Women-in-Prison Movies
Caged, 1950
Trying to save her husband after he was fatally injured in a heist, Marie Allen (Eleanor Parker) is wrongly convicted and sent to a women's prison where the warden (Agnes Moorehead) may have progressive ideas, but the real boss is Hope Emerson's ultra-butch giantess of a lifer. "Let's you and me get acquainted, honey," she growls to Marie. "You may be a number to others but not to me." When Marie discovers she's pregnant, the infirmary nurse asks if the father can help pay the bills. Marie says the father is her husband, and he's dead. "Another bill for the state!" the nurse snarls. "Get dressed." Co-written by Virginia Kellogg (who'd worked on the 1940s crime epics T-Men and White Heat) and directed by John Cromwell (father of L.A. Confidential's corrupt police captain James Cromwell), Caged earned Oscar nominations for Parker, Emerson and the screenplay. Gallows humor and acerbic aphorisms abound; as inmate Kitty Stark (Betty Garde) says, "In this cage, you get tough or you get killed."