Girls of the Big House (1945) User Reviews

Not really a girls in jail movie...

[searchanddestroy-1 · 30 March 2009]

It's not about a real hard and dark film noir you have to deal with. Not WOMEN'S PRISON, CAGED, BETRAYED WOMEN or even STORY OF MOLLY X. No. Just a little drama which takes place more in a sort of boarding school than in a jail. Inmates have pretty comfortable bedrooms and there is not vicious and sadistic warden in petticoat in the Ida Lupino style - WOMEN'S PRISON - in it.

It never falls into comedy, but it remains a little mystery film telling the story of a young woman sent behind bars because she is accused to have stolen a wallet. But is she really guilty?

There are some another things in this picture, but nothing unusual.

It's one of the hundred of movies that George Archaimbaud made.

Welcome to the Vassar of women's prisons.

[mark.waltz · 3/10 · 10 September 2019]

This convoluted mess of a women's prison movie seems to really have no beginning, middle or end, just the shell of a story disguising itself as a plot. It focuses on Lynne Roberts, picked up in the first scene for allegedly stealing Dick Elliot's wallet. She ends up being incarcerated in the most civilized of women's prison, escapes overnight to visit a boyfriend, ends up in a knife struggle with fellow inmate Virginia Christine, and ends up in solidarity confinement (not quite in solitary because there's another fellow prisoner next to her) and everything ends up hunky dory because of extenuating circumstances.

Cheaply made Republic programmer features such familiar faces Marion Martin, Adele Mara and adorable Ida Moore as other inmates, Norma Garden as the warden, Geraldine Wall as the head matron and Marion Newton as an understanding prison doctor who pretty much begs the inmates to confide in her. It lacks the camp elements of later women's prison movies, with even the knife battle dull and the dialog without sparkle. Trying too hard to be complex, this just reeks of being rushed into production and falls miserably on its face.