Caged! (1950)
- General info
- Available formats
- Synopsis:
- Pregnant nineteen-year old Marie Allen is sentenced to prison as an accessory to robbery. The warden, Ruth Benton dedicated to reforming even the most hardened of the prisoners, deals fairly with Marie, even upon learning of her condition. The naive Marie comes up against tough block matron Evelyn Harper and must decide whether accepting the friendship of the toughest prisoners will rub off on her and affect the future of her unborn child.
- Actors:
- Eleanor Parker, Agnes Moorehead, Ellen Corby, Hope Emerson, Betty Garde, Jan Sterling, Lee Patrick, Olive Deering, Jane Darwell, Gertrude Michael, Sheila MacRae, George Baxter, Guy Beach, Don Beddoe, Gail Bonney, Lovyss Bradley, Jean Calhoun, Claudia Cauldwell, Pauline Creasman, Marjorie Crossland
- Directors:
- John Cromwell
- Producers:
- Jerry Wald
- Voiced By:
- Zon Murray
- Writers:
- Virginia Kellogg, Bernard C. Schoenfeld
- Others:
- Bernard C. Schoenfeld
- Genres:
- Classics, Drama
- Collections:
- Award Winners, Lions on the Lido
- Awards:
More like Caged!
Reviews (2) of Caged!
Doing Time with Caged - Caged! review by griggs
Having watched Brute Force this Noirvember and now Caged, with Orange Is the New Black lurking in the background, it felt like the missing reel between men’s prison noir and modern women-behind-bars TV. Same bars, same grim routines, but a very different climate. The men get shivs, sweat and grand gestures; the women get humiliation, haircuts and their identities quietly filed away.
On paper it’s a routine 1950 “women in prison” melodrama. In practice, John Cromwell steers it into something closer to horror. Eleanor Parker arrives as a scared young widow, jailed as an accessory to a botched robbery, and the camera keeps boxing her in with bars, door frames and staring faces as her softness is scraped off scene by scene. Hope Emerson’s Matron Harper isn’t just a monster; she’s the petty workplace tyrant given concrete walls and almost total power.
You can feel the Production Code holding things back, but the film still smuggles in what OITNB later makes explicit: cliques, fragile alliances, the system nudging women to police each other while pretending it’s “rehabilitation”. And plenty of what humiliates Piper Chapman decades later – strip searches, delousing, public shaming – is already grinding Parker down. Where Dassin’s Brute Force explodes in sweaty martyrdom, Caged settles for something bleaker – the sense that the institution has got under her skin.
By the end I felt angry, impressed and slightly hollowed out. If Brute Force is the punch, Caged is the bruise that keeps catching your eye the next day.
Prison Drama. - Caged! review by Steve
Made by Warner Brothers, the home of the prison film, this is the best women-in-prison picture ever made! The story is familiar: a naive and exploitable first offender (Eleanor Parker) arrives at the Big House as a 19 years old. She is consumed by fear, but among the crazy lifers, the mentally sick and the dumb victims, she transforms into a tough convict. A survivor.
It has a liberal perspective which asserts that punishment further harms these luckless dupes and a progressive approach would be more effective. But there is no money for therapists and teachers. It creates a powerful impression of the institution: the brutal hierarchy, the crooked officers, the insensitive parole board.
Eleanor Parker is phenomenal as the inexperienced girl who goes into prison pregnant and is forced to give up her baby by law. She breaks down and rebuilds herself in a new shell, like the more resilient cons. Hope Emerson is formidable as the butch screw who runs the wing. Jan Sterling excels as an uneducated sex worker.
The slang is dated, but this is a credible drama which was intelligently researched (by screenwriter Virginia Kellogg). Yes, there's a shower scene, but this is no exploitation flick! Though surely it invented some of the genre cliches. It's so powerful because of the pitiful and futile realities of the penal system, and Parker's heartbreaking performance.