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The Grand Illusion of the gals-behind-bars bin, or at the very least its The Battle of Algiers. The setting isn't the Third World mud-wrestling pits of the usual AIP potboiler, but the Southern California of "agricultural therapy," roadside motels and bank robbers in Disney masks: Jonathan Demme's America. The Connerville Institute for Women is the "violent sorority" where wised-up toughies, damaged waifs and other incarnations of female victimization peek through grilled windows and dream of brief little Maya Deren send-ups. (Differently but equally oppressed, prudish warden Barbara Steele escapes into a fantasy of her own, where she ditches her wheelchair, unfurls her severe bun and puts on a long-legged cabaret act.) The new fish (Erica Gavin) arrives courtesy of a botched drug deal and promptly clashes with the fierce block queen (Juanita Brown), who warns "I'm gonna kick your little pretty teeth so far down your throat you're gonna get a picket fence around your asshole." Roberta Collins, Cheryl Rainbeaux Smith and Ella Reid are a few of the other Athenas in this vibrant take on multicultural grindhouse sisterhood, with a "goddamn perverted sadistic maniac" of a doctor (Warren Miller) standing, smoking pipe and power-drill in hand, for lobotomizing chauvinism. Handed the rough Hill-Franco-Mattei blueprint, Demme is generous with communal showers and grudging with sleaze, using a fabulous vaudeville act (Collins and Reid in male drag, whiskered like raunchy Godot refugees) to playfully yet confrontationally deconstruct the subgenre's exploitative expectations of gender performance. A string of ribald jokes, a constant flow of human harmonies amid the mayhem, a revolution envisioned bursting through the walls and leaving the guards with pants around their ankles. With Lynda Gold, Mickey Fox, Joe Viola, John Aprea, and Desiree Cousteau.
--- Fernando F. Croce |