Women's Prison (1955)

Tonight!

(1955)

Helene, convicted for the accidental vehicular manslaughter of a child, and Brenda, habitual ward of the state returning for a new stretch, are escorted by a kindly matron to their new home: the women's prison.

(L to r) Kindly escort, Helene, Brenda.

This particular women's prison is separated from a men's prison only by a thick wall and heavy guard. The do-nothing supervising warden Brock (Barry Kelley, last seen in these pages in The Asphalt Jungle) lets his sadistic second-in-command Amelia van Zandt rule the women's prison with a heavy hand, despite the frequent objections of Doctor Crane.

(L to r) van Zandt, Brock, Dr. Crane.

While Brenda seems almost happy to be back in prison, Helene is ill-suited for life inside. While her husband fights to reduce her sentence on the outside, van Zandt subjects her to the standard ritual for all new inmates under her watch: 

two weeks in solitary quarantine.

When Helene cracks completely, Dr. Crane manages to get her switched to the infirmary, a move that sets he and van Zandt on a collision course

The more experienced inmates (principally Brenda and three others: Mae, Dottie, and Joan) try to protect Helene, but soon another drama unfolds. Joan's husband Glen is imprisoned on the other side of the wall, and he knows a secret way into the lady's laundry room. 

He surprises her there, and they embrace suggestively.

When it looks like one of the matrons is going to discover them, Brenda intentionally burns her hand to cause a distraction.

That's a pal.

The suggestive embrace leads to some hot laundry room prison sex (only suggested of course, in true 50s fashion) and Joan becomes pregnant. After she faints on a work detail, Dr. Crane discovers the truth, and Glen is called before the warden. 

He's willing to do whatever he has to not spoil Joan's chance for parole, but the warden decides to play hardball.

He gives van Zandt one week and carte blanche to uncover how Glen got into the women's prison.

Uh-oh.

She beats the pregnant Joan into a coma, and Dr. Crane moves her into an oxygen tent. When the other inmates hear the news, they take matters into their own hands. Things go rather fast and furiously from here to the end of the movie, but it plays out more or less how you'd expect: 

The ol' fake a stomach cramp and grab the guards and keys trick.

Followed by taking the ladies' warden hostage.

Meanwhile, Glen's got his hands on a gun and is out for blood.

(Nice symmetry with the padded solitary room from the beginning.)

A good bit of tear gas later, order is restored, the wardens are brought up on charges, and Helene's early parole is secured.

The End.

Okay, so as you may have noticed, this isn't exactly a film noir. It's packaged as one on the Bad Girls of Film Noir DVD (which sounds awful, I know) I own, but this is more or less just a black-and-white entry in the Women's Prison genre. (Minus a lesbian angle and exploitative shower scenes.) In 1955, this genre barely exists. It's interesting, though, how many tropes of the genre as it exists today (Orange Is the New Black, though I haven't actually seen it, but from the reviews I've read) are on display in Women's Prison:

THE CAST

The "bad girl" in question on the Bad Girls of Film Noir DVD mentioned above is apparently Cleo Moore, who plays Mae. But the villain and gravitational center of Women's Prison is undoubtedly Ida Lupino.

Lupino was coming off the collapse of her and former husband Collier Young's independent production company (for which she directed a good run of films, of which I've only seen "The Hitch-Hiker") and was returning to being in front of the camera after being behind it for so long.

She stayed in front of the camera for two more decades. (L, early photo; R, with Shatner in The Devil's Rain.)

Howard Duff, her real-life husband at the time of filming Women's Prison and until the early 80s, plays Dr. Crane (relation to Frasier unremarked-upon as near as I can tell). Their marriage was a tempestuous one, and this gives the scene where the doctor tells van Zandt that the reason she runs the prison the way she does is because she's a sexually frustrated psychopath some fun context. 

Not that I am in any way implying Ms. Lupino was a sexually-frustrated psychopath. I just mean for Old Hollywood Camp value.

Phyliss Thaxter plays Helene, and while she's perfectly fine, her character recedes into the background for the more interesting parts of the film. Jan Sterling and Cleo Moore play Brenda and Mae, respectively, and they get most of the film's most notable lines and scene-stealers. 

Both were under contract  but "failed to launch" as the studios' go-to blonde bombshells. (The wikipedia scuttlebutt indicates they lost those roles to a young Kim Novak.) P.s. I can't seem to resize this pics on the right, sorry about that; I tried to enlarge the ones on the left to match them but then the whole thing is just way too big. #BlogginProblems

Vivian Marshall gives quite a memorable performance as Dottie, but it doesn't appear she was in all that much. That's too bad. She's something of the feminist heart of this film - don't take my word for it, of course - and displays clear talent for impersonations, among them Bette Davis, Tallulah Bankhead, and - as will come in handy in the prisoners-take-over-the-prison portion of the film - a spot-on Ida Lupino.

There's a small role for future Academy Award nominee Juanita Moore. And Joan's virile husband Glen is played by Warren Stevens, i.e. Rojan.

"We conquer. We RULE."

I promise that the next Friday Night Film Noir entry will be more traditionally film noir-y. Only a few left on our list to cover! Though - I might just add more, haphazardly, from here on out. That seems to be the Dog Star Omnibus way. 

~

Watchmen at Thirty, pt. 6: The Abyss Gazes Also

"I took the remains of her unwanted dress 

and made a face I could bear to look at in the mirror."

The midpoint of the Watchmen saga is probably the darkest issue of the series. (And considering some of the things we've seen... yikes.) How could it not be, being Rorschach's origin story? As was the case with Doctor Manhattan in issue #4 or Ozymandias in issue #11, the whole story flips between Rorschach in the present -

and the experiences in his past that brought him to this point. 

It's difficult to gauge how influential this issue truly was. The idea of a serial killer/ vigilante having sexual hang-ups sublimated into reactionary violence was not startlingly original in 1986, though not nearly as ubiquitous as it would become by the 90s, nor the idea of a doctor's world slowly coming apart the more he peers into his patient's diseased mind. Both were new as-applied-to-comics, of course. Suffice it to say, no (or very very few) heroes or villains (or doctors examining them) ever got the working over Moore and the gang give Rorschach in Watchmen #6.

It's told from the viewpoint of Dr. Malcolm Long, the prison psychologist who sees Rorschach as his ticket to criminal psychology fame. But as the title warns, peeling away the layers of a mind like Rorschach's comes at a terrible price. 

The story begins with Dr. Long showing Rorschach - now just "Walter Kovacs" - a series of ink-blots and asking him what he sees in them. Rorschach is less than forthcoming.

When the taunts of his fellow prisoners overwhelm Rorschach as he's led back to his cell, they change into the taunts of children who bullied him as a boy.

Dr. Long fleshes out the subsequent events of Rorschach's life: after blinding one of the bullies and putting the other one in the hospital, the subsequent home investigation results in his becoming a ward of the state. (The name of his boarding school? "The Charlton House." Wink wink, nudge nudge.)

Relics of his time in juvy comprise the back-pages material of this issue.

But it isn't until Rorschach begins telling him what he really sees in the ink blots that the doctor - and we-the-reader - get a true idea of what made Rorschach into the vengeance-meting sociopath he is. 

Years ago (we're told) there was a kidnap case...

When he discovers a tattered pair of undies in the furnace and evidence of a body being butchered, he puts together the sickening truth...

- and lays in wait for the butcher to return home. (Fantastic colors, Mr. Higgins)

After handcuffing him to the furnace, Rorschach spills kerosene everywhere - 

and hangs around outside for an hour to watch it burn. ("No one got out.")

This was changed in the movie to Rorschach murdering him with a meat cleaver. ("Men get arrested; dogs get put down.") It's still an intense scene, but the sequence of events and how it changes him in the comic is much better. This is, as the character says, the moment when Walter Kovacs closed his eyes, and Rorschach opened them. 

Overall, I'm net-positive about the film and the changes it made. Most of them worked, I felt. The film wasn't perfect, and I know some folks absolutely loathed it. Not me, though. And as far as adaptations that honor - and grok - the source material, you have to tip your cap to Zack Snyder and the gang.

Rorschach's lapse into murderous vengeance has at least one comic book precedent: Michael Fleischer's and Jim Aparo's Wrath of the Spectre. That was seen as a real aberration when it appeared, though as with most things shocking-for-its-era, it's probably a little quaint now. 

Besides learning what makes Rorschach so much fun at parties, the story documents Dr. Long's discovery that he can't just close the file on Rorschach when he leaves the office. He becomes increasingly estranged from his wife in an unconscious imitation of Rorschach's withdrawal from all women and rejection of sex, as symbolized by the butterfly-blot that is the story's main motif - 

as well as the Hiroshima lovers that he keeps seeing.

And even though the entire issue is basically one long "Hangin' with Mr. Rorschach," nevertheless, let's end by showcasing some of our disturbing friend's more meme-worthy moments:

...

(slow nod)

Rorschach sounds a little like Cohle from True Detective Season 1, doesn't he? I wouldn't be surprised if he - or Thomas Ligotti, whose work is typically cited as the TD character's inspiration - are big Watchmen fans.

Until next time!

~