Women in Prison Film - History of The Genre

History of The Genre

Hollywood made movies set in women's prisons as early as the 1930s, such as Ladies They Talk About and Hold Your Man, but generally, only a small part of the action took place inside the prison. Women-in-prison films developed in the 1930s as melodramas in which young heroines were shown the way to a righteous life by way of the prison. Under the influence of pulp magazines and paperbacks, they became popular B movies in the 1950s. It was not until the 1950s, beginning with the release of Caged (1950), starring Eleanor Parker and Agnes Moorehead, So Young, So Bad (also 1950), and Women's Prison (1955) with Ida Lupino and Cleo Moore, that an entire film was set inside a women's correctional facility.

Several films were made about women prisoners interned by the Germans and Japanese during the Second World War such as Two Thousand Women and Three Came Home.

The film that kicked off the genre in a new direction was Jesus Franco's 99 Women, which was a big box office success in the U.S. in 1969. That year Love Camp 7 was also among the first pure exploitation films that influenced the women in prison and Nazi exploitation genres. Since the 1970s, women-in-prison films have become a specialty product that has more to do with sexual fantasies than with real prison life.

A number of the WiP films remain banned by the BBFC in the United Kingdom. Among them are Love Camp 7 (rejected in 2002) and Women in Cellblock 9 (rejected in 2004), on the grounds that they contain substantial scenes of sexual violence and in the case of the latter an actress who at 16 was under age at the time of production rendering it child pornography under U.K. law.