Review

This is your warning that there are spoilers ahead. If you don’t want any of the plot of Caged spoiled, stop reading now until you’ve seen the film.

What a delicious, delightful treat this movie is. Hope Emerson is the ultimate screen baddie, and this is the meatiest role she ever got as prison matron Evelyn Harper. Emerson’s Evelyn is queer-coded to the nines, and there’s very little subtext. We love Evil Gays. 

We love Evil Gays.

Eleanor Parker makes the biggest transformation of any of the characters in the film, going from a doe-eyed ingenue to a hardened criminal after losing her baby to adoption and finding out that the system is designed to keep her incarcerated, not help her transition to life on the outside. 

Agnes Moorehead plays a rare sympathetic role as prison superintendent Ruth Benton, a no-nonsense but very caring woman who works overtime in the cruel and corrupt system to make her prison a place for rehabilitation and healing, not punishment and brutality. 

Last but certainly not least, Betty Garde’s character Kitty Stark reminds one of Kate Mulgrew’s Red in Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black, so much so that one wonders if Mulgrew took inspiration from Garde. Garde as Kitty Stark is sardonic and hardened, but not unfeeling. She’s someone who’s had to play the cards she’s dealt, and she makes no apology for it. Seeing Evelyn break her is heartbreaking. But she gets what’s coming to her, thank God! 

Caged is streaming now on Watch TCM and was recently featured on Eddie Muller’s Noir Alley programming block on the channel.

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Cinephile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. Keep watching the world, one frame at a time.