Caged (1950)

Posted by BmacV

First Encounter: Sometime in the early 1970s, living in Toronto and working, that week, the graveyard shift in the old M&D (music and drama) section of the Globe & Mail. Put the bulldog to bed about 12:35 a.m. With good connections, home by about one, just in time for the local station’s nightly late movie (and its library was enviable). Poured a Teacher’s and soda and flicked on the 13" black-and-white. Feet up on the sofa. Then, one unforgettable night, Caged!; think my drink may have even gone flat. Riveted from the very first line: “Pile out, you tramps – It’s the end of the line.”

During the inexorable course of this seven-cigarette (the highest accolade) cinematic banquet, gorgon after gorgon unleashed line after insolently insinuating line. Only one other movie, and from the same year, caught in almost identical circumstances at pretty much the same time of my life, resonated so astoundingly: Sunset Blvd. They’re still my two favorite movies, but, backed into a Sophie’s Choice, I’ll stick with Caged. Both have gotten better over the years – but then there’s nothing quite like the first time, is there?

The Background: John Cromwell made some swell movies (Ann Vickers, Of Human Bondage, The Enchanted Cottage, The Goddess, maybe even Night Song), but his work in the noir cycle always struck me as tepid: Dead Reckoning, The Racket, The Company She Keeps. Caged blazes at a higher order of magnitude, owing in large part to the high order of talent committed to it.

Producer Jerry Wald – no stranger to gorgons, as these credits will show – already had Mildred Pierce, Humoresque, Possessed, Dark Passage, Key Largo and The Damned Don’t Cry behind him (and can thus be forgiven Flamingo Road). Virginia Kellogg (who wrote the story), fresh from T-Men and White Heat, together with Bernard Schoenfeld (Phantom Lady, The Dark Corner), penned the unsentimental, epigrammatic script. Carl Guthrie (Her Kind of Man, Cry Wolf, Flaxy Martin, Backfire) lighted and shot the film; the bars on the cell block and over the high windows suspend the dingy, dank prison in a reticulation of shadows, chillier and more ominous than William Daniels’ in the more brutal Brute Force. Max Steiner (no introduction necessary) composed the score. Last but far from least, the cast....But they’re better off woven into their story.

The Story: That “Pile out, you tramps” gets snarled by the driver of a jitney bringing a load of “new fish” to a women’s correctional facility somewhere in a nameless city in an anonymous state where there’s plenty of snow (for no good reason I want to think Indiana). In this load there’s a scared 19-year-old, Marie Allen (Eleanor Parker), whose husband was killed during a $40 robbery; she was in the car, and so was charged as accomplice. A shrewd intake nurse cottons on to the fact that Allen’s “expecting company;” she’s slapped into quarantine, where Jane Darwell sits watch. Soon enough she’s assigned the number 93850 and to her ward, which Brobdingnagian matron Evelyn Harper (Hope Emerson) runs like a private racket (“Sit in this chair. It’s kinda...roomy,” and “Maybe you’ve got a habit that’s hard to break. Cigarettes...or something?”). When it turns out that neither Allen nor her family is likely to prove a cash cow, Harper abandons her pregnant charge to scrubbing the floors – with lye.

To unfurl much more of the plot would be, well, unchivalrous. Let it suffice to list the rest of the principal players. There’s the butch “booster,” or head of a shoplifting ring, Kitty Stark – the marvelous Betty Garde (who sang Aunt Eller in the Broadway premiere of Oklahoma!): “If you stay in here too long, you don’t think about guys at all. You just get out of the habit.”

Long Queen Bee of Cell Block C, Stark is soon to be dethroned by an old rival, haughty “vice queen” Elvira Powell (Lee Patrick, scoring a personal best), who’s taking a light slap on the wrist rather than sing before grand jury. Allen (“She’s a cute trick”) becomes the objective correlative of the Stark/Powell power struggle, the distant apex of an isosceles triangle.

Others doing time include dim-bulb Emma (Ellen Corby, who receives unaccountably high billing), “common pross” Smoochie (Jan “I’ve got news for you” Sterling) and, almost stealing the movie as ancient lifer Millie, Gertrude Hoffman (“One more like you would be just so much velvet”). Upstairs, as reformist warden Ruth Benton, Agnes Moorehead does as well as expected as the film’s social conscience, but the role’s just not so freighted and coded as the others’ (she would have, however, fared quite well among the harpies). Alas, there must have been scenes with Esther Howard that were cut from the final print; she’s glimpsed but twice, one of a crowd in the prison yard.

Along the way, Cromwell modulates this grim stretch in stir with vignettes ranging from the Gothic (a cadaverous, tubercular inmate in quarantine, bidding Allen “Welcome to Lysol Lane;” Stark’s emerging “stirbugs” from solitary, a mass of tics and shorted synapses – “Quit shakin’ the tambourine,” she snaps to an apologetic Powell), to the poignant (the soughing whistle of a passing train leads the inmates to fall silent, turning to the window that reveals nothing but a cold shard of sky). In another set-piece at Christmastime, the women sing “Bird in a Cage” like combat-bound conscripts on a troop train, wondering if they’ll ever again know the meager comforts of home; one of them breaks into a lovely, impromptu dance solo to harmonica obbligato. The script stays alert to the unnatural isolation of life “behind the iron,” its diurnal regimentation and nocturnal terrors. There’s the inchoate yearning of the women to return to the world they were wrested from – and to the realities of babies abandoned to an impersonal bureaucracy, of families drifting apart, of loneliness (emotional and physical), despair and even suicide.

Of course, looming over all this is an inexpungible sense of dread, chiefly in the person of Emerson’s matron Harper, with her wheedling schoolgirl’s voice in a linebacker’s body. She’s the malevolent engine of the plot (and received an Academy Award nomination for the role, as did Parker). But Parker’s Allen is the protagonist, journeying from a terrified young widow to a savvy hard case. When she’s finally released, it’s to a hotsy-totsy jazz riff as she steps into a waiting sedan and accepts a light (plus a hand on her knee) from one of her new male friends from freeside. When asked what to do with her file, Benton, watching from her office window, replies “Keep it active.”

There was a time when Caged rolled around with some regularity on local and even cable stations, a time which seems to be no more. Never released commercially on either VHS or DVD, it may be the best movie ever that keeps sinking deeper into obscurity. (And it’s little short of scandalous that Caged used to turn up on lists – obviously compiled by the callow – of the worst movies ever made. True, the dames-behind-bars movie quickly ran to a sexploitation sub-genre – you could sense this coming even in 1955's Women’s Prison – but Caged, for all its frankness, never so sullies itself; if anything, it can be seen as proto-feminist). More than just about any post-Code movie up to 1950, Caged pushed the envelope. It’s an altogether astonishing piece of work.

Kindly omit flowers.