#maisie

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…

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…

It’s 1946, the war is over, and like so many women of her generation, our beloved Maisie Ravier finds herself out of work now that the men have come back from Over There and resumed their civilian work. After finishing a secretarial program, Maisie starts applying to various suitable jobs all over the city, but finds that everywhere she goes, the wolfish men who interview her are only interested…