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