Laura Gemser was a big star in the sexploitation realm, but we’re still searching for a movie of hers that was actually good. Emanuelle in America was okay. So wasLa via della prostituzione, aka Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade. All the others we’ve seen have been calamities, if imaginative ones. In Violenza in un carcere femminile, seventh in Gemser’s Black Emanuelle series and known in English as Violence in a Women’s Prison or sometimes Caged Women, she’s sent to an Italian prison named Santa Catarina for prostitution, drug trafficking, and attempted murder.
Gemser is usually an undercover reporter in these films, playing a character named Emanuelle Sturman (yes, she has a last name). In this case she’s been sent by Amnesty International to expose corruption and cruelty in the prison. While there are numerous set pieces both humiliating and titillating throughout the movie, there isn’t much actual plot. Gemser gathers plenty of evidence but is of course stuck behind bars, degraded, beaten, solitarily confined, raped, gnawed on by red-eyed rats, beaten again, placed in a resonating bell torture device, drugged, and sent to swing a pickaxe at the stony earth. Geez, being an undercover reporter is hard. But she’s also made sweet love to, so at least there’s that.
Gemser is eventually assisted in her escape from hell by prison doctor Gabriele Tinti. No spoiler there. The Emanuelle series wasn’t over yet, so freedom was in the cards. Is Violenza in un carcere femminile the good Emanuelle movie we were searching for? Hah hah—it’s awful. We recommend giving it a wide berth. By the way, don’t get it confused with 1983’s Blade Violent – I violenti. The latter was filmed at the same time using the same sets, costumes, and performers, but it’s a different movie—barely. Violenza in un carcere femminile premiered in Italy today in 1982.
Some sing. These mostly cry, fight, and plot revenge.
German artist Hans Otto Wendt painted this poster for the women-in-prison film Verlorene Frauen, which was originally made in the U.S. as Caged. Wendt’s signature is always illegible, but his creation of this piece has been confirmed by poster experts. It certainly channels the travails of star Eleanor Parker effectively, as she’s tossed in the can for naively acting as an accessory to armed robbery. Worse, she’s two months pregnant. Sadly her husband was killed during the heist. Single motherhood behind bars looms.
There were many women-in-prison films made during the ’50s. Caged is one of the more sober treatments of the subject, and Parker’s teary and anguished reaction to prison feels authentic. She doesn’t remain her innocent self for long, though, which is largely the point here. Her transformation is top notch acting. The movie also features effective subplots such as animosity between warden Agnes Moorehead and matron Hope Emerson, corruption among the staff, and conflict with state officials that threaten the rehabilitative potential of the facility.
Caged is melodramatic, but carefully put together and thoughtful. Its occasional noir stylings help, though some debate whether it’s a film noir. As it progressed we could imagine teen males who watched it in cinemas thinking, “If this were my production I’d lighten it up with some explicit nudity,” then growing up to be the ’70s filmmakers who made women-in-prison movies essential sexploitation fare. Or maybe it was just us who thought it. Caged premiered in the U.S. in 1950, and in West Germany today in 1951.
Authorities warn that five escaped convicts should be considered armed and amorous.
Direct from the dank and vermin infested crawlspace beneath the grindhouse comes the women-in-prison flick Fugitive Girls, also known as Five Loose Women, a no-budget WIP entry built around the classic plot device of an innocent or framed ingénue who gets tossed in the joint and falls in with a group of hardened criminals planning to escape. Margie Lanier plays the new fish, and the bad girls are Jabie Abercrombie, Tallie Cochran, Donna Young, and Rene Bond, who escape their prison farm only to suffer through episodic encounters with various weirdos and malefactors. The latter actress is, yes, the same Bond who had become a major xxx star, and like many others in her profession was trying to transition into mainstream cinema. She’s as good as anyone else in Fugitive Girls, but that isn’t a compliment. The entire movie is terrible, from the script to the sex sequences. Even its laudable focus on girl-girl boob sucking can’t save it. But hey, the poster is fun. Fugitive Girls premiered in the U.S. today in 1974
With Michaels as the lure the prey is helpless to resist.
Blonde Bait is yet another vintage b-movie with an a-poster, as Beverly Michaels stars on this colorful concoction put together from tinted production photos. She plays a nightclub singer who sees her mysterious boyfriend only rarely and is supposed to meet him next on New Year’s Eve, a few months hence. Unfortunately she gets herself tossed in jail for assault, and on the inside comes to the attention of the U.S. State Department. They know exactly who her boyfriend is—a courier of illegal secrets and a murderer. They decide to manipulate Michaels into railroading him. She has no idea about her man’s shady past, and no idea she’s being steered by federal suits. She’s given the opportunity to escape prison and keep that New Year’s Eve tryst, all while unknowingly acting as bait in a trap. Unlikely? For sure. But if the movie isn’t a must-see (even within the parameters of cheapie vintage dramas) you can spend your time in worse ways than hanging with Michaels. As a side note, Blonde Bait shares footage with a British drama titled Women without Men, so if you’ve seen that don’t be surprised at the similarities. Blonde Bait premiered today in 1956.
She'll escape from prison eventually. She's had more than enough practice.
The Italian sexploitation flick Femmine Infernali, which premiered in Italy today in 1980, is another women-in-prison effort, and because we already knew it was cobbled together from footage concurrently shot with the same cast and sets as Orinoco: Prigioniere del sesso, we didn’t feel a burning need to see it. But the art on the above poster is pretty nice. It was painted by Carlo Alessandrini, who signed his work as Aller. It’s been a long while since we’ve looked at his output. You can see some interesting examples of his style here, here, here, and here.
Femmine Infernali starred Ajita Wilson, and was retitled for its English release to Escape from Hell. As with any b-level sub-genre, women-in-prison movies are generally terrible. Never let anyone tell you otherwise. At their best—and we use that term advisedly—they offer this: veiled social commentary, proto-feminist themes couched deep within their inherently sexist overarch, occasional tender depictions of lesbianism, and action featuring women who can kick ass.
This was not Wilson’s first or even second tango in women’s prison, as we noted above. We also discussed her turn in 1976’s Perverse oltre le sbarre, and she was in Sadomania – Hölle der Lust, so she earned at least a superfecta. In today’s spin through WIP purgatory she’s again installed in a hellhole jungle prison with abusive guards and little hope, and once again decides to escape or die trying. In the end, does the movie have any of the four WIP characteristics we mentioned above? Not enough to matter. This random quote should demonstrate its basic quality: “Decency is one of the rules in our regulations.” You see? Our advice: if you watch it, tell nobody you did.
Angela the sunbear: I liked the movie. It spoke to me because, here at Hangzhou Zoo, I too am illusorily free but in reality imprisoned and watched over by cruel keepers.
Above is a dark poster for a dark movie—the drama Peine capitale. That translates from French into English as “capital punishment,” which kind of gives away the plot, no? It’s better known as Yield to the Night, as well as Blonde Sinner, and starred Diana Dors as—we suppose this means it counts as a women-in-prison flick—a killer who has a date with the hangman. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1956, but we didn’t want to wait until May to post this great piece, so we’re sharing it today, when the movie went into general release in France. The art is by someone who signed as J. Mayo, but that’s all we have on this person for now, except a few other posters we’ve found. It’s nice work. We especially like the fact that, though Dors is a bit of an abstraction, her lips are exactly correct. Have a look at the bottom of this post.
This is a nice piece of art from Turkey for the women-in-prison flick Günah—i.e. “Sin.” The movie was originally made in Italy as Perverse oltre le sbarre, and was known as Hell Behind Bars in English speaking countries. The art here is basically a crop of the Italian promo, and like the original neglects to include the film’s star Ajita Wilson. In fact, nobody in the cast looks remotely like the poster artist’s fantasy woman with her ripped shirt and wonderful white girl afro, so if you watch the movie you’ll have to make do with Wilson, Rita Silva, Linda Jones, et al. But we don’t recommend that you actually do that. It’s pretty bad.
Actually she doesn't even know the meaning of the word slow.
This nice promo image was made for the 1956 drama Yield to the Night starring Diana Dors. She plays a murderess—or murderer, we suppose—on death row. We like the genderized grammar of the past because it seems more elegant, but change happens. Anyway, Dors was an interesting star who, like her trailblazing analog Marilyn Monroe, had sharper filmcraft than she was usually credited with. For our money, by the acting standard of the era Dors was good. But then again, we have terrible grammar, so what do we know?
Today we continue our journey through ’70s exploitation cinema with Jackson County Jail, churned out of the grindhouse factory known as New World Pictures. Plotwise, Yvette Mimieux plays a Los Angeles advertising exec who leaves her cheating husband and finds herself at loose ends, but manages to score a job from a friend in New York City. She decides to get there by driving cross country, but passes through fictional Jackson County, located somewhere in or around Texas (a geographical fact we learn from a news broadcast that provides a Dallas Cowboys update). She’s railroaded into jail and raped by the cop working the graveyard shift. Afterward, Mimieux manages to brain him with a stool and escapes with the help of hardened criminal Tommy Lee Jones, who early in his acting career (and with that monobrow of his) was already capable of making lines like this sing: “There’s nothing wrong with being a crook. Everybody’s crooked. I never met a straight person in my whole life. Whole goddamn country is a rip-off. And everybody in it.”
Jackson County Jail is sometimes labeled a women-in-prison flick, but it’s a bit different for a generally low rent sub-genre because Mimieux was an established star, thirty-four years old with more than twenty movies behind her. The credibility she lends the film changes little about its basic purpose—titillation mixed with violence and an indictment of hick culture. Simultaneously, though, the filmmakers definitely don’t go to the extremes of other women-in-prison dramas, in which we’ve seen women hung up by their hair. There are some viewers, we suspect, who wouldn’t consider this movie a women-in-prison flick at all. We’re fine leaving it out of the conversation too. The jailbound portion lasts barely twenty minutes of what is perhaps more of an outlaw movie, complete with Jones letting fly with this response to being told the police will kill him: “That don’t matter. I was born dead.” Whether women-in-prison, outlaw, or counterculture, that’s a damned good line. And Jackson County Jail is a pretty good movie. It premiered today in 1976
The curious and certainly never-to-reappear style of movies referred today as women-in-prison, or WIP, is a subgenre of sexploitation cinema that came about for one reason: it used settings in which women were helpless. Well, in theory. The dramatic thrust of the plots always derived from attempts to retain dignity and to escape captivity. The protagonist was usually an odd woman out—an unjustly imprisoned victim or an undercover operative—surrounded by a mix of prisoners who were hopeless, cruel, sexually predatory, and complicit, plus the abusive guards, one of whom nearly always was a sadistic woman.
Hotel Paradis, known in English as Hotel Paradise, stars Anthony Steffen, Ajita Wilson, and slinky Cristina Lay, sometimes referred to as Cristina Lai. There are numerous posters for it, but we like the above Danish effort featuring a fight to the death. Its text notes: This film is banned in many countries because of its strong scenes…. it’s shown in Denmark in uncut version. Indeed. Interracial lesbian sex might be to blame for the banning. There are other possible reasons too. We won’t waste our time trying to figure it out. As an aside, the movie was filmed concurrently with the WIP flick Femmine infernali using the same cast, director, and sets. So consider this a write-up of that movie too, since the pair are basically identical.
Plotwise, a group of women are being transported to a jungle hellhole prison where forced labor is used to dig for emeralds. When their guards are ambushed and killed by patriot soldiers seeking to steal the emeralds to fund a nebulous revolt, the women agree to continue posing
as prisoners in order to aid the infiltration of the camp. Behind bars is one inmate—Wilson—who has the shining or something, and keeps telling the others that violence, death, and freedom are coming. Also coming are WIP staples such as the evil wardenness, languorous shower scenes, whippings, baroque tortures, and sexual assault. It all ends pro forma with a climactic shootout.
Obviously, you have to go into these types of movies with a sense of humor if you can. When Lay first meets Wilson in the camp, she says, “My name’s Maria. I’m frightened.” Why, oh why, didn’t Wilson respond, “I’m Ajita. I’m a virgo”? Too bad we didn’t write the script. Lay then helps herself to Wilson’s pipe—which Wilson just a bit earlier had used to masturbate. If she can obtain a pipe you’d think she could get a dildo, but whatever, in prison you have to find your pleasures where you can. And in women-in-prison movies the same holds true—we thought the scene was hilarious. It was merely one of many.
It should be noted that while Wilson is the female lead, and we’ve shared a couple of racy images of her and highlighted her importance as a trans trailblazer, Lay is the audience draw here. She’s unusually beautiful, and director Edoardo Mulargia and the movie’s producers know it quite well. She gets the most loving camera work, the wettest shower scene, a nice interlude with Wilson, and goes through the entire final shootout obviously naked beneath her tattered prison tunic and with the top of it hanging wide open. It’s not quite Frauen für Zellenblock 9, in which Karine Gambier and company perform their long escape sequence completely starkers, but it’s notable just the same.
Hotel Paradis is obviously sexist and exploitative. As we’ve said before, in the same way blaxploitation movies usually show a racist power structure before the hero shatters it, sexploitation movies sometimes do the same with sexism. Sometimes. Not here. There are additional flaws. Compared to better WIP efforts it lacks the winking sense of humor, the empowerment undercurrent, and the sense of actors having fun while making something they know is ridiculous. There’s a hardcore cut of this film with explicit scenes spliced in. It merely amplifies the aforementioned issues, so we suggest you avoid that version. But really, if you avoid Hotel Paradis entirely you’ll probably be a better person for it. It premiered in Italy as Orinoco: Prigioniere del sesso in the autumn of 1980, and in Denmark today in 1983.
In Montreal, Canada, at the École Polytechnique, a gunman shoots twenty-eight young women with a semi-automatic rifle, killing fourteen. The gunman claimed to be fighting feminism, which he believed had ruined his life. After the killings he turns the gun on himself and commits suicide.
1933—Prohibition Ends in United States
Utah becomes the 36th U.S. state to ratify the 21st Amendment to the United States Constitution, thus establishing the required 75% of states needed to overturn the 18th Amendment which had made the sale of alcohol illegal. But the criminal gangs that had gained power during Prohibition are now firmly established, and maintain an influence that continues unabated for decades.
1945—Flight 19 Vanishes without a Trace
During an overwater navigation training flight from Fort Lauderdale, five U.S. Navy TBM Avenger torpedo-bombers lose radio contact with their base and vanish. The disappearance takes place in what is popularly known as the Bermuda Triangle.
1918—Wilson Goes to Europe
U.S. President Woodrow Wilson sails to Europe for the World War I peace talks in Versailles, France, becoming the first U.S. president to travel to Europe while in office.
1921—Arbuckle Manslaughter Trial Ends
In the U.S., a manslaughter trial against actor/director Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle ends with the jury deadlocked as to whether he had killed aspiring actress Virginia Rappe during rape and sodomy. Arbuckle was finally cleared of all wrongdoing after two more trials, but the scandal ruined his career and personal life.
1964—Mass Student Arrests in U.S.
In California, Police arrest over 800 students at the University of California, Berkeley, following their takeover and sit-in at the administration building in protest at the UC Regents’ decision to forbid protests on university property.
1968—U.S. Unemployment Hits Low
Unemployment figures are released revealing that the U.S. unemployment rate has fallen to 3.3 percent, the lowest rate for almost fifteen years. Going forward all the way to the current day, the figure never reaches this low level again.
Aslan art was borrowed for many covers by Dutch publisher Uitgeverij A.B.C. for its Collection Vamp. The piece used on Mike Splane's Nachtkatje is a good example.
