Caged

You know you’re in noir territory when the first line of dialogue is: “Pile out, you tramps, it’s the end of the line.” Centered around a stunning personality transformation by Eleanor Parker over the course of 96 minutes, John Cromwell’s Caged remains, even today, an edgy, nihilistic prison drama that paints incarceration as a soulless (yet gorgeously lit) hellscape where society’s female criminals marinate in the stink of their own ruination. Parker plays Marie Allen, the prison inmate who arrives a young, mousy girl but learns to survive by expecting nothing good. The film’s only source of moral justice is prison superintendent Ruth Benton (Agnes Moorehead) who constantly battles with the sadistic, taunting matron Evelyn Harper (Hope Emerson). Described as a “dyke movie” by Bette Davis, the female-on-female violence and relatively overt lesbian content (“If you stay in here too long, you don’t think of guys at all; you just get right out of the habit”) made the film way ahead of its time, while Cromwell’s direction and Guthrie’s camera work create scenes of aesthetic brilliance: the head-shaving, solitary confinement sequence is thoroughly riveting. The inmates are involved in outside rackets, shoplifting, even murder, yet with so many characters choreographed on screen and bored voices singing in the background on occasion, the film strangely has the feel of a musical at times. By the end, Marie’s persona is hardened and hollow: in one electrifying scene, a fur-clad socialite tours the prison and makes lasting eye contact with Marie, perhaps each reflecting on what might have been.