Cage Without a Key
| Cage Without a Key | |
|---|---|
 Promotional poster | |
| Genre | Drama |
| Screenplay by | Joanna Lee |
| Directed by | Buzz Kulik |
| Starring |
Susan Dey Sam Bottoms Katherine Helmond Lani O'Grady Anne Bloom |
| Music by | Michel Legrand |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Original language(s) | English |
| Production | |
| Executive producer(s) | Douglas S. Cramer |
| Producer(s) |
Buzz Kulik Robert Mintz (associate producer) |
| Location(s) | Dorothy E. Kirby Center - 1500 S. McDonnell Avenue, Commerce, California |
| Cinematography | Charles F. Wheeler |
| Editor(s) | Roland Gross |
| Running time | 120 min. |
| Production company(s) |
Douglas S. Cramer Company Columbia Pictures Television |
| Distributor | CBS |
| Release | |
| Original network | CBS |
| Original release | March 14. 1975 |
Cage Without a Key is a 1975 made-for-TV movie starring Susan Dey and Sam Bottoms, with Jonelle Allen and Lani O'Grady in supporting roles. The movie appeared on the NBC television network, later repeating on The CBS Late Movie. The film was released on VHS under the title Imprisioned Women.
The movie was filmed at Las Palmas School for Girls in Commerce, California, now known as the Dorothy Kirby Center. This was a juvenile detention center, not an actual women's prison. Many of the extras were actual inmates.
17-year-old, Valerie Smith, newly graduated from high school, who heads off on a road trip to San Francisco with her friend Joleen. They have just started out when Joleen’s car breaks down, but one of Joleen’s friends, Buddy (Sam Bottoms) pulls up and offers to take Valerie the rest of the way. He is overly familiar; Valerie doesn’t know him and is reluctant to accept the offer, but is ultimately pressured into accepting the ride. Not far into the trip Buddy decides to rob a liquor store and forces Valerie to assist him at gunpoint. The shopkeeper raises the alarm and is shot dead; the Police arrive and both Buddy and Valerie are arrested. At her trial Buddy insists that he and Valerie were secret lovers and that it was only at her urging that he committed the robbery. All the witnesses back his version that she was a willing participant, and she is duly convicted of the murder and sent to the San Marcos School for Girls, which looks like, well, a school for girls. It is a big modern prison campus and has modern facilities like a hair salon and its own modern euphemistic language, including the delightful rebranding of solitary confinement as ‘meditation’. The staff meanwhile eschew all modern correctional techniques, keeping the girls in their place by reinforcing their uselessness wherever possible, and failing to intervene in their most blatant acts of skulduggery. The prisoners are divided into two rival camps - one led by the duplicitous, scheming Susie Kurosawa (Suesie Eléne), who is a favourite of the staff, and the other by the forthright Tommy Washington (Jonelle Allen, who at 30 was probably a bit old to be playing a teenager). Valerie knows she doesn’t belong in this circle and tries to avoid taking sides, but after her 14-year-old friend Sarah has a vat of boiling water tipped over her by the Kurosawa gang, she decides that aligning herself to Tommy’s crew might be in her best interests. She continues to battle, aghast at the way the ’school’ is managed, and not fully comprehending that prison could be much, much worse. She becomes a bit manic. Away from the prison, her attorney resorts to some very creative work to explode Buddy’s story, but when he does it is almost in vain as Valerie prepares to join in on an escape attempt after suffering one tragedy, one unhappy setback too many.
LGBT in media
Media researcher Steven Capsuto cites the character of Tommy as probably the earliest well-developed gay teen character on television, as well as the first well-developed non-white gay character.