Gold Rush Maisie

In the third movie of the series, Maisie is a gold digger -- the kind who swings a pickaxe and has only blisters to show for it. When folks strike gold in the great expanses beyond Phoenix, Brooklyn-born Maisie figures she can use her showbiz talents to find work in the boomtown settlement sure to spring up near the claims. Her plans take a turn after she befriends a migrant Arkansas family even more desperate for a lucky break than she is. Ann Sothern -- snapping off one-liners, putting the kibosh on brash flirts, getting slightly loopy on spiked hot lemonade -- is again a delight as Maisie Ravier in a film that, via its depictions of uprooted sharecroppers, has overtones of the cinema landmark released just months earlier: The Grapes of Wrath. Former Our Gang regular Scotty Beckett and Virginia Weidler of The Philadelphia Story portray two children in the Dust Bowl family Maisie helps.

• comedy
• drama