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Lady in a Cage

Blu ray

ViaVision [Imprint]

1964/ B&w / 1.78:1 / 95 Minutes

Starring Olivia de Havilland, James Caan, Ann Sothern

Directed by Walter Grauman

Though the title suggests anything from a feminist manifesto to a women-in-prison melodrama, Lady in a Cage is in fact a home invasion thriller with a mile-wide mean streak. Critics in 1964 saw the film itself as the intruder, a smash and grab aberration wallowing in bloodshed and perversion. In The New York Times, Bosley Crowther labeled it as “reprehensible.” Gossipmonger Hedda Hopper wailed, “The picture should be burned.” Chances are good the reaction to Walter Grauman’s claustrophobic shocker would have been far less shrill without the presence of its leading lady, Olivia de Havilland—according to Hollywood taste-makers, Maid Marian should not be consorting with such riffraff.

De Havilland plays Cornelia Hilyard, a ripely beautiful dowager who lives in a spacious if drably generic house in an unnamed city.

With readers turning to their home viewing options more than ever, this daily feature provides one new movie each day worth checking out on a major streaming platform.

Thanks to the hot popularity of Robert Aldrich’s you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it thriller “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?,” hagsploitation movies starring your favorite screen dames nearing or passing their prime were briefly all the rage in the 1960s. “Lady in a Cage,” a claustrophobic and fright-filled horror picture directed by William Grauman, was the grand (and fleeting) entrance into the hagsploitation genre for then-48-year-old Olivia de Havilland, who died just this past weekend at the age of 104. The film was excoriated upon release, when The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther deemed it as “socially harmful.” And yet all these years later, “Lady in a Cage” remains a doozy.

De Havilland wasn’t even the studio’s first choice to play Mrs.

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