Caged (Warner 1950, Eleanor Parker, Lee Patrick)

The class entry in women-behind-bars movies. As nineteen-year-old Parker sits in a car, waiting for her husband outside a gas station, she has no idea that she is an accomplice to a burglary in progress. When her husband is killed in the robbery attempt, she is arrested and sentenced to a term in a women’s prison filled with savage inmates and brutal guards. She struggles to retain her sanity throughout cruel mistreatment, a prison pregnancy, murders, and an inmate revolt. Remade as House of Women.

Caged screenwriter Virginia Kellogg spent two weeks researching her story at a woman’s prison and also visited a number of other penitentiaries.

production details
USA / Warner Bros. / 96 minutes / 1950-05-19

Director: John Cromwell
Producer: Jerry Wald
Cinematography: Carl E. Guthrie
Editor: Owen Marks
Music: Max Steiner
Script: Virginia Kellogg, Bernard C. Schoenfeld
Production Design: G.W. Berntsen, Charles H. Clarke

cast
Lee Patrick as Elvira Powell
Eleanor Parker as Marie Allen
Agnes Moorehead as Ruth Benton
Ellen Corby as Emma Barber
Hope Emerson as Evelyn Harper
Betty Garde as Kitty Stark
Jan Sterling as Smoochie
Olive Deering as June
Jane Darwell as Isolation Matron
Gertrude Michael as Georgia Harrison
Sheila MacRae as Helen
Gertrude Hoffmann as Millie Lewis
Queenie Smith as Marie’s Mother
Don Beddoe as Sam Walker
Esther Howard as Grace
Edith Evanson as Miss Barker
Grace Hayes as Mugging Matron (uncredited)
Taylor Holmes as Sen. Ted Donnolly (uncredited)
Nita Talbot as Inmate (uncredited)

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