Rife with prison-movie clichés and hyperactive music, this B starts with the unlikely premise of adjoining men's and women's big houses, with a female inmate married to a male inmate, and escalates the incredibility from there. Ida Lupino, apparently realizing she's in an implausible movie, eye-pops like Bette Davis and exaggerates every gesture and line reading, most entertainingly, and squares off against hubby Howard Duff, as a too-good-to-be-true prison doctor. The cells are jammed with good actresses, most notably the always-underrated Jan Sterling as a practical-minded blonde floozy, and Phyllis Thaxter as the not-really-guilty newbie quickly driven insane by Lupino's sadistic hysterics. Warren Stevens is especially good as an inmate from the other side who unconvincingly breaks into the women's side and impregnates his wife, setting the stage for an exciting we're-taking-over-this-joint climax. It is, as another poster noted, no "Caged," and you'll giggle more than you'll really feel for these dames, but it's a great time-waster, with a hilariously unlikely, tacked-on happy ending.
Review of Women's Prison
