Caged

Eleanor Parker in Caged (dir. John Cromwell, 1950).

Don't be put off by the lurid stigma of the "women in prison" genre: this is a superbly crafted, unsettling drama, nearly in the same class with films like Brute Force and A Man Escaped. Eleanor Parker plays a young woman convicted as an accessory to a robbery in which her husband, the main perpetrator, was shot and killed by the police. She enters prison scared and naive, and must gradually adjust her entire ethical world view in order not just to survive, but to retain whatever personal power she has left. Agnes Moorehead is a sympathetic but impotent warden, and Hope Emerson is a loathsomely evil "matron" (guard). Jan Sterling, from Mystery Street, instills her character "Smoochie" with a level of dyke chic I would wager the screen had not thitherto seen.

The Racket

Robert Ryan and Lizabeth Scott in The Racket (dir. John Cromwell, 1951).

When Howard Hughes took over RKO, he remade this film, the silent version of which he had also produced in 1928. It's a lackluster hodgepodge for the most part. In addition to Cromwell, Mel Ferrer, Tay Garnett, Nicholas Ray, and Sherman Todd all directed sequences at Hughes' command. Robert Ryan acts like he thinks he's in a good movie, as does William Talman (who went on to play the DA in the Perry Mason TV series), but Robert Mitchum and Lizabeth Scott make little effort to hide their boredom. I'm pretty sure Mitchum actually stifles some yawns. The best part is noir scholar Eddie Muller's engaging commentary on the Warner DVD: his ongoing observations on what a mess the film is are interesting in and of themselves, and when he occasionally points out things that are well done, it's almost exhilarating.