And so, at last, we find ourselves on our final outing with Maisie Ravier. Before we get into Undercover Maisie, however, I’d like to offer an elegy for the Maisie films that never were and must only exist in our hearts and imaginations. Maisie the Pledge, wherein Maisie enters college as a non-traditional student, joins a sorority, discovers that the dean’s wife is embezzling from the university, exposes her, and falls in love with an English professor. Maisie on the Orient Express, which finds Maisie solving a not-too-vicious murder on a snowed-in train, becoming engaged to the movie’s Poirot stand-in during the final minutes. Maisie Goes to Washington, where Maisie visits her mother’s retirement home and discovers elder mistreatment happening there, and she goes all the way to the Supreme Court to put a stop to it, charming a handsome young lawmaker in the process. Chairman Maisie, which finds Maisie securing the acquittal of an innocent man by finding the still-living supposed victim while breaking out of being sequestered, all while softening the heart of a hard-nosed district attorney. Mayday for Maisie, Whoopsie Maisie (Brandon’s suggestion), Natural History Maisie . . . . We could have had it all. Of course, it’s entirely possible that Maisie did all of these things in her radio show that ran concurrently with the later films, but we’re not a vintage radio comedy website, and although I can foresee myself occasionally checking in on the audio adventures of our heroine if I start to feel the need for a little Maisie in my life, I’m not about to dive headlong into that rabbit hole. 

We open in classic Maisie fashion; she’s got a job offer somewhere distant and needs to make her way there. For Undercover Maisie, this means that we find our heroine in Los Angeles trying to make her way back to New York, where she has an offer for a job as a bubble bath demonstrator (as she says, it’s good, clean work). She meets a seemingly kindly elderly woman who needs a travel companion for the long drive, and she convinces Maisie to use the specially installed glove compartment mini-safe to hide her valuables, then ditches Maisie when she goes into the gas station to get road snacks. Just as an innocent and delighted Maisie notes that they won’t be seeing any men for a while so she can get onions on her hamburgers, the woman drives off. We then cut to Maisie giving her statement to “bunco” detective Paul Scott (Barry Nelson), who investigates con artists and schemes, and he’s so impressed by Maisie’s photographic memory and perfect recall that he pressures the chief of police into hiring her as an undercover officer. Maisie goes through an accelerated police academy course in montage, but when she goes to the gym to learn self-defense, most of the other trainees (and the trainer) find her gorgeous presence so distracting that she’s assigned to do her hand-to-hand training one-on-one with Chip Dolan (Mark Daniels), a bunco cop whom Scott previously busted down for a past failure that’s never quite clear. 

There’s not quite a love triangle here, but the tension is strong. Dolan has no real designs on Maisie; she simply sympathizes with him in a way that Scott responds to jealously, especially when she asks Scott to give Dolan another chance. Scott, for his part, is too by-the-book for his own good, and overly devoted to his job. On the night that Maisie passes her civil service exam, Scott wants to put her right to work, but Dolan convinces the chief to let Maisie have one night to relax and celebrate. Scott turns up at her apartment later and invites her out for a night on the town, but it turns out that this was a cover to catch a pickpocket at a night club, and Maisie’s rightfully peeved at the deception. Scott slowly softens toward Maisie, and toward Dolan too, and gets the other man his job back. 

For Maisie’s first official assignment, she goes to see a fortune teller named Amor (Leon Ames), who channels her character’s dead fiancé and mother to tell her that she will soon meet someone who will present her with a foolproof investment opportunity. Later that day, she “coincidentally” meets Gilfred Rogers, a real estate broker. A trap is laid for the con artists, but when she crouches down, she accidentally reveals her slip, which has her name embroidered on it. Rogers, deducing the deception, congratulates Maisie for passing her final test, claiming to be a fellow law enforcement officer who was secretly confirming her readiness for undercover work. He and his accomplices slip away, and Maisie is embarrassed, determining that she has to catch them herself to make up for her failure. She finds a scrap of evidence that leads to a function where the con artist group is planning to scam a large number of G.I.s out of the funds they were given to build homes, but before she can do anything about it, the trio of con artists binds and gags her. “Amor” is a thief, but not a murderer, and he plans to merely keep her captive until the checks they’ve acquired clear, then they’ll leave her somewhere that the police will find her and be on their merry way. Co-conspirator Mrs. Canford (Gloria Holden, aka Dracula’s Daughter) convinces her husband that there’s no way that they can let Maisie go alive, which leads to some pretty high stakes. 

The film’s biggest weakness is that it feels like it’s aping Harry Beaumont’s previous outing, Maisie Goes to Reno, a little too closely. Maisie is once again held against her will by two men and a woman, the latter of whom slaps her across the face in a moment of fury. What differentiates it is that “Amor” is a much more interesting character than the leader of the conspirators in Nevada. Maisie is also more physically capable this time around; when she’s slapped, she immediately uses some of her self-defense techniques, only failing because she’s outnumbered. Maisie is a character whose comedy is usually verbal or situational; she’s quick with a retort or witticism, or the humor comes from her failing to fit in socially, as in Maisie Was a Lady and Up Goes Maisie. Here, she gets to do some good physical work, although the film’s attempts to hide Maisie’s more broad-shouldered and muscular stunt double are about as effectively convincing as the miniature helicopter flying around Pasadena last time. We do get to see Maisie keep her wits about her, though, as she finds ways to sneak messages out during her captivity and even leaves a clue about where she’s being taken on a road sign by leaving behind the same trademark undergarment that gave her away to the con artists earlier. The film hits its most exciting point with only two minutes of runtime left, as Mrs. Canford and her husband march Maisie off into the brush on the side of the road to shoot her. Maisie pretends to fall, gathering a handful of sand, and uses it Dale Gribble style to get the drop on her captors. She takes a rolling tumble over the brow of a hill with Canford, and she spends the last 45 seconds of the movie judo flipping both of the Canfords, which was a step down from Maisie flying around, but was nonetheless very cute and fun. 

And that’s where we leave Maisie. She’s engaged (again), seemingly ready to settle down, but we’ll never really know. The character may have been getting a little long in the tooth (when an APB is put out for the missing Officer Ravier, she’s described as being 25; Ann Sothern was nearly 40), but I believe that Maisie could have carried on. At the very least, she’ll always be where we left her: ready to start a new adventure, once again rolling her boulder up a hill, ready to change the lives of everyone she meets. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond