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Well, it wasn't Alaska but Arizona where Maisie Ravier winds up next in MGM's third film of 10 for the blonde adventuress. While Arizona does have a history of gold mining, I don't know if there ever was another rush around 1940 as this film portrays. But that's the setting for "Gold Rush Maisie."

Enroute for another job singing in the Hula Parlor Café in Truxton, Arizona, Maisie's car breaks down. That leads to a night with a very unhospitable Bill Anders and his sidekick, and then to an adventure with a horde of prospectors who come in search of quick riches. These are mostly families that travel the farm planting and harvesting cycles in the Western states.

Maisie helps the folks set up a tent camp and file their claims, and in the end Anders melts a little. Some good drama and good neighborliness in this film. Ann Sothern continues to please audiences, and Lee Bowman is the grouchy Anders who finally softens up. The rest of the cast all are very good.

There's more drama than comedy in this film. Here are the better funny lines.

Maisie Ravier, "When I first saw you, I thought you were a stinker. Now I've changed my mind. You're not that good."

Maisie Ravier, "I'm not really ignorant - just uneducated."

Maisie Ravier, "As I look back on it, you've been awfully, awfully kind, in a sort of nasty way."

As usual, Ann Sothern is the excite-able "Maisie", stranded again, SOMEWHERE. They show joshua trees, so she must have been somewhere in the mojave desert. Although that was probably just a backlot with a backdrop. When her car breaks down, she bumps into Bill (Lee Bowman) and Fred ( Slim Summerville), who get her car going again, but success is short lived. Now Maisie bumps into the Davis family, scratching for gold. Virginia Weidler is the daughter... you may recognize her from "The Women", where she was over-the-top, saccharin sweet and emotional. Here, she's just a normal kid. This one has a pretty thin plot... they had a couple ideas, and put lots of talking in between. Takes a while to get going, but does get better in the second half. Just my opinion. Could be wrong. It DOES have the moral lesson, as Maisie films usually do. See what you think. It's on Turner Classics now and then. Writer C.W. Collison had come up with "Maisie", but then he croaked young in 1941. Collison's death didn't stop them from making movies about Maisie... they were still making them in 1960! Collison had also written the Oscar nominated "Mogambo", with Clark Gable. This Maisie chapter directed by several different folks, apparently due to illness.

Maisie (Ann Sothern) heads west where she helps a poor family trying to strike it rich as prospectors. Sothern is as delightful as ever. Lee Bowman is fine in yet another crappy male lead role in this series. For some reason they always paired Maisie up with jerks. Maybe so people wouldn't complain when she moved on to another guy in the next movie. Slim Summerville is great as Bowman's friend. He does some classic double takes. Virginia Weidler is likable as the little girl who takes a shine to Maisie. Rest of the cast includes Scotty Beckett, Mary Nash, Irving Bacon, John F. Hamilton, and Eddy Waller.

Another enjoyable Maisie movie. Not the best but solid. The Maisie-meets-the-Joads element is nice. One odd moment that stood out to me was when Maisie told the family she's helping that she took a swing at a guy once for daring to call her a gold digger, followed by awkward nervous laughter from the family. Such a weird scene.

Back in the old big studio days MGM didn't send their expensive cast and crews out on location if they could possibly keep them back home on the Culver City lot, especially if the story was set in the Arizona desert as this one is. This 1940 studio-bound production is a curiosity: full of phony sound-stage sets pretending to be exteriors, obvious painted backdrops and fuzzy process shots. Ann Southern and Virginia Weilder even have a big sister-little sister talk while walking on a treadmill as a process-shot desert background is projected in the background. No production shot today could get away with all this fakery. On the plus side, the good-hearted screenplay co-written by Mary C. McCall, Jr, president of the Screen Writer's Guild, is one of the few scripts, other than "The Grapes of Wrath," to have dealt sympathetically with the plight of Dust-bowl farm families who moved west in search of a better life.

These Maisie B-programmers were all based on a tough-as-nails (yet tea-totaling) 30-ish Brooklyn dame who finds herself in some oddball situation where she's broke &/or stranded and manages to get herself out of the jam and help &/or enlighten nearly everyone she comes into contact with (usually landing a $25/week job in the process). Here she's finds herself STRANDED in the middle of Arizona in a broken down Model A (the thing's just 9 years old and had the snot beat out of it) 100-miles late for a singing job in some dive. She meets an anti-social Lee Bowman and his inexplicable sidekick Slim Summerville (imagine Tom Poston's role on Newhart without the humor) and encounters a family of displaced Arkansas sharecroppers traveling to a gold strike (imagine Grapes of Wrath) after her job falls through. The gold strike is back near Bowman's property. This is one of the most meandering and dull Maisies ever made (remember the production was plagued by a change in directors). Absolutely no drama--- the only mildly curious aspect is why Bowman is the way he is (did he discover gold and is hidin' it?). Whatever buildup there is in the plot is deflated at the end, except for the 'Gold is where you find it' theme. It's also got the tragic Scotty Beckett in the role of the sharecropper's kid. Ann's still quite cute and makes with the snappy comebacks, but this entry amounts to nothing much more worthy than a rainy day time waster. Yawn...