If you want to see sexy, damn dangerous young ladies with a number of social deviations, then the Women in Prison (aka WIP, aka “Women in Prison”) genre is for you. Psychologists can talk for hours about what might be of interest to this genre (a wide variety of fetishes, misogyny, lesbian subtext, various forms of violence, etc.).d.) and what kind of cockroaches you have in your head, but the main reason for the attractiveness of this genre is simple. Many viewers love to watch half-naked women in harsh conditions kicking villains’ ass.
This genre originated in the late 20s of the XX century and representatives of that time, by today’s standards, seem rather harmless, boring stories with a simple moral. Films such as Godless (1929), Ladies of the Big House (1931) and The Ladies of the Talk (1933) recalled the flood of early gangster films and conveyed a wonderful moral – crime is always punishable.
At the end of 1938, viewers saw the film "Woman in Prison" directed by Lambert Hiller. The film was about a warden at a women’s prison whose daughter Anne was imprisoned there on charges of manslaughter. It was this painting that gave the genre its name. That same year, William S. McGann made a film on a similar theme, Girl in Intern, a pretty bad drama, judging by the reviews, whose only trump card was the presence of a young Ronald Reagan.
In general, 1938 turned out to be very rich in interesting representatives of the genre. Thus, “Women’s Prison” was released (don’t get confused by this variety of titles), a worthy attempt to bring the novel “Prison De Femmes” to the screen. In this film, the orphan main character was thrown into prison, where she somehow managed to marry a successful businessman. Ah, this naive movie of the 30s!
The early 1940s saw a surge in WIP-oriented films, the most interesting of which was Convict Women (1940), directed by Nick Grind. The director gave us a strange, but at the same time interesting idea of self-government of prisoners in prison. That same year, Robert Florey directed The Woman with No Name, in which a couple is falsely accused and sentenced to life imprisonment.
But after this, the genre died out for several years, only occasionally showing signs of life, when rare crafts of terrible quality came to light. There were exceptions, like “A Cruel Woman” by Barry Mahon or “Why I Must Die” by Roy Del Ruth, but this, you know, was not enough.
It was not until 1950 that he emerged from his coma when director John Cromwell made a film called Caged, released by the major studio Paramount. The film blew up the public with its undisguised eroticism, energy and hopelessness, which was not typical for a seemingly typical drama. This outstanding film was even nominated for three Oscars and became a kind of symbol of exploitation cinema about women in prison, justifying all previous unsuccessful attempts in the genre.
The main role was played by Eleanor Pracker, whose character is interesting primarily because she enters prison as a fairly innocent person, but leaves it as a person who has already sunk to the very bottom. Hollywood had never seen anything like it before, with the possible exception of So Young, So Bad (1950). He didn’t see much of anything at all until the 60s. The film influenced young filmmakers so much that later these characters began to be actively exploited – from “House of Women” (1962) to the parody “Girls from the Penal Colony” (1986).
As for the lesbian subtext characteristic http://duck-duck-bingo-casino.co.uk/ of these films, it first clearly manifested itself in the noir “Women’s Prison” with the star of the time, Ida Lumpino, who played the role of a driven prison warden. She was the very embodiment of evil, but her actions were damn interesting to watch. The same can be said about its ideological successor, Women Devoted (1955), which featured a cruel prison guard named Darcy, played by Sarah Hayden.
The next historically significant footnote for the genre is the surge in B-movies making money in their respective drive-in theaters. These films have reached a new level, raising the problem not only of women in prison, but also of juvenile delinquents. They even gave birth to their own stars, for example – their own, characteristic analogue of the polished Marilyn Monroe – Mamie Van Doren. As the Warner brothers described her: “This girl is like a platinum powerhouse.”!».
Her debut work was the 1949 film “The Jet Pilot,” in which she appeared for just a moment with one single phrase: “Look!", which did not stop Mamie from becoming famous in the future. Her key WIP films came in 1957, “The Untamed Youth” and “Girlstown,” and it was thanks to them that Van Doren received the status of the Queen of B-movies.
In 1957, after the release of the film "Girls from the Correctional Colony", fame came to Gloria Castillo. According to the plot, a guy stole a car, and a girl witnessed it. As you already understood, the guy began to threaten her, mock her, and in the end she turned into a rude, antisocial creature. We swam, we know. Let’s move on.
In 1962, the American film The Woman’s Home marked a shift in the genre towards greater frankness and swagger, reaching its apogee in So Young, So Wicked (1961) and The Crashed Bird I Knew (1969). These films shocked the public with their full nudity, which, however, later became one of the features of the genre.
Despite the small number of films released, the genre was not completely left to the mercy of fate. Last but not least, the WIP genre influenced the development of the so-called “Men`s Adventure” magazines. These were cheap, tabloid semi-erotic publications containing stories about hot girls who found themselves in dangerous situations. They were published back in the late 40s, but only received a second wind in the 60s, when the WIP genre brought more stories about cruel prison guards torturing poor girls into magazines. It was obvious exploitation, but it worked. The shelves were filled with publications like Argosy, Man’s Story and Men Today, flaunting provocative, almost pornographic covers and bright headlines.
But what’s interesting is that interest in these magazines waned in the late 60s, when, after many lawsuits, many of them either closed or were transformed into the publications that we know today – just collections with many photographs of naked young ladies, accompanied, for the sake of decency, by several pages of text.
What’s doubly interesting is that at the moment when the “Men’s Adventure” genre of magazines died, the Women in Prison genre of films was resurrected. Coincidence? Don’t think. The content of such magazines flowed smoothly back to the film sets, thereby ushering in the third (and final) wave of WIP cinema.
"99 Women" by Jesus Franco marked the beginning of the third wave in the genre. The most interesting thing about this film is that out of the declared 99 women, only three appear on screen. The cast is damn good and this seems to be the only decent film from this director. According to the plot, prisoner number 99 is on the island-prison. There, the cruel warden Thelma Diaz, played by the wonderfully named Mercedes McCambridge, is in charge. As you probably already guessed, the island contains all possible sexual perversions (torture, rape, lesbian orgies and other delights of life), which the three main heroines will have to face.
Later, when the sympathetic warden Caroll comes to replace Diaz, the heroines reasonably assume that their torment will end, but what the heck?! So they decide to escape from this island, which is what a significant part of the film will be devoted to.
And it would seem that everything that was described above is cruel and inhumane, but compared to other WIP films that will be released later, these are still flowers.
There are many versions of 99 Women that vary in length, from the censored UK version that runs 70 minutes to the original DVD version that runs an hour and a half. The French version is also common, but it is no better than the British one.
To be completely honest, this film’s low rating on IMDb is justified. It’s boring, cheap and ridiculous by modern standards. But I have good news – his subsequent films turned out even worse! “Dolls Behind Barbed Wire” (1976), “Ilsa the Fierce Jailer” (1976) and “Sadomania” (1981) are proof of this.
In 1982, the genre was already on its last legs. Redundant plot devices, outright blunders, the same actresses wandering from film to film… The audience is not fools – they began to notice this more and more often. The quintessence of the entire genre is depicted in the parody “Girls from the Penal Colony” (1986), which put an end to. That’s when the genre died out, finally moving into the realm of cheap crafts released straight to video.
But we must admit that no matter how terrible these films were, they still influenced the grindhouse genre as a whole and inspired many filmmakers from Europe, Asia and South America to create similar films. Thanks to this, the genre, in a modified form, lasted in these corners of the world for some more time and gave us some really worthy things, for example, “Prisoner No. 701: Scorpio” and a number of its sequels, a number of Roger Corman films, mainly made in the Philippines, as well as the mini-series “Bangkok Hilton” with Nicole Kidman and Hugo Weaving, and its echoes were visible in films not directly related to the genre, from Turkey Hunt (1982) to Sucker Punch (2011). But this is a topic for a separate article..
I hope you’re still here. Thank you for your time, I really appreciate it. If you liked this text, write comments, give pluses, all this will greatly motivate me to talk about other forgotten genres. See you!
P.S. You can read reviews of exploitation and trash films on my blog: peretrenie.ru/?cat=4
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