Women-in-Prison Movies
Caged Heat, 1974
"White-hot desires meting cold prison steel!" proclaimed the posters for this debut feature from Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs). Unjustly convicted Erica Gavin arrives at a prison inhabited by tough-gal types at their apogee, or maybe their parody. Special mention goes to Barbara Steele, zombie princess of 1960s Italian horror films, as the prison's grim, wheelchair-bound superintendent, and to John Cale, formerly of the Velvet Underground, for his haunting harmonica score. Caged Heat just noses out Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS — starring statuesque Dyanne Thorne as a Nazi camp warden who performs "medical experiments" to prove that women could withstand more pain than men — as the definitive WIP movie in a great year for the genre.