 80 minutes long (as opposed to Planet Earth‘s 500+), and it gets the job done. As I’ve since come to learn, it’s also always functioned as a bargain-bin alternative to a superior work, even though it predates Planet Earth by a couple years. Long before they made Genesis, directors Claude Nuridsany & Marie Pérennou had scored major acclaim with their 1996 masterwork Microcosmos, which offers an up-close, Planet Earth-style profile of insect life never before seen in such beautiful cinematic detail. Genesis is the watered-down version of their earlier success, which makes it a pity that’s the one I had access to on the nearest video store shelf.

The key to Microcosmos‘s success as a monumental work of art rather than a standard-issue nature doc is its almost complete lack of narration. While Genesis overexplains in metaphor and Planet Earth instructs in classroom lecture, Microcosmos includes only a small touch of narration to get the audience thinking about how insects, snails, and other miniature creatures live small lives that we rarely take the time to observe. Even those couple paragraphs of narration feel a little redundant, given that its opening theme song already explains it perfectly in a child’s falsetto, instructing “Look at your feet/this funny world/full of insane small creatures/and listen to/this buzzing chord/who keenly spreads such strange murmurs/The sound’s buzzing, swarming, sliding beetles, snails, and ladybirds.” Besides functioning as a presciently pitch-perfect parody of Björk’s career to come, that tune encapsulates the entire project in just a few simple words. Gazing at Microcomsos means pausing your busy brain to observe a world smaller than yours, the one just below your feet — where the bugs live. Nuridsany & Pérennou worked with state-of-the-art microscopic cameras to immerse their audience in that world, shrinking our moment-to-moment concerns down to the insectoid impulses to feed, breed, and shelter. It’s not a mode of observation & wonderment that can be explained in narration; it’s a practice that the movie teaches you by forcibly diverting your attention to the smallest things in life. I also have to assume that its lessons’ most accomplished students are 20-year-old stoners who’d rather focus on just about anything other than their actual homework, the same as with Genesis & Planet Earth one decade later.

The cast of Microcosmos is large & varied. You’ve got all of your classic microspecies here: your ants, your spiders, your ladybugs, your tadpoles, your moths, your butterflies. And then you’ve got a never-ending supply of esoteric creepy crawlies I couldn’t even begin to identify, as if they were found under a rock on an alien planet instead of the one we occupy. Even more mysterious is the moment-to-moment actions of these micro creatures, which Nuridsany & Pérennou playfully assign meaning through cheeky music & editing choices. It’s easy to read into insects’ intention & emotions while they’re mating, hunting, and organizing in groups, but when those acts all inevitably lead to no specified goal or result, the audience snaps out of the trance and remembers, oh yeah, they’re bugs. We’ll often watch the up-close struggles of a frog being pummeled with rain drops, a dung beetle struggling to push its self-assigned Sisyphean bolder, or a group of caterpillars lining up in military formation. We get emotionally involved in their toils, only for the edit to then switch to a wide shot that contextualizes these epic battles as the meaningless busywork of insects who have no idea what they’re doing or what’s happening around them. It’s an effect that says just as much about the manipulative nature of filmic storytelling as it does about the minute-to-minute meaninglessness of our own upscaled human lives. Nothing you’re working on right now matters all that much in the bigger picture of things, so you might as well take some time out of your day to look at some cool bugs doing cool bug shit. There’s a whole world down there, and it can be just as breathtakingly beautiful (snails having sex) as it is hilariously pitiful (ladybugs having sex).

Microcosmos recently screened at The Broad as part of their weekly Gap Tooth repertory series, with a fully engaged audience making their own audible insectoid rustlings in reaction to every microstruggle depicted onscreen. After a clueless dung beetle spent minutes freeing its little bolder from an errant stick in the mud, the room burst into spontaneous applause. Personally, I only spent half the screening marveling at the majesty of nature’s smallest wonders; I spent the other half thinking about how every species of insect deserves to be blown up to kaiju scale in its own standalone creature feature, an experience the packed house was already gifting to the latecomers in the front row. Access to such a beautiful communal event in my own neighborhood was also a blessing in its own way. It’s funny how access can affect your relationship with cinema. What we’re able to see can be severely limited by cable subscriptions, video store libraries, and geographic proximity, like how I spent repeated nights watching Genesis while most of my friends were watching Planet Earth and we all should have been watching Microcosmos.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: The Kirlian Witness (1979)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the psychotronic ’70s oddity The Kirlian Witness, a murder mystery in which the only witness to the crime is an ordinary house plant.

00:00 Welcome
01:41 Take One (1977)
09:20 Maisie (1939)
24:35 Camille 2000 (1969)
31:28 Heaven Can Wait (1943)
36:47 The Invisible Boy (1957)
41:39 Gazer (2025)
51:26 New Rose Hotel (1998)
56:50 The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026)
1:16:26 The Puffy Chair (2005)
1:20:47 Prisoners of the Ghostland (2021)
1:27:20 Demonwarp (1988)

1:30:05 The Kirlian Witness (1979)

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

The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026)

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I only saw The Devil Wears Prada once, in theaters during its original theatrical run. I didn’t care too much for it at the time. I was a teenager who was working two jobs while going to college, struggling financially and at the peak of my indie pretension, and I found the film to be both too mainstream and too propagandistic to really be enjoyable. This was still two years before the 2008 financial crisis hit, a cultural disruption that changed a lot about the way that people engaged with the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Hit reality series like MTV Cribs and My Super Sweet 16, which trafficked in both envy of the wealthy and derision for their excesses, were both quietly scuttled by 2010 (although new seasons went into production for both in 2021 and 2016, respectively). At nineteen, I was already struggling too hard in my own life to find the world of couture fashion to be escapist fantasy. When Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) gives her memetic “cerulean sweater” dressing down to Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) about how she sees herself as being outside of, uninfluenced by, and dismissively “above” the world of fashion, she may as well have been speaking directly to me. I, admittedly immaturely, saw the 2006 film as a movie about a woman with high career aspirations who is brainwashed into giving an industry that is predicated on wealthy elitism a pass. Further, I was still impressionable enough that the film’s rampant body-shaming was both distasteful and had a negative lasting impact on me personally. (Also, I just hate KT Tunstall’s “Suddenly I See.”)

In the years since, the original film’s finer moments have become Mean Girls-scale internet background radiation in the form of Miranda Priestly girlboss gifsets, “Are you wearing the?”/”The [x]? Yes I am” memes, and “Adrian Grenier is the real villain” thinkpieces. The Devil Wears Prada is a film that’s, if you’ll excuse the pun, tailor-made to be chopped into pieces for fancams of Miranda Priestly, and the predominance of vertical/portrait video means that we perpetual scrollers never have to miss whatever outfit she’s wearing at the time. The less memorable elements, like the fact that Andy’s in a love triangle between Entourage, and The Mentalist, aren’t what people think about when the film’s title comes up in conversation or online. Now, twenty years later, we’re back with another entry in what Brandon likes to call the “should have been a Super Bowl commercial” genre, a legacy sequel that for most people will simply be a nice nostalgic ride but for others will be a piece of art that is forever responsible for justifying its existence. I was surprisingly on board for Freakier Friday, so why not? 

On the same night that Miranda Priestly is hosting the similar-to-but-legally-distinct-from (henceforth STBLDF) Met Gala, Andy Sachs is present at a journalistic awards ceremony. Andy  and her entire team from the New York Vanguard are laid off via text message in the same moment that her win is announced, and she ascends the dais to express both her gratitude and her frustration at the ongoing one-percenter-led gutting of journalism as both a career and a necessary pillar that supports a theoretically free society. Miranda also finds herself in crisis mode when the reputation of Runway, the STBLDF-Vogue that she oversees, is endangered by an exposé that shows the magazine’s negligence in regards to an article about a supposed ethical manufacturer that secretly runs sweatshops. The CEO of STBLDF-Condé Nast puts his plans to move Miranda into a global editorial role on hold and hires Miranda as the new Features editor at Runway, which brings Miranda and Andy back together again. The latter is also reunited with Nigel (Stanley Tucci), still serving as Miranda’s right hand, and Emily (Emily Blunt), who has moved out of publishing and into luxury retail with Dior, which makes up a healthy chunk of Runway’s advertising and thus gives her the chance to play hardball with Miranda following the “fast fash”(ion) debacle. 

The set-up here is pretty solid. Even though Miranda still reigns over her office like she did decades previously, changes in expectations about workplace behavior mean that she doesn’t have the liberty to throw her coats at her assistants as she once did, and her current assistant Amari (Simone Ashley)’s job seems to entail no small amount of reining in Miranda’s déclassé sentiments about body positivity and trivial references to killing herself. Although she still commands respect, it’s only a matter of time before the elderly STBLDF-Condé Nast CEO hands the reins over to his mouth-breathing, athleisure-sporting, wannabe-disruptor idiot son (BJ Novak). The film also gets in on 2025’s general abuse of STBLDF-Elon Musk archetypes, with a little bit of Bill Gates thrown in for good measure. Justin Theroux plays Benji Barnes, a tech billionaire who’s unbelievably unfunny and out of touch, who, instead of aspiring to colonize Mars, instead wants to look into the potential of exploring the sun. Lucy Liu plays Sasha, his Melinda Gates-esque ex-wife, who supported him initially while he “tinkered around with code,” and is now unconscionably wealthy and hopes to give away her entire fortune before her death. When Andy’s dogged persistence nets her an interview with the infamously reclusive Sasha, one that results in an exclusive on the announcement of her new engagement, it solidifies her value to Runway, but their attempts to save the magazine (and, by extension, journalism as a whole) may all be in vain. 

The Devil Wears Prada 2 smartly decides to be about something, in a way that actually justifies going back to this well twenty years later. This is a film about the death of journalism, and it manages to be smartly trenchant for a lot of its runtime before fizzling a bit with an ending that’s both too pat and too happy while also kind of missing the point of this entire enterprise. When Andy returns to Runway, Nigel is candid with her about the publication’s deteriorating state, citing that features which would once have been budgeted as a month long international trip now only cover a couple of afternoons at a nearby studio. The magazine chugs along, but the physical copies that appear in newsstands have been whittled down to the point that Nigel jokes it could be used as dental floss. The changing social media landscape means that Andy’s writing isn’t connecting with an audience; her features are incisive and informative, but no one seems to actually be clicking through and reading them. Even something that Andy once dismissed as utterly frivolous is now another barometer for the end of the Fourth Estate as a whole, an old world dying while a new one struggles to be born. 

The film manifests the discussion of the death of culture and whatever is to follow it in the world to come in the form of Andy’s token love interest, Peter (Patrick Brammall), a contractor who has recently converted a classic New York architectural beauty into apartments painted millennial grey and furnished with faux-MCM Wayfair purchases. Peter makes the argument that, if he hadn’t done so, the building would have been torn down completely and something modern would have been built in its place, and in some way he’s managing to hold onto the old form while making it into something new. It’s a little on-the-nose as a metaphor, and the film wobbles on whether he’s right or not. He’s pretty thinly characterized, overall, and seems to exist solely to fulfill the need for a romance that the film wouldn’t suffer for lacking if it were excised. Ultimately, the film comes down to a message of “it’s okay if a billionaire owns a media monopoly, as long as it’s the right billionaire, preferably a girlboss who leans in.” I could see that this was where the film was going as it headed into the final act, but I was still a little shocked that this was where all of the rigmarole about integrity and personal growth led us. At the end of the day, this film is still a corporate product that is being seen at for-profit megaplexes, and it was never going to be able to imagine a conclusion where all of this was resolved by anything other than appealing to someone with deeper pockets. This is a film about fashion as journalism, but one of the key differences between those things is that journalism, despite often being driven by capital, is not inherently so, and as such it’s difficult to imagine any solution to the characters’ problems that isn’t the one that the screenwriters came up with. That’s not my job, though; it was theirs. 

I’m coming down pretty hard on a movie that I mostly enjoyed. I appreciated that Hathaway’s love interest was played by an actor who was handsome in a very normal way, not someone with a chiseled jawline and perfect facial symmetry, but I also found my mind wandering the most during their romantic scenes. They feel rather rote, all things considered, and at two hours, the comedy isn’t quite sufficient to really carry the film all the way to the finish line. It gets sentimental but never goes maudlin, and I was sufficiently invested for the entire runtime. It’s worth noting that every single trailer before this one was advertising a legacy sequel: the new Scary Movie, Focker-in-Law, Practical Magic 2, the live-action Moana, and, of course, the omnipresent Mandalorian and Grogu. (There was also a DWP2-themed Loreal ad with Kiran Soni and the Pepsi copaganda Jenner.) With that as an appetizer, I was primed and ready for a narrative about the death of commercial art and the strangling weed of capitalism. Other than DWP2 itself, none of these films feel like they were made with any artistic intent, or with a particular story to tell that justifies its existence the way that DWP2 does, with the possible exception of Scary Movie, a parody franchise which has lain fallow for long enough that there’s a wealth of new material for it to satirize. What all of these titles offer is the chance to take a second walk through a familiar world, and DWP2 succeeds with this in a way that doesn’t feel like it exists solely as a corporate product. It’s funny, if not quite funny enough, and it’s a little broader in its comedy than its predecessor, but it’s worth a watch. It falls short of being as worthwhile as Creed, Doctor Sleep, or Freakier Friday, but it doesn’t deserve to be sorted into the same dustbin as The Craft: Legacy and Hocus Pocus 2. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Take One (1977)

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They say all pornography, no matter how scripted, is partially documentary. You’ll find the phoniest characters, dialogue, and scenarios cinema has to offer in porno, and yet the physical sexual contact between performers is more real than all other cinematic action — unstimulated, often documented by the camera in medical detail. It’s easy to look back to vintage titles of the Porno Chic era and retroactively impose anthropological meaning on them, citing them as a document of a bygone era, since their unpermitted street shoots and nonexistent costume budgets often captured the people of the time as they were in daily life. Pornography is also immediately documentary, though, caught between the extremes of both staged cinematic fantasy and the documented reality of the performers within that fantasy. This is not a new observation. One of Porno Chic’s earliest auteurs was playing around with the tension between those extremes a half-century ago, coining the term “docufantasy” to describe his chosen artform’s dual, self-conflicting nature. Wakefield Poole’s 1977 “docufantasy” Take One opens by warning the audience that trying to parse out what’s fiction and what’s reality is a fool’s errand, announcing, “For your enjoyment, do not try to understand this film: there is nothing to understand. It is only real people doing reel things and making them real together.” That distinction between the “real” and the “reel” sums it all up more concisely than I ever could.

Take One finds Wakefield Poole on the opposite coast than his crown jewel Bijou, now docu-fantasizing about the gay men in 1970s San Francisco. In an early precursor to Beth B’s reality-TV prototype Visiting Desire, Poole invites eight men from the local scene to confess their fantasies in videotaped interviews, then act them out in front of 16mm cameras. Unlike in Visiting Desire, this experiment reliably results in onscreen fucking, with each performer given a spotlight fantasy sequence before they all gather for a climactic orgy in the theater where the movie they’re participating in premieres mid-runtime. Some fantasies are more abstract than others, such as an early sequence where a young man gets so revved up thinking about his muscle car that he finds a way to passionately penetrate its hood ornament, à la Julia Ducournau’s Titane or Kenneth Anger’s Kustom Kar Kommandos. In another, a domestic couple has semi-public sex on the sunny roof of their isolated desert home, leaning heavily into the soft psychedelia of the film’s post-hippie era. The most shocking sequence is the one in which two real-life brothers have sex on camera, fulfilling an incest fantasy most pornos only playfully hint at to capitalize on a convenient taboo. Here, the siblings’ lovemaking is warmly tender to an almost disconcerting degree, as if the audience has been invited to witness an intimate moment that no one outside their unusual relationship was ever meant to see. That sequence is more “real” than it is “reel,” alarmingly so.

If Take One falls short on either side of the real/reel divide, it’s in the supposedly documentary interview sequences that justify their resulting fantasies. For the most part, the initial video interviews that inspired the film aren’t incorporated into the final cut and are instead restaged and scripted in a more traditional pornographic narrative style. So, like Bijou, the film is at its best when it goes full fantasy mode, staging the abstract sex acts inspired by those interviews in an endless black void. The best scenes in the film are pure jack-off material, with men narrating their fantasies to the audience while masturbating in a featureless room decorated only with slideshow projections of momentary illustrations, as described in their horned-up ramblings. It’s a surprisingly poetic approach to pornography that’s introduced as soon as the opening scene, wherein a nude ballet dancer performs a full routine for the audience after emerging from the silver screen like a cryptid hatching from an egg. That poetic approach to the genre is later echoed in Poole’s liberal use of color gels, as he bathes his performers in fantastic colored lights that untether them from this earthly realm. The film’s incidentally documentary glimpses of vintage gay San Francisco are cool & all, but we spend most of the runtime indoors, so Poole is smart to attempt to document their internal lives instead. We learn about them by finding out what gets them off.

Because this project is so dependent on Wakefield Poole’s distinctions between the “real” and the “reel,” the filmmaker himself inevitably becomes part of the story. Take One is a meta-porno, including footage of Poole & crew recruiting performers, conducting interviews, operating cameras, and exhibiting film prints between the purer sensory immersions of the full-on fantasy sequences. The reality of the movie being made & projected in-film fully breaks down by the mid-premiere orgy sequence, which gets so out of control that even the projectionist gets in on the action, receiving a surprise blowjob in his hermetic booth above the fray. Having already fulfilled all of his obligations as a documentarian and a pornographer, Poole fully lets loose in that sequence, playing around with as many color gels and camera angles he can afford to shoot while his performers shoot all over each other. He becomes especially enamored with repurposing a glory hole as a peephole in that sequence, viewing the action from a self-imposed distance on the other side of a faux patrician. For all of the semi-documentary elements that make Take One interesting as a consciously academic object from porno’s distant past, it’s still most useful and most remarkable when it drops the bullshit and gets down to the task at hand: filming unstimulated sex acts in the most aesthetically pleasing light possible. Poole didn’t need to go out of his way to stage a “docufantasy”; that’s already the business he was working in.

-Brandon Ledet

Camille 2000 (1969)

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Radley Metzger’s late-60s romance Camille 2000 slips through the cracks of most marketable genre definitions. Its title suggests a Swingin’ 60s sci-fi futurism, but its story is set in contemporary Rome; the only thing futuristic about it is its see-through inflatable furniture. Its fashionable Italian production design and scene-to-scene dramatic sensibilities recall the post-Hitchcock stylings of a giallo, but there’s no murder nor mystery to be found in its plot. Its director’s reputation as an unusually stylish hardcore pornographer sets the mood for lewd on-screen sex, but its historical timing as pre-Deep Throat erotica means it can only deliver softcore posing of nude bodies, with no genital contact nor thrusting. So, what exactly is a sci-fi title without science fiction, a giallo without murder, a porno without penetration? Like with many artsy Euro dramas, it’s all just a vibe. In this case, the vibe happens to be a Pierre Cardin magazine layout inspired by Valley of the Dolls. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

The titular Camille is a wealthy Roman socialite who’s living a dangerously fast life of pure, high-fashion hedonism. She spends her careless days drunk & stoned, shopping for dresses, and party-hopping from orgy to opera to orgy. The only thing she needs to do to sustain this fabulous lifestyle is to marry rich, an obligation that stresses her out as she half-heartedly attempts to placate an aging sugar-daddy fiancée while continually humping the more age-appropriate fuckboys whom she actually desires. She warns the latest fuckboy not to fall in love with her, since that life-dependent need to marry rich will certainly break his heart in the long run, but the young Frenchman can’t help but fall for her anyway. He swears that even if he sleeps with 2,000 other women, he still won’t be able to get over her (thus the futuristic-sounding title). He copes by draining his modest bank account trying to keep her clothed and happy until she can’t help but move on and officially marry, securing her place in life. She copes by popping pills in-between her nonstop parade of orgiastic cocktail parties, too numb to feel the full brunt of her burgeoning love for the dolt. Their toxic dynamic inevitably leaves him drunk and her dead. It takes 131 long minutes to arrive at that predetermined destination, like a train that takes lengthy breaks at every station.

Camille 2000 is not a movie you watch for its drama or its action; you watch it for its production design. Its social conflicts and stoney-baloney fuck sessions are frustratingly inert, but they’re at least staged inside an Italo fashion magazine layout, where it’s appropriate to wear see-through swimsuits to an afternoon cocktail party and no bedroom is complete without at least a dozen strategically angled mirrors. It’s less actual pornography than it is lifestyle pornography, inviting the audience to hang out with emptyheaded European socialites whose only immediate concern in life is finding the chicest place to smoke their dope and get their rocks off. Metzger can’t go full-hardcore here the way he does in later, more famous pictures like The Opening of Misty Beethoven, but he has plenty of opportunity to leer & drool over his actors’ carefully arranged nude bodies. In the most stylish scene, Camille is being eaten out by her favorite Frenchman in the background while a vase of camelias is framed close-up in the foreground, with Metzger’s lens alternating focus between the two displays to the rhythm of her orgasmic breaths. Like everything else in the picture, it’s gorgeous, it’s indulgent, and it lasts for several more minutes than you expect it to, so it’s best not to be in a rush to get off and get over to the next swanky locale.

Roger Ebert wrote a 1-star review of Camille 2000 for the Chicago Sun-Times, frustrated by the excess of mirrored nude modeling and the total lack of actual phonographic thrusting. That review was published in October of 1969, and I am dying to know if that was before or after Ebert wrote the screenplay for Russ Meyers’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls that same year. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls resembles Camille 2000 in its garish look and its erotic sensibilities far more closely than it recalls the original Valley of the Dolls it was supposedly a sequel to, almost to the point where it feels like a direct parody of Metzger’s film. Camille even has a gay fashionista bestie that stands in as the film’s very own Z-Man, whom I fully expected to transform into Superwoman during the film’s climactic, prison-themed S&M orgy. I must admit that a large part of my enjoyment of Camille 2000 is in its resemblance to Russ Meyer’s much crasser, much more exciting follow-up, since it was a joy to spend more time luxuriating in mise-en-scène that so closely recalled one of my all-time favorite films. Meanwhile, Ebert would’ve been confronted with it as a routine work assignment that tested his patience & forgiveness as its drama refused to progress and its nude models refused to hump. All I can say is that all movies become more interesting with time, which tends to flatten their differences and accentuate their shared value as cultural snapshots of a bygone era.

-Brandon Ledet

Maisie (1939)

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Last year, after watching The Blue Gardenia and being particularly taken with Ann Sothern in it, I looked her up and discovered that, over the course of eight years, she had starred in ten(!) films as a character named Maisie Ravier, a misadventuring showgirl. Those ten films are largely forgotten now, but I found all of them on Russia’s YouTube equivalent as uploaded VHS rips from Turner Classic Movies airings, and I dutifully archived them for this year with the intent of watching them all and writing about them for something I intended to call “Maisie May.” Then, almost halfway through this month, as a result of working on a fiction project, I realized I had spent almost half of May in writing mode instead of movie mode. Will I be able to finish all ten Maisie films before the end of the month? Let’s find out together. 

The film opens as Maisie (Sothern) arrives in Big Horn, Wyoming to discover that the stage show for which she left New York has folded after a single performance. With only a nickel to her name, she convinces a carny to let her work the shooting gallery, which sets up her meet cute with “Slim” Martin (Robert Young, a few years after his appearance in Hitchcock’s Secret Agent), the manager of Bar-O Ranch. When his wallet gets lifted, Maisie ends up arrested for the theft, and although she’s cleared of the charges, she stows away in the back of his pick-up truck to avoid being arrested again for vagrancy should she remain in town. Slim is less than enthused to discover this, but allows her to stay overnight with the intention of sending her off on the train the next morning, as one of the ranch hands is already going into town to pick up the ranch’s owner, Cliff Ames, and his wife Sybil (Ruth Hussey), whom he has spirited away from New York to put some distance between her and the man with whom she’s been carrying on an affair. Maisie again latches on to an opportunity and presents herself as a maid that Slim has hired for Sybil for the summer. She comes clean to Mr. Ames once they get back to the ranch, who is impressed with her gumption and allows her to stay. 

Sybil asks Slim to show her where the “old ranch house” is, and she latches onto it immediately as a place where she can have her lover come and meet her discreetly. Maisie also manages to break through Slim’s resistance and learn that his unfriendliness is the result of previous heartbreak; the two start to fall in love. One day, while touring the ranch in his car with Maisie, Mr. Ames gets into an accident and his arm is pinned in the overturned car. Maisie, believing that she will find Slim and the other ranch hands at the old ranch house because they are on a cattle drive, and instead finds Sybil in flagrante delicto with her lover. Once Mr. Ames is safely back at the ranch, Maisie gives Sybil a dressing down about her behavior and her treatment of her loving husband, and Sybil is able to manipulate her words in conversation with Slim to convince the ranchman that Maisie has spent the summer trying to lure Mr. Ames away. Slim sends Maisie away, and shortly thereafter, Mr. Ames sends a letter to his lawyers in New York and then kills himself. Unfortunately, as Slim discovers the body first and is found standing over the body with the gun Ames used, he is arrested for murder. When Maisie learns of this, she must make her way to the trial to try and save him. 

This is a fun enough little seventy-five minute romp, and it practically breezes by. It’s also a bit of a genre-bender, as it starts out as a contemporary Western romcom before the dark twist of Mr. Ames’s suicide and a final act that turns into a courtroom drama. It’s also fairly unconventional in the sense that it plays with certain character stereotypes. Maisie’s a big city showgirl, so one expects there to be some kind of culture clash between her and the simpler Wyoming ranch hands and their employer, but instead of her being brassy and bossy, it’s instead she who is almost immediately taken advantage of by the podunks and conmen of the west, although she manages to turn things around for herself by conning her way into a job at Bar-O Ranch. Once that development occurs, one then expects that there’s going to be some comic hijinks about her not being suited for rural living, but she actually adjusts fairly quickly and does quite well for herself, coming to be adored by both Mr. Ames and Slim’s right hand man, Shorty (musician Cliff Edwards, who would be immortalized the following year as the voice of Jiminy Cricket in Disney’s Pinocchio). The conflicts aren’t at all what one would expect, and I appreciated that I never really knew where the plot was going to go next, even if the stakes are relatively low throughout, at least until Slim’s trial. 

As a movie of a bygone era, it has its detriments, most notably in its casual racism. Even our beloved hero refers to a Black train porter as “boy,” and there’s occasional fun being had at the expense of ranch cook Lee, who is referred to more than once as “the China boy.” It’s a relief that he’s played by an actual Chinese-American actor, Willie Fung, rather than a white actor in yellowface, but he’s also played as a “humorous” stereotype; it’s a mercy that his scenes are few and brief. This was, unfortunately, the exact role that Fung was often funneled into during this more (overtly and openly) racist period in Hollywood history. He has seven films in his 120+ feature filmography where he’s an uncredited “Chinese Cook,” six as “Chinese Waiter,” then “Chinese Bartender,” “Chinese Tailor,” “Chinese Laundryman,” and so on. It’s an unfortunate legacy for a man who came to the U.S. following the collapse of his uncle’s peanut business and made a name for himself as the owner and operator of East Hollywood’s New Moon Café in addition to appearing in 125 films. 

There is already trouble on the horizon for Maisie May. The very next film starring Sothern in one of her defining roles is the 1940 picture Congo Maisie, which from the title alone I expect is likely to be unconscionably racist (although I’ll eat crow if Maisie ends up communicating with a mountain gorilla). The synopsis for that one includes both mentions of a rubber plantation and Maisie having to save it from a “native attack.” This could be so awful it derails the entire thing. Stay tuned to find out. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Gazer (2025)

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Gazer is a 2025 film  from first-time director Ryan J. Sloan, who shares writing credit with the film’s star, Ariella Mastroianni. Mastroianni portrays Frankie Rhodes, a woman with a progressive neurological disorder that distorts her memories, induces psychedelic dreams, and sends her into long blackout periods of lost time. She’s separated from her daughter Cynthia, whose current guardian is Diane, the mother of Frankie’s late husband, whose death was ruled a suicide but which Diane suspects Frankie had a hand in. Finding it difficult to hold down a job because of her degenerating condition, Frankie opens the movie being fired from her job as a gas station attendant due to perpetually zoning out in the middle of her shifts. The film takes its title from Frankie’s activities on the job, as she stares up at the building across the street, losing time while making up narratives about the people that she sees, Rear Window style. On the night that she’s fired, she sees an episode of violence happen in one of the windows. Frankie attends a grief group for people whose loved ones committed suicide, where a woman she saw leaving the building (Renee Gagner) approaches her. She introduces herself as Paige Foster and relates that her mother overdosed, and telling Frankie that her brother has since become overprotective, which prompted the domestic assault incident Frankie witnessed. Paige offers Frankie $3000 dollars to sneak into the apartment, get her car keys, and bring the car to her at a different location so she can flee her brother, and Frankie agrees. 

I’ve seen the film described as Hitchcockian, which is accurate. Beyond the shameless cribbing from Rear Window, the film takes on one of Alfred’s favorite elements, that of the wrongfully accused protagonist being pursued by the authorities while seeking to clear their name, and a Vertiginous series of mistaken identities. It’s also Lynchian, in that important information is revealed through surrealist dream sequences and characters that mirror one another or become confused with one another in esoteric, Mulhollandian ways, while psychedelic nightmare sequences pull from Twin Peaks for set and blocking inspiration. It’s also Cronenbergian, in that Frankie’s nightmares also often involve body horror imagery that’s directly taken from his catalog, and I do mean directly; there’s a shot of dream Frankie pulling an audiocassette out of a wound in her husband’s torso that’s so close to Videodrome that it might be legally actionable. 

If all of that sounds like this film is trafficking in too many ideas and lacks a cohesive creative vision, that’s because it is, and it does. It’s not a bad film at all, but it does have a lot of the hallmarks of being a freshman outing, and given that director Sloan has zero other credits on IMDb, it gives the impression that he emerged fully formed out of thin air as a filmmaker. Given that there’s no evidence of him getting any crew experience in the rest of his CV, this is even more impressive as a technical achievement, but its dependency on the use of other directors’ metaphorical color palettes means that, as a text, it fails to be more than the sum of its parts. There’s also a narrative device throughout the film in which Frankie listens to cassette tapes that she makes for herself, and the conceit never quite works, and it feels very much like a darling that the screenwriters couldn’t bring themselves to kill. It’s possible to excise the use of them in scenes like the one where Tape!Frankie is telling Present!Frankie not to linger too long in Paige’s apartment after getting her keys (a direction that Present! Frankie fails to follow, of course, and loses track of time) while also retaining the narrative throughline of Frankie recording journal entries for her daughter so that she can still communicate with her after her disorder takes her life as well as the scenes in which Frankie listens to previous recordings of Cynthia to keep herself company. As played in most scenes, however, the tapes are little more than a distraction in the scenes where Frankie listens to them “to focus,” and it feels like the hallmark of a director who’s too afraid to trust the audience as much as he should. 

That’s a shame, since the film has a lot going for it. The soundtrack is excellent, and perfectly meshes with the film’s overall sound design. There’s a really fantastic element in the visual design where all of the environments Frankie occupies while she’s dreaming are uncannily symmetrical, which is a nicely subtle way of playing with the narrative’s themes of mistaken identity and mirroring. I really sat up and paid attention when Dream!Frankie goes into her old house and opens a TV cabinet to find a one-eyed meat cube inside, the tongue of which Frankie pulls out like a magician’s endless string of handkerchiefs and then connects to her navel like a gross umbilical cord. Out of context, all of these dream sequences would work as their own individual horror shorts, and I appreciate that they don’t always mesh in a comprehensible way with Frankie’s real life decisions or memories, since it accurately reflects both her medical condition and the anxieties thereof. Mastroianni is also an odd but perfect choice for the lead. She’s quite petite, and the choice for Frankie to have a non-femme hair style renders her androgynous in a way that you rarely see in a main character unless it’s plot-mandated or narratively relevant. I found myself frequently frustrated with her choices in a way that threatened to make her impossible to root for, but not every lead has to be unchallenging. The film is also gorgeously photographed, with film grain artifacts and focus choices that make the film feel like it fell out of a time capsule from the New Hollywood era, so much so that when a newer version $100 bill or a cell phone pops up, you’re a little surprised. 

Where Gazer borrows too much from that New Hollywood era, however, is in its choice to be deliberately contemplative to an excessive degree. While in Paige’s apartment, Frankie looks down at the gas station where she used to work and we in the audience understand that this was the view that Paige and her attacker had the night of the assault; we don’t need to revisit this exact angle and reverse shot on Frankie on two additional occasions. I recently picked up a fun phrase from an old Siskel & Ebert episode that someone uploaded to YouTube, in which Roger criticized the performances in a certain film by saying that the actors were reciting their lines “like they had all day” to do it. I praised Mastroianni above, and while she’s usually quite good here, there are far too many scenes in which she enters and exits scenes with no energy at all, and it makes the film itself feel more sluggish, while Sloan leaves the camera running on some things like, as Roger would say, he had all to film it. Revelations about the central mystery happen quickly and get skipped over, while some scenes play out just shy of interminably, and I don’t think it’s quite the right choice. 

Gazer was recently added to Shudder, and you can find it there as of this writing. It allows its contemplation to get a little long in the tooth and the mystery itself is convoluted in a way that is going to leave a lot of viewers puzzled, but there are worse ways to spend an evening. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond