CLEANING OUT THE DVR: HOUSE OF WOMEN (1962) ** ½

I taped this loose remake of Caged! off Turner Classic Movies on July 23^rd, 2017.  Shirley Knight stars as a pregnant woman behind bars.  She has the baby, which will be kept inside the prison walls in a daycare center until it turns three.  If she is still incarcerated by then, her daughter will become a ward of the state.  Andrew (Lancer) Duggan is the warden who takes a shine to Shirley and makes her his maid.  She plays up to his affections in hopes she’ll receive parole and get her daughter back.  When the warden realizes he’s being used, he denies her parole and her baby is taken away.  The inmates learn about his misdeeds and as a show of solidarity, stage a riot.

House of Women is more melodramatic than exploitative.  That’s more of an observation than a criticism.  Because of the year in which it was made, it goes without saying that it was going to be tame.  Despite being low on sleaze, there are definitely some memorable moments here.  The highlight has to be Barbara Nichols’ parole meeting that probably inspired Morgan Freeman’s similar scene in The Shawshank Redemption. 

There are also enough genre cliches here to at the very least pacify Women in Prison fans.  We have food fights, riots (the matrons subdue the prisoners using stools, just like lion tamers!), and pervert wardens.  It also has one of the best reasons for a catfight I’ve ever seen in one of these movies.  (“She drew a moustache on my picture of Troy Donahue!”)

Knight is a little milquetoast in the lead, but then again, she has to be because her character is trying to win her daughter back.  Duggan does a decent job as the warden, although he never quite blossoms into an out-and-out scumbag.  Most of the fun comes from seeing Jason Evers (the same year he starred in the classic The Brain That Wouldn’t Die!) as the kindly alcoholic prison doctor. 

While House of Women has some strong stretches, it never really gets into gear.  The finale is particularly weak as the big riot is broken up into several sections using newspaper headlines as interstitials.  It is also in this section when the focus kind of shifts from Knight to Constance Ford, who plays an inmate who flips her lid when her son dies from the guards’ negligence.  Even then, there are enough good bits in that first hour to make the flick recommended to Women in Prison die-hards.