“You may be just a number to them, but you’re more than that to me…here pull up a chair it’s nice and roomy.”

CAGED (1950)

Writer Virginia Kellogg (White Heat 1949) offers us a doozy with this story directed by John Cromwell (Dead Reckoning 1947)

Eleanor Parker is Maria Allen, thrust into the prison system run by a well-meaning warden Ruth Benton played by the inimitable Agnes Moorehead. As in any good women in prison flick, it requires the sadistic matron to roil the exploitation brew with lots of dehumanizing antics like a good head shaving or dare I mention it, a kitten killing. So here’s to Hope Emerson’s mean-spirited Evelyn Harper, kitten killing, bon bon eating, Midnight Romance reading, prison caboose with a mean on, that makes Ida Lupino look like Saint Joan. Also starring one of my new favorites and a staple to these great gritty noirs the sprite Jan Sterling, Betty Garde, Ellen Corby, and Jane Darwell.