Lady in a Cage (1964)

Film: Lady in a Cage (1964)

Stars: Olivia de Havilland, James Caan, Jennifer Billingsley, Jeff Corey, Ann Sothern

Director: Walter Grauman

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Ann Sothern: click here to learn more about Ms. Sothern (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last week, we left our star Ann Sothern broke, her career nearly over, and drowning in medical bills after a three-year fight with hepatitis.  Thankfully, this is not where we're going to leave her in our final film devoted to our April star.  Sothern, a few months after The Blue Gardenia, signed a contract for a television show called Private Secretary for CBS.  Sothern, like Lucille Ball & Jack Benny before her, had made her name in movies but never quite caught on as a name-brand star in the way that she would be throughout the 1950's as a television headliner.  Private Secretary would run for five seasons, regularly be a Top 10 smash, and would get Sothern four Emmy nominations for Best Actress.  After it finished, she went on to do three seasons of The Ann Sothern Show, also a hit (after a rocky start) which would win her a Golden Globe.

This was the height of Sothern's stardom-she finally became the household name that the 1940's hadn't really afforded her beyond Maisie, but when The Ann Sothern Show ended its run in 1961, she was in her fifties, and a return to leading work in movies didn't feel like an option.  Instead, she took on the guise of a character actress, and had quite a bit of success in 1964 for two roles, both of which got her serious Oscar buzz: Gore Vidal's The Best Man and the famed hagsploitation film Lady in a Cage.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place largely in one house, and focuses on Cornelia Hilyard (de Havilland), a wealthy widow whose son is leaving for the weekend.  Cornelia's hip has broken, and so she uses an elevator to get up-and-down the stairs.  When the elevator is stuck, she realizes that she's trapped.  Initially, she waits & rings an alarm to an oblivious public, and then a drunk (Corey) comes, bringing with him a former prostitute Sade (Sothern) who both start to ransack the house.  They are soon superseded by a group of delinquents (meant to play as sociopaths), lead by Randall (Caan, in his first credited film role), who eventually kill the alcoholic, lock Sade in a closet, & began to torture Cornelia, first with threats of death, and then in a late-stage twist, when she realizes that her (apparently gay) son has decided to kill himself.  The film ends violently, with Caan being blinded by Cornelia as she tries to escape, and finally the ugliness of Caan's bloodied eyes stops passersby, who eventually arrest all of the intruders and leave a distraught Cornelia behind, the fate of her son unknown.

The movie was part of a very brief period after the smash success of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? where actresses of the 1940's & 50's suddenly had work playing aged versions of themselves titillating the audience by showing yesterday's glamour girls in horrifying, violent displays.  De Havilland did two such films in 1964, both successfully (though she wasn't the original choice to play the lead in Hush...Hush Sweet Charlotte, a part originally intended for Joan Crawford, but that's a fantastic story for a different day).  Lady in a Cage was a hit, partially because of the sheer curiosity of arguably the most dignified leading lady of the 1940's being put in truly shocking scenes of sex & violence.

At the time, the film (and de Havilland herself) were heavily criticized for being involved with such a project, and even today, reviews are mixed on the movie but count me as a fan.  It's not a campy sort of fun like Baby Jane or some of the other Grand Guignol movies of the era, but it's really solid as a genuinely terrifying horror movie.  Caan's character is nasty, with the actor doing his best version of Brando crossed with Alex DeStrange, and de Havilland plays her character at just the right hilt.  Cornelia is certainly not the film's villain, but she's also meant to be obtuse & not a particularly good person.  Her ignorance of other people's feelings, particularly her son's, and the way she behaves quite ridiculously (to use modern parlance, she is decidedly "extra") all create a great deal of depth to her performance.  I liked what she did here, what can I say?

Ann Sothern is also excellent, and gives the film its most well-rounded performance.  Unlike Caan's Randall, her villain gets a proper arch, going from greedy-by-circumstance to genuinely horrified by the brutality she's unleashed by invading this woman's home.  The role got her loads of Oscar buzz, as I mentioned above, but it didn't get her an Oscar nomination, and she quickly found herself back in television, primarily as Lucille Ball's frequent costar on The Lucy Show.  It would be another 23 years before she'd finally get her date with Oscar, nominated for her final film The Whales of August opposite two other aging screen legends, Lillian Gish & Bette Davis.  Always just a hair's breadth away from bigger stardom, Sothern couldn't get that final moment of glory & lost to Olympia Dukakis.  Next month we will take a look at an actor who like Sothern spent much of the 1940's & 50's getting to play opposite bigger stars, letting them take the glory...until television provided him with not one but two roles that would define his career.