Caged (1950)

Directed by John Cromwell. Starring Eleanor Parker, Agnes Moorehead, Hope Emerson, Betty Garde, Ellen Corby, Jan Sterling, Lee Patrick, Sheila MacRae, George Baxter, Olive Deering, Jane Darwell, Don Beddoe.

The granddaddy (er, grandmama) of women’s prison flicks, the sort of shameless melodrama that makes jailbird life look a lot simpler and more eventfully harrowing than it actually is/was. One of the less exploitative examples of its type, put over by a punchy pace to its episodic narrative and good performances from most of the cast, with special marks to Emerson as the hateful prison matron. Parker plays a wilting flower, two months pregnant and incarcerated for being an accomplice in her husband’s botched armed robbery, who transforms into a hardened cynic in the merciless environment; Moorehead is the new superintendent with reform on her mind. Taut and atmospheric, but overwrought to the point of being unintentionally campy at times—no knock on its entertainment value, at least. Written by Virginia Kellogg and Bernard C. Schoenfeld from their story “Women Without Men”.

69/100