Women's Prison

Lewis Seiler’s 1955 film is set, as advertised, in a women’s prison, and works within the B-picture conventions of its moment. Its spine is the conflict between a psychiatrist trying to improve conditions inside and a sadistic superintendent. Ida Lupino plays the superintendent and carries the part without turning it into caricature, so that what it shows is how institutional power corrodes the person holding it. Jan Sterling, Cleo Moore, Audrey Totter and Phyllis Thaxter play prisoners, with Howard Duff also in the cast. It is generally treated as an early and relatively sober entry in the women-in-prison strand that followed. Seiler brings it in at seventy-nine minutes and never lets it sprawl.