Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!
It’s often interesting to see the early films of someone who turned into a star. It's fun to see someone who ened up having a great career starring in something kind of trashy. That’s definitely the case with Lady in a Cage, which features the second role and first-ever credited role for James Caan. This is a good half decade or so before Brian’s Song. Seeing him playing a young tough (he’s about 23 in this) is one of the more interesting parts of this film.
The easiest film connection to make with Lady in a Cage is that this is like a salacious and vulgar version of Wait Until Dark. The reality, though, is that Lady in a Cage came first by three years. This is much closer to a sort of “youth in revolt” picture that focuses on the victim instead of the youths. If you’re an old school MST3K fan, think something along the lines of Wild Rebels or The Hellcats, but from the point of view of their victims.
This is a very simple high-concept movie. A wealthy older woman named Cornelia Hilyard (Olivia de Havilland!) is recovering from a broken hip. She’s got the kind of money to have an elevator installed in her house to help her up and down the stairs. At the beginning of the Fourth of July weekend, her emasculated son Malcolm (William Swan) heads out of town after leaving her a note suggesting that if she doesn’t stop controlling his life he’ll kill himself. However, before she can read the note, a series of accidents leave her trapped in the elevator halfway between the ground floor and the upstairs.
The elevator is connected to an outside alarm system, but when Cornelia uses it to try to attract attention, the only person who shows up is a drunk named George (Jeff Corey), who sees the wealth in her house as an opportunity to make a little money and perhaps get off the street. He takes an armload of goods (and a bottle of wine or two) to the local pawnbrokers (Charles Seel and Scatman Crothers). While he is pawning what he stole, he is observed by Randall (Caan), Elaine (Jennifer Billingsley), and Essie (Rafael Campos), who decide that George must be onto something to be showing up with goods like that, and they decide to follow him when he goes back.
Before he returns to rob the house, though, George shows up on the doorstep of Sade (Ann Sothern), offering to cut her in on the take if she can keep him away from the wine until they are done looting the house. Naturally, the pair of them are followed and all hell breaks lose. Tired of wearing stockings over their faces in hot weather, Randall, Elaine, and Essie decide to not worry that the others have seen their faces and plan to kill them instead.
That’s really it. Cornelia remains trapped between floors in her elevator, but this is not the sort of elevator that you might think of traditionally. This is completely open-air, operated by a device next to her staircase. What this means is that she can see most of what is happening around her, a fact that Randall especially takes delight in, as he forces her to watch the torture and eventual murder of George and the tormenting of Sade. Meanwhile, Cornelia tries to figure out her own way to fight back.
While relatively tame by today’s stanards, I would guess this was pretty out there for 1964. A little push in one direction and this is a film right in the wheelhouse of someone like William Castle. A much stronger push, and we’re looking at Herschel Gordon Lewis, although Olivia de Havilland would never sink that low. In fact, de Havilland is what makes the film work. While there is a sense of her slumming a bit with this film, not unlike Joan Crawford doing Strait-Jacket or Bette Davis in Burnt Offerings, this isn’t terribly outside of her norm. She was never so proud that she wouldn’t take a less glamorous role—see The Heiress or The Snake Pit for reference.
All of that said, this is very much Caan’s film in large part. While there is a sense of him doing Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire for at least part of the film (he even looks a bit like a young Brando), he is magnetic on screen. There’s not a lot of doubt in seeing this that he would eventually have a hell of a career.
The truth is that Lady in a Cage is interesting for what it is, but it’s hardly required viewing. It does raise the question, though, if Wait Until Dark would exist without it; there’s a lot of common DNA, even if the second film is higher budget and a lot less gritty. Just like real camp has to happen organically and can’t be planned, actually good low-rent cinema has to happen through some captured lightning in a bottle, and Lady in a Cage comes close.
Why to watch Lady in a Cage: It's not quite in the psycho-biddy subgenre, but it’s close.
Why not to watch: It's exactly as trashy as it sounds.
This is a nasty little film with a cruel heart at its center. There is no doubt that the success of "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" made the production of this possible but it really doesn't fit into the psycho biddy subgenre that Jane ignited.
ReplyDeleteUsually in those films you have someone to root for, a character who is more or less blameless for whom you feel sympathy being done dirt by an unhinged villain. But that's not really the case here. Olivia would seem the obvious victim and she is wronged, but in the beginning of the film if memory serves she's an imperious smotherer whose iron will and implacability is so onerous she's crushed her son's spirit to the point where his only option for survival is to sneak away and plan to never see her again.
However, even with all that she is still the nicest person in the movie!! All the rest are contemptible vermin in most ways. Even Ann Sothern’s (talk about a once glamourous star who is willing to look like hell!!) Sade who quite literally gets plenty of hard knocks is a frowzy hag with the morals of a swamp insect. But the real parasite is James Caan and his gang, they are loathsome and vicious to the point there is an unnerving edge beyond plain discomfort whenever they are onscreen. For all that Caan’s swagger and presence are on full display and he is a standout.
This was originally planned for Joan Crawford to play Olivia’s part, but she had to bow out due to scheduling conflicts and then Olivia stepped in when she dropped out of “Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte.” I can see Joan working (though her harder surface persona might have made Mrs. Hilyard even harder to feel pity for!) but Olivia digs right into the part. However, considering this and her role in Charlotte it’s not too hard to see why she withdrew from pursuing film work with any sort of regularity from this point forward. She appeared in only about a dozen projects over the next 20 years and most of them smaller guest roles, her only starring role after this was in “The Screaming Woman” a not bad TV movie in the early 70’s. Of course, she chose to live in Paris which would have made a Bette Davis style renaissance difficult plus the fact that her son became seriously ill with Hodgkin’s Disease around this period as well. A shame since she was only forty-eight at the time.
OK, this actually sounds interesting.
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