The Turner Movie Channel’s (TMC, Rogers 48) commercial-free gay and lesbian film festival continues Monday with a look at Hollywood’s homophobic depiction of life behind bars.
8 pm HELL’S HIGHWAY (1932, dir: Rowland Brown, w/Richard Dix, Tom Brown, Louise Carter) A sissy carries on an affair with a butch prison guard.
>9:15 pm LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT (1933, dir: Howard Bretherton, w/ Barbara Stanwyck and Lyle Talbot) One of the very first women-behind-bars flick finds Babs as a tough talkin’ gangster sent to the slammer for bank robbery.
> 10:30 pm CAGED (1950, dir: John Cromwell, w/ Eleanor Parker, Agnes Moorehead, Hope Emerson) A sadistic prison matron (the 6’2″ Emerson) terrorizes a young pregnant woman (Parker) incarcerated for a crime she did not commit. The genre’s archetype.
> 12:15 am SO YOUNG, SO BAD (1950, dir: Bernard Vorhaus, w/ Paul Henried, Anne Francis, Rita Moreno) A crusading psychiatrist (Henreid) tries to help troubled teen-agers locked up in a reform school for girls.
> 2 am THE STRANGE ONE (1957, dir: Jack Garfein, w/ Ben Gazzara and George Peppard) A controlling cadet (Gazarra as Jocko de Paris) holds sway over a southern military academy including his homo fl unky Cockroach. Screenwriter Calder Willingham went on to co-write The Graduate.
> 4 am WOMEN’S PRISON (1955, dir: Lewis Seiler, w/ Ida Lupino, Jan Sterling, Howard Duff) A crusading psychiatrist (Sterling) butts heads with a sadistic warden (Lupino) to improve conditions at a co-ed women’s prison. A virtual re-make of Caged.
