Wed 9 Dec 2009
A Movie Review by Walter Albert: WOMEN’S PRISON (1955).
Posted by Steve under Crime Films , Reviews[5] Comments
WOMEN’S PRISON. Columbia, 1955. Ida Lupino, Jan Sterling, Cleo Moore, Audrey Totter, Phyllis Thaxter, Howard Duff, Warren Stevens, Gertrude Michael, Mae Clarke, Barry Kelley, Vivian Marshall, Adelle August, Juanita Moore, Ross Elliott, Murray Alper, Frank Jenks, Lorna Thayer, Eddie Foy III. Director: Lewis Seiler. Shown at Cinecon 40, Hollywood CA, September 2004.
In the midst of the corny but eminently watchable antics at a coed prison, Audrey Totter gives a touching performance (with a deathbed scene to boot) and was the last of the Career Achievement Award honorees to appear and be interviewed after the screening.
Lupino is the psychotic women’s superintendent constantly sparring with her (at the time) real-life husband Howard Duff, playing the prison doctor with a big heart for the incarcerated dames.
I was surprised to note that Eddie Foy III was in the cast (I don’t remember seeing his unforgettable kisser in the film) but Sterling, Moore (Juanita and Cleo), and Thaxter all manage to establish their presence among the large cast, and when Lupino goes bonkers, I almost melted from pure joy. (I don’t remember her as being this deliciously over-the-top since her big courtroom scene in They Drive by Night.)
December 9th, 2009 at 2:31 am
Walter
This was Eddie Foy III’s first film. Can’t say as I would know him if I saw him really. You aren’t by any chance thinking of Eddie Foy Jr. who had a much more memorable face and career on screen from teaming with Ronald Reagan in the Brass Bancroft films at Warner’s to playing his dad in Yankee Doodle Dandy to the con artist charming Jean Stapleton in The Bells Are Ringing?
Eddie Foy III had a bigger career as a casting director and producer, only acting in four movies and some television episodes between 1955 and 1960.
I knew Charlie Foy, another of the seven little Foy’s, who owned and operated the Village Theater in Dallas. My cousins used to take me when I was little and tell me I should remember the girl who took the tickets. I think she later went blonde and became an actress — called herself Jayne Mansfield or something … wonder whatever happened to her?
But it sounds as if you might have confused Foy II with III. I’m not sure even the most devoted film fans among us could be expected to know III on sight unless he looked a lot like I or II.
December 9th, 2009 at 6:20 am
In 1972 Ida Lupino returned playing a sadistic prison matron type role again in a 74 minute TV movie called WOMEN IN CHAINS. She obviously liked these type of roles and a genre of films now exists called WIP, for Women In Prison movies. I have quite a few on dvd and they are always good for a guilty pleasure fix.
December 9th, 2009 at 11:42 am
My assumption was that Eddie Foy III would have some of the family’s facial characteristics, but I may have been wrong about that.
December 11th, 2009 at 1:30 am
[…] Walter Albert’s review of Women’s Prison (Columbia, 1955) reviewed here not too long ago, Walker Martin pointed out that there is a whole subgenre of WIP movies, where for […]
April 12th, 2010 at 3:30 pm
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