On W List of Movie Reviews

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Women's Prison (1955)

Rate: 3
Viewed: 6/24

WomPris
6/24: Women's Prison is awful, manipulative, and tacky all rolled into one.

The biggest irony was made in the following dialogue exchange between two guards:

"I want to catch the last show at the Bijou."
"That prison movie?"
"Yeah."
"They never get things right in prison pictures."

Ditto for this film. I was actually on the female warden's side and thought the doctor got in her way inappropriately many times. After a while, given the number of males involved including the director and the writers, I started to think it was about making a female look incompetent when placed in a position of power.

A few of the players are the worst: Howard Duff, Vivian Marshall, and Phyllis Thaxter as Dr. Crane, the female prisoner who does impersonations, and Helene Jensen, respectively. The latter is the biggest crybaby I've seen in a while. What she needs is a sound beating just like how Clancy Brown's character took care of the fat fish in The Shawshank Redemption. This is prison, not kindergarten! Yeah, sure...Helene is released like a week later after being convicted of vehicular manslaughter. Only in Hollywood. Similarly for the warden typing out a letter and labelling the incident as a "small riot."

All in all, everybody in Women's Prison deserves extra twenty years behind the bars.