|
Women Behind Bars
[Blue Underground]
1975; color
Directed by Jesus Franco
Starring: Lina Romay, Martine Stedil, Nathalie Chape, Roger Darton & Ronald Weiss
|
|
Considering Women Behind Bars is one of nine Jess Franco films released in 1975 (which may seem like an insane number to some but is fairly typical of Franco's '70s output) you might expect a thrown-together treatment of a half-baked story. On the contrary, Women Behind Bars is one of Franco's more solid and cohesive efforts, and possibly the best of his WIP films. (He made four or five, the most well known being Barbed Wire Dolls and Ilsa The Wicked Warden.) The film opens with some explanatory narration courtesy one of the main characters, an insurance investigator who is on the trail of a stash of missing diamonds. The story, in brief, goes like this: three guys rob a safe on a private yacht and steal a case containing the diamonds. Then one guy turns on the other two during the getaway, and shoots both his partners dead. As soon as remaining burglar gets home, he opens up the box in front of his girlfriend (Lina Romay, of course; still looking pretty foxy at this point) and finds—to his great surprise—the box is empty. His girlfriend doesn't seem too surprised though. Then she shoots him dead and, confusingly, calls the cops and turns herself in. Once she's sentenced and sent to prison our story switches to the present and thing start to pick up a bit. The jail itself has a few tried and true WIP standards: the sadistic warden, a couple evil matrons and your stock array of prisoners. (Gay, straight, white, black, Asian, etc.) As it turns out, the warden is also interested in the missing jewels, and he enlists a prisoner who's sorta like his girlfriend / mistress to spy on, and get info on the missing goods from, Romay—because everyone seems to think the location of the diamonds is known solely to her. As the woman tries to get close to Romay, the narrating investigator also comes to the prison to interview her, but she clams up and claims to know nothing. He's also joined on the case by a fellow investigator, played by Franco, and the two decide the only way to get the diamonds—they too are still convinced she knows where they are—is to break her out of prison. And then, of course, get the ice for themselves and send her ass back to jail. After what seems like a very intentional set-up, which nets Romay a gun, she winds up on the receiving end of some serious discipline from the warden in the form of getting repeatedly shocked in the genital area. (PS: this is the scene that earned the film a banning in the UK and it's subsequent labeling as a "video nasty.") Needless to say, she not only survives, but lives on to strangle the girl who set her up, take the warden hostage and literally walk herself right out the front gate and into a waiting car. I won't go any further, but there's a big swerve on the way to the ending that not only makes all the difference in who lives and who dies, it ties up all the loose ends in a nice little package.
—the Kommandant
|
|
