by Douglas Messerli
Virginia Kellogg (screenplay, based on the book by Kellogg
and Bernard C. Schoenfield), John Cromwell (director) Caged / 1950
19-year-old Marie Allen (Eleanor Parker) has been sent to
prison as an accessory to a small-time botched robbery by her equally young
husband, who was killed in the event. We’re not even sure whether or not she
knew what her husband was up to; all she knows is that she loved him, and they
were both near-starving.
Worse yet, in
the prison entry check-up, she discovers that she is pregnant, and is told that
she will have to give up the baby for adoption. Even her mother refuses to take
in the child.
Yes, this is
the “grandmother” all those dozens of “dykes in jail” movies that appeared
after, itself the granddaughter of Broadway’s 1920s drama Chicago. Certainly we get enough tough talk and stark realist
behavior—including the suicide of one of the prison’s denizens, Helen (Sheila
MacRae) after she is rejected yet again for parole, sent back into the system
since the parole officer cannot find a job for her—that we might think this is
yet another cheap pot-boiler B-grade movie.
But in John
Cromwell’s Caged we get something
closer to Anatole Litvak’s classier 1948 film on mental illness, The Snake Pit, with Olivia de Haviland.
Like Litvak’s insider view of a terrifying institution, Cromwell’s work has a
loud message on its mind. Ranging from total innocence to, by movie’s end, a
hardened ex-prisoner, Parker gives a stellar, Oscar-nominated performance that takes
us through the step-by-step degradations and learned lessons that turns her
from a salvageable young being to a woman, who even the wise prison-head,
Benton, recognizes: “She’ll be back.”
One of the
film’s greatest accusations goes to the political system itself, where monsters
like Harper are given the patronage of state political hacks, while the good
Benton works to reform the situation with the perpetual fear of being fired.
But there are
plenty of guilty figures that work toward the corruption of Marie Allen,
including the “buster” (a professional shoplifter) such as Kitty Stark (Betty
Garde) and the even higher-up gangster moll, Elvira Powell (Lee Patrick) who
ultimately convinces Allen that she’ll never get parole unless she accepts her
patronage.
In this turned
upside-down world, breaking the law from inside is the only to get you out.
Unless you play along with the evil-doers you’re doomed to the endless boredom,
punishment, and tortures of prison life.
Of course, these
facts have been a staple of male prison dramas for decades. We all know that
once you’re locked away behind bars, there is no way out: the system makes
certain that you will survive only by recreating your crimes over and over.
Even in the very
first scenes, most of the women entering the prison, we perceive, have been
there before. Emma Barber (Ellen Corby), standing in for them all, greets her
old prison mates and prison staff members with hearty recognition, noting body
changes and similarities to their former selves as if she were genuinely happy
to see them again. It is only the newcomers, like Allen, who are aghast.
And yes, as in
all of these women-in-prison tales there is something campy about their female
camaraderie. But then, even the wealthy women on the up-and-up, such as those
in Clare Booth Luce’s The Women are
not so very different—perhaps just a bit meaner and more destructive. All-women
movies, mostly directed by males, do not generally present a very nice picture
of the female sex.
Los Angeles,
September 22, 2017
Reprinted from World
Cinema Review (September 2017).
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