Plot
A married 19-year-old (played by Eleanor Parker) named Marie Allen is sent to prison, after a botched armed robbery attempt with her equally young husband, Tom (who is killed). While receiving her prison physical, she finds out that she is two months pregnant. Despite the hardships she is put through under Matron Evelyn Harper (Hope Emerson), she gives birth to a healthy baby and wants to "temporarily" grant full custody to her mother. The intent is to get the baby back after she is released. However, her mother informs Marie that her callous step-father has decided that under no circumstances will he allow the baby into his house, and she uses the excuses that she's "too old" and "hasn't a penny in name" as reasons why she can't leave him and help Marie. The prison forces her to permanently give the child up for adoption. Marie never sees her baby again. After her exposure to hardened criminals and sadistic prison guards, by the end of the film she leaves prison a hardened woman with debts to the criminals who helped get her released from jail.
Read more about this topic: Caged
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)