Dassin’s film, for all its many virtues, treats its inmates as victims. In some ways, in fact, you might argue that Caged is more honest than Brute Force when it comes to its characters. You just get out of the habit”-but like Jules Dassin’s 1947 men-in-prison picture Brute Force, Caged is a film that finds serious faults with the penal system. This film might have some elements that have been appropriated as camp stereotypes-Kitty Stark tells Marie suggestively at one point, “Get this through your head: if you stay in here too long, you don’t think of guys at all. For camp purposes, this teases the audience with expressions of the dominant/submissive relationship, but if this is the stuff of S&M fantasy, it can also be the stuff of serious drama. It’s a trope of this subgenre that the real danger always comes from the guards, not the other inmates. Miss Harper runs roughshod over the girls, demanding money for protection and dishing out brutal punishments for small infractions. The prison is run by a stern but kindly warden named Benton (played with intelligence and sensitivity by Agnes Moorehead), but it’s managed on the cell block level by a hulking monster named Evelyn Harper (Hope Emerson). She just wants to serve out the first ten months of her sentence until she can get paroled.īut things won’t be that easy. Her husband wound up dead and now Marie is in the joint where she’s told that she must “Get tough or die.” She’s recruited to be part of a gang run by a butch convict named Kitty Stark and her sidekick, Smoochie, but Marie politely refuses. That tradition reached its highest point with John Cromwell’s 1950 Caged, the Citizen Kane of Women In Prison flicks.Įleanor Parker stars as Marie Allen, an innocent nineteen year-old widow who has been sentenced from 1-to-15 years for sitting in a car while, unknown to her, her husband knocked over a gas station. But she’s drawing on a film tradition that back decades. Jenji Kohan’s Netflix series Orange Is The New Black is doing amazing things with the Women In Prison genre-creating a deeply moving, and often funny, portrait of life behind bars.
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