Maisie (1939)

Film: Maisie (1939)

Stars: Ann Sothern, Robert Young, Ruth Hussey, Ian Hunter, Cliff Edwards, John Hubbard

Director: Edwin L. Marin

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Ann Sothern: click here to learn more about Ms. Sothern (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Ann Sothern spent most of her early career, after moving from Minneapolis to Los Angeles after dropping out of college, jumping from studio to studio with none of them feeling like a good fit.  RKO, Columbia, & finally MGM were her home throughout the 1930's and it honestly looked like Sothern at the age of thirty was going to be one of those actors who got a chance at Hollywood but couldn't graduate to proper stardom.  That was until Maisie came along.  Originally intended as a vehicle for Jean Harlow (who had starred in a different Wilson Collison property, Red Dust, to legendary success), when Harlow died unexpectedly the movie went to Sothern.  To the surprise of many, it was a smash hit for the studio, and Sothern quickly signed a star contract with MGM making in total ten Maisie pictures for the studio over the following decade.  We're going to do just one of the films this month, the first one, which starred Sothern opposite Robert Young, another future TV star.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Maisie (Sothern), a burlesque dancer lured out to Wyoming under the pretense of being the star in a new show there, only to find out that the show has already closed, leaving her penniless in the middle-of-nowhere.  She meets a guy named Slim (Young), who has no use for women, but thanks to tagging along with him she finds work as a maid for Slim's employer Cliff's (Hunter) wife Sybil (Hussey), who is having an affair despite promising her husband she'd be more faithful.  Slowly Slim & Maisie fall for each other, their initial dislike turning into attraction, but a tragic car accident leads Cliff to find out his wife is still having an affair, and in the process, he kills himself.  Meanwhile, Sybil, prior to Cliff's death, tricks Slim into thinking that it's Maisie having the affair (with Cliff) and after he confronts her she storms off, only to return when Slim is tried for Cliff's murder.  In the end, Slim & Maisie end up together after Cliff's death is ruled a suicide, and find out that Cliff left the two of them the ranch in his will so they can have a proper happily ever after.

The movie is cute, if predictable, and it's easy to see why audiences fell for Sothern in this role.  Up until this point in her career, a lot of her work had been in the wrong genre, but Sothern was made for romantic comedy, and this fits her like a glove.  She gets a lot of the great one-liners off here, playing Maisie as a sassy broad, perhaps in a way that better suits the role than even Harlow would've been able to achieve.  While Harlow was always a damaged blonde star, frequently in her best roles feeling like she's got a little bit of desperation behind the bottle blonde look (I'm such a fan of hers, she was a previous star in this series and was mesmerizing in Red Dust and Dinner at Eight), this material needs someone to play it more broadly, and Sothern understands that.  This isn't breaking new ground, but it's harmless & fun.

The Maisie films would become Sothern's calling card until her turn in television.  Over the coming weeks we'll continue to look at her work in film, but I wanted to point out that she is a weird entry in this year's series.  Unlike someone like Lucille Ball, she wasn't unsuccessful in this era-the Maisie films kept some of MGM's more prestigious, expensive-and-less-profitable classic dramas of the era from bankrupting the studio.  But she wasn't really a seriously-considered actress, not in the way that women like Joan Crawford & Greta Garbo had been for the studio, and despite her successes isn't really thought of today for her work during this era.  Keep that in mind in the coming weeks; Sothern isn't the tale of a woman who couldn't make it in pictures, but instead was a star who always felt like she got the short end of the stick until television gave her a second chance.