Caged

We all know that prison is never straight up.  Either you have to be someone’s bitch, prove your toughness, there’s a corrupt guard or warden or people just want to kill you ‘cause you’re not the same race.  You can’t just be left alone and serve your term.  One way or another some shit’s gonna go down.  In Caged we mostly deal with the corrupt guard formula.

A young woman, only 19, gets imprisoned for being an accessory to armed robbery.  Her husband robbed a gas station for 40 bucks.  She was waiting in the car for him and didn’t quite realize what he was doing but he was killed and she got arrested.  This tells you what kind of tragic shit we’re dealing with here.  She gets a 1-15 year prison sentence for that.  Marie Allen is played by Eleanor Parker (Detective Story, The Sound of Music) and she’s been sent to an all female prison.  All of the other broads that arrive with her have been to prison before and look real rough.  Marie looks so scared and lost and has no idea what to expect or do.  The guards and officers that take her information and give her a physical are pretty tough also and don’t have much sympathy because they see fucking dirtbags everyday so they’ve turned that part of themselves off.  

After Marie gets checked out we learn that she’s pregnant.  Shit man.  Being pregnant in prison must be pretty awful.  So after a quick visit with the very kind warden, Benton played by Agnes Moorehead (Citizen Cane, Pollyanna), we meet our villain, Harper played by Hope Emerson (Adam’s Rib, Peter Gunn).  At first she seems kinda nice but then she starts making comments about her “taking care” of her girls if they have money.  Marie doesn’t have any money so Harper puts her to work scrubbing the floor of the fairly large cell block where the inmates stay.  They don’t have individual cells.  Instead it’s a sectioned off area with maybe about fifty people crammed into it.

Marie just tries to hang on for the first couple of months.  She tries to keep to herself and not cause trouble.  One of her cellmates is Kitty and she wants to recruit her to be a shoplifter on the outside.  In return she can get Marie out on parole sooner.  But Marie refuses, trying to keep straight.  However shit like Harper coming over and torturing the girls with stories of what she’s going to do that evening with a guy doesn’t make it easy.  The other girls talk about guys a lot and have a love-hate relationship with them.  They’ve all been in bad relationships with men but can’t deny that they need them and love them.

After Marie doesn’t get paroled by the pricks on the parole board she loses it.  She now thinks that she might never get out of there.  She becomes a bad girl and starts to rebel against the prison.  For example Marie finds a kitten in the yard one day and sneaks it back to her cell.  Of course she can’t keep the thing hidden for long and when Harper finds out Marie runs away from her, hides the kitten and then goes toe to toe with her.  The rest of the prisoners get riled up and they start to riot.  They completely destroy their cell block.  When it’s all over Marie goes to get the kitten but finds it dead.  Marie went into such a blind rage that she inadvertently killed what she was trying to protect.

The whole film must have been kinda shocking when it came out because this movie shows that prisons, even female prisons, have major problems and you don’t just go there, serve your term and leave.  It’s a fight for survival of not only your body but your mind.  If you’re not a criminal when you go in then they turn you into one.

I’m sure the most scandalous scene in this piece is when Harper shaves Marie’s head bald and throws her in solitary to punish her.  And this made me wonder why this is such a nasty thing to do because she didn’t physically beat Marie.  But then I realized it’s a spirit breaker.  You’re conscious of how you look and it’s not something that you’d think would affect your mood that much but have you ever gotten a bad haircut?  That shit really kinda sucks.  Shaving her head is meant to make her feel like less of a woman, like she doesn’t have control over anything.  It’s a dominating act that shows who is the alpha female of the group.  If Harper had just sent Marie to the hole then not much would have been accomplished.  Even if she buzzed her head and put her right back in the cell block it wouldn’t have been as effective.  But shaving her head, leaving her alone to think about who is in charge, what the others will think and how long it will take to grow back makes her neurotic and panicky.  Harper is such a goddamn bitch.

Caged acme out in 1950 and I can imagine it being pretty eye opening at the time.  And I think it has even more of an impact because it’s a women’s prison.  In order to do research for the film the screenwriter had herself incarcerated for a while.  The script was put together based on her observations and experiences and it lends a real grittiness to the whole thing.  So add this one to the list of awesome prison flicks.