Girls in Prison

Who played the blonde dance partner of Paul Anderson (Lance Fuller) in the opening nightclub scene?

Less-than-thrilling, the film drags but the ending is goofy enough to make it possibly worthwhile. Features earthquakes that come from nowhere, a boxing preacher, and girls in prison who seem not to have been quite locked up. Trouble ensues.

It is nice to see B girl Adele Jergens have some fun right before she retired. This is pure camp, which is why we watch it. I Iove 1950s and early 1960s women's prison movies. They all have their roots done, perfect hairdos, tailored prison uniforms and are probably wearing girdles. The worst they do is use double negatives and pull each other's hair. I'm sure I watched these rerun on TV as a little kid thinking society was SO much better then, thinking, "Oh I see hippies on the street doing worse!"

A pretty young woman by the name of "Anne Carson" (Joan Taylor) gets mixed up with two other men in a bank robbery and gets a 5-to-10 year prison sentence even though she declares her innocence. Along with that, $38,000 was stolen and since she left one person at the bank and the other person is dead, everybody thinks she hid the money. And everybody wants it bad. Anyway, for a women-in-prison (WIP) film made in the mid-50's this movie wasn't too bad. Not only did Joan Taylor give a pretty good performance but she was rather cute too. Along with that, I liked the way the director (Edward L. Cahn) depicted her lesbian cell-mate "Melanee" (Helen Gilbert). Although certainly tame by today's standards, it was rather racy for this particular time-period. I also appreciated the fact that her other two cell-mates, "Jenny" (Adele Jergens) and "Dorothy" (Phyllis Coates) weren't bad on the eyes either. After all, they could have looked a lot worse. All in all then, I rate this movie as slightly above average.

I bought a VHS copy of this odd little women-in-prison film on eBay because it featured the sublime Phyllis Coates (the first "Lois Lane" on television and, arguably, the best ever) in a supporting role as 'Dorothy', a disturbed inmate. A small but memorable role for Phyllis here: oddly enough her character assumes every new female inmate is a woman named 'Lois' who broke up her family and led her to murder someone.

Lots of great-looking women inmates throughout the film. Prison life is pretty rough, with lots of meaningless busywork for the inmates.

The opening scene is pretty avant garde; the director deserves credit for his experimental approach to introducing the characters.