Caged Heat: Demme's Feminist WIP Debut

Every director who came through Roger Corman’s operation was given the same deal: hit the schedule, deliver the required nudity and violence, and whatever else you can get on film is yours. Most of them took the deal and made a competent piece of product. Jonathan Demme took the deal in 1974 and made Caged Heat, which delivers every requirement on the New World checklist and is also, in the gaps between them, a film about institutional psychiatry with dream sequences, a John Cale score and Barbara Steele giving a performance nobody in the audience had paid to see.

It is his first film. He was thirty. The credit sequence lists a cinematographer named Tak Fujimoto, also on his first feature, who would go on to shoot most of Demme’s career. That fact alone makes Caged Heat one of the more consequential ninety minutes in American cinema, and the film is better than it needs to be for reasons that go well beyond hindsight.

The formula, and what Demme does with it

The template was three years old and already exhausted. Jack Hill had written the rules with The Big Doll House and started sending them up with The Big Bird Cage, and by 1974 the women-in-prison picture was a checklist that any hired hand could fill.

Demme fills it. Jacqueline Wilson (Erica Gavin) is arrested after a drug bust and sent to Connorville, a women’s prison run by Superintendent McQueen (Barbara Steele). Inside she meets Maggie (Juanita Brown), Belle (Roberta Collins), Pandora (Ella Reid) and Lavelle (Cheryl Smith). There is a shower. There is a fight. There is a break. The parts are all present and correctly ordered.

What Demme changes is the target. The prison in The Big Doll House is a fence with sadists inside it; the horror is physical and the enemy is the matron. Connorville’s real machinery is medical. Its instrument of control is the infirmary, its enforcer is a doctor, and its punishments are administered as treatment — electroshock, sedation, surgical intervention on women whose crime is being difficult to manage. Demme moves the film’s centre of dread from the whipping post to the clipboard, and that relocation is the entire difference between an exploitation item and a film with a thought in it.

The move also solves a problem the cycle never solved. WIP films are ridiculous because their villains are cartoons; nobody is frightened of a leering guard. A physician with a theory and a signature is frightening in a way no amount of jungle sadism manages, because the audience recognises the authority as real.

Barbara Steele, and what Demme knew

Casting Barbara Steele as the warden is the film’s masterstroke and its clearest evidence of a director who had actually watched films. Steele was the face of Italian gothic — Black Sunday had made her an icon of a very specific kind of doomed, enormous-eyed dread — and by the mid-seventies the parts had thinned. Demme hands her Superintendent McQueen, a woman who uses a wheelchair, who runs Connorville with a rigid puritan discipline, and whose repression the film keeps cracking open into fantasy.

Those fantasy sequences are the reason people still talk about this picture. McQueen dreams, and the dreams are vaudeville — she performs, she is applauded, she is looked at, she has a body and an audience and the freedom she spends her waking life confiscating from the women in her care. Demme shoots them in a completely different register from the rest of the film, and the tonal rupture is the point. A prison melodrama that gives its villain an interior life and stages it as a musical number is doing something no other entry in the cycle attempted.

Steele plays McQueen straight and lets the dreams do the arguing, which is why the character lands as tragic rather than camp. Erica Gavin — whom the drive-in audience knew as the star of Vixen!, Russ Meyer’s most notorious hit — underplays opposite her with an exhausted flatness that reads as a person rather than a lead. Between them the film has two performances that would not disgrace a picture with ten times the money.

The real ancestor

The genre pedigree runs back through Hill to the studio women’s-prison melodrama, and Caged Heat inherits all of that furniture. Its actual ancestor is elsewhere, and it is the Warner Bros. social-problem picture of the early thirties.

Watch what the film is angry about. Connorville processes inconvenient women through a system that has medical vocabulary for what it does to them, funded by the state, staffed by professionals, accountable to nobody. That is I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang — a 1932 film whose subject is a legal apparatus operating exactly as designed, with the individual cruelties treated as symptoms of the design. Demme’s targets are institutional in precisely that sense, and his heroines’ escape solves nothing structural, which is the thirties picture’s characteristic bitterness rather than the seventies drive-in’s.

The John Cale score points the same way. Cale writes the film something spiky, dissonant and cold — the sound of a system rather than a chase — and the choice tells you what Demme thought he was making. The Corman film school taught its graduates to hit the marks. It could not teach anyone to hire the Velvet Underground’s viola player, and the fact that Demme did is the loudest signal in the film about the career coming.

Why the dream sequences work

The mechanics deserve unpacking, because a lesser director doing the same thing would have produced an embarrassment.

Demme’s trick is that he never signals the transitions. The dreams begin inside a scene that appears to be proceeding normally, with no dissolve and no musical cue announcing that reality has been suspended, and they end the same way. The audience is required to work out where it is, which puts the viewer briefly in McQueen’s position — uncertain which of the two lives she is currently living. That is an idea about the character delivered through editing rather than dialogue, and it is a genuinely sophisticated piece of construction for a first feature shot in a few weeks.

The second thing he gets right is duration. The sequences are short. A director in love with his own audacity would have let them run; Demme cuts out early, before the joke lands and before the audience gets comfortable, so each one leaves a residue rather than a punchline. The prison scenes afterwards play differently because of what has leaked into them.

Fujimoto’s photography does the rest. The Connorville material is lit flat and institutionally, all overhead fluorescent and no shadow to hide in, and the fantasies are lit like a stage. The two visual grammars sit inside the same ninety minutes without either one apologising, and the collision is the film’s whole argument about repression compressed into a lighting choice. This is what people mean when they say the Corman graduates learned on the job. Fujimoto is teaching himself here, in public, on someone else’s money.

The case against

The feminist reading of Caged Heat has been made so often and so warmly that it has floated free of the thing itself. This is still a New World picture that shows women in the shower because the poster promised it, and Demme’s sympathy for his characters coexists with a camera that undresses them on cue. He is doing the job. Calling the result a feminist film without qualification requires ignoring a considerable amount of footage.

The film is also ragged. The escape plotting in the last act is loose, the tonal swings between the dream sequences and the genre business occasionally read as two films spliced together, and there are stretches where the schedule is visible in the staging. Demme’s later precision — the thing that would eventually produce the interrogation scenes in The Silence of the Lambs — is present here only intermittently, in flashes.

Those flashes are worth the ticket. Demme’s defining quality as a filmmaker was an unfashionable, uncondescending interest in people that the industry mostly regarded as a soft spot, and it is already fully formed at thirty in a picture financed to show women in a shower. He gives the minor prisoners jokes and histories. He gives the villain a dream life. He treats the whole population of Connorville as though they had somewhere to be.

Caged Heat circulates through the restorations of Corman’s catalogue and looks far better than it did when it played the bottom half of a double bill. Watch it as the beginning of a career, and for Barbara Steele, who deserved a decade of parts this good and was given one afternoon of them.

Spoilers below

The film’s real horror lands in the infirmary. Demme has spent the picture establishing the medical wing as the prison’s true instrument, and the payoff is Lavelle — the youngest and least equipped of the prisoners, worked on by Dr. Randolph and the apparatus behind him until the institution has quietly removed the person from the body. Cheryl Smith plays the aftermath with a blankness that is the most upsetting thing in the film, and Demme refuses to stage it as a set-piece. It happens administratively, off to one side, the way it would.

That damage is what turns the escape into something other than a genre requirement. The women who break out do it to retrieve one of their own from a procedure, which gives the last act a moral engine the cycle never bothered with. Maggie and Jacqueline’s raid back into the institution is the reversal Demme has been building to: the prison break runs in the wrong direction.

McQueen’s ending is the film’s most Demme-like gesture. The superintendent is given no comeuppance the audience can cheer, and Steele plays her final scenes as a woman confronted with the gap between her dreams and her ledger. Connorville stays open. The doctor’s methods stay legal. The women get out and the machine keeps running, which is the thirties ancestor’s ending exactly, delivered by a thirty-year-old who would spend the next forty years making films about how much people cost.