Let me preface this review by saying that I have watched ALL Of the other nine "Maisie" movies. There are reasons this is the least often seen film in this series. This is not a comedy. This is a serious film on the plight of migrant farm workers which pretends to be a comedy so the general public will watch it. As a movie on "social comment' is is not a bad movie. As a comedy featuring the Maisie character it is dreadful, just dreadfully bad. The Maisie character is one of the most beloved characters in B films of the 1940s. Here she is totally and completely out of place -- a bubbly showgirl wannabe plonked down in the middle of the Arizona desert. This is also one of the most depressing movies I have ever seen from this period. The entire movie moves from one disturbing theme to the next, with little to ease the tone. There are some especially disturbing scenes. There are scenes of children starving. families who are forced to sleep in tents without adequate water to drink. .ANd n and on Never has "real life' be so present in a 1940s movie.I love Ann Sothern. I love the Maisie series. I do not care for this movie.

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.

"Gold Rush Maisie" has Maisie (Ann Sothern) prospecting in this 1940 entry into the series. Maisie's car breaks down, and she becomes stranded and has to ask for help from an isolated, nasty rancher (Lee Bowman) who shares his house with another sourpuss (Slim Somerville). These films all followed the same formula - Maisie's charm, no-nonsense attitude and warmth melt the icebergs she meets. Later on, she meets a family of farmers who have lost their farm and become migrant workers. Now they're on their way to prospect for gold. Maisie is stunned at how little they have and sets out to help them.The atmosphere of "Gold Rush Maisie" is a little more down than usual, and the actions of the rancher played by Lee Bowman are inexplicable. First he's nasty, then he abruptly puts the moves on Maisie, becomes nasty again and later, after she tells him off, he becomes nice. Bowman was Sothern's leading man in the series more than once, as was James Craig - I prefer James Craig, who had more energy and variety in his acting.One does really feel for the family, and that helps to hold one's interest. Sothern does her usual bang-up job. The previous reviewer has it right - she would have been a bigger star in an earlier era. But if huge movie stardom eluded her, she still played some wonderful roles, and her two series are a treasure, as is the actress herself.

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...