It’s not often that I get accused of being too high brow, but my friend Steve has criticized my heretofore well-regarded list of 10 Best Prison Movies for not including Women in Chains (1972). Women in Chains is part of the subgenre of women-in-prison exploitation movies. A prison setting offers a filmmaker the possibility of violence, sex and S&M to exploit. With women’s prisons, nude shower scenes and catfights are added to the mix. Steve fondly remembers this aspect of Women in Chains. But, Steve, it was a made-for-TV movie, so it couldn’t have been THAT racy.
The absolute master of this genre is the website BigBustOut.com – The Original Encyclopedia of Women in Prison Films, which lists over 300 women-in-prison movies. BigBustOut.com also has an excellent history of the genre. I’ve included BigBustOut on my list of Other People’s Great Movie Lists. Here is BigBustOut’s take on Women in Chains.
My own guilty pleasure from 70s prison exploitation films is 1971’s 1,000 Convicts and a Woman, which I saw in a drive-in during a misspent evening of an otherwise upstanding youth. 1,000 Convicts and a Woman doesn’t make BigBustOut because it’s not about a women’s prison. Instead, the oversexed daughter of the warden returns from finishing school and moves into the men’s prison. Played by vamp-eyed blonde Alexandra Hay, she immediately begins to tease the incarcerated, with forseeable results.