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