“Caged” and “Tomorrow is Another Day”
Noir City 22
Grand Lake Theater
3200 Grand Ave, Oakland
February 1, 2025
”Pile out you tramps, this is the end of the line.”
A rather cold open to a film, sure, but we were sitting in a nearly-full and very much unheated theater, huddled in our coats, eyes wide for the next few hours to soak in the sights of some on-film noir. A matinee double feature of John Cromwell’s 1950 “Caged” and Felix Feist’s 1951 “Tomorrow is Another Day” were being screened, the penultimate daytime selections for the annual 10-day festival that is Noir City.
After the welcoming sounds of the Wurlitzer died down, Alan Rode, treasurer and charter director of the Film Noir Foundation, introduced the films. He waxed nostalgic about watching and rewatching these films endlessly as a child, as well as his “close” “personal” relationship with acclaimed actress and star of the first flick Eleanor Parker (they met in passing one time, she left, they spoke on the phone a few times afterwards. His telling).
His presentation, a tad long-winded, self-aggrandizing, and outdated in discussion of the women he so dearly admires for my taste, nonetheless provided some interesting tidbits and funny facts. Parker’s shorn head? A wig! (We knew). Loner sort-of bad-boy but virginal Bill Clark? Portrayed by Steve Cochran, one of the most notorious “___ hounds, I’ll let you fill in the rest” in Hollywood, which is certainly saying something.
Caged, a groundbreaking film at the time, features few men; set in a women’s prison with a 19 year old pregnant protagonist and taking a compassionate stance towards these wards of the state, it remains an astonishing departure from the usual film fare, even now. Bechdel test, smashed. Thick with grief and pain and undercurrents of “unacceptable” sexualities, the humanity and pride of the women is stripped away with each interaction, each utterance of heartbreak. Parker delivers a broken and tender but fiercely resilient young woman in Marie, and warden Ruth Benton (Agnes Moorehead) meets her there: a powerful woman in charge and staunch advocate for the care of her inmates ability to exercise that power remains in the hands of out-of-touch men. The prisoners are portrayed as women with real problems, complicated circumstances, and individual inner lives, if only snapshots.
Nearly every plot point is a heavy one, with a whole lot of trauma and drama packed into a tight package, devastation and despair at every turn, no happy endings in sight. This is not to say the film takes itself too seriously or runs without levity, and Jan Sterling’s Smoochie consistently provides bits of much needed comic relief, her refrain “I got new for ya” garning a chuckle from the audience each time. However, when the lights went up and I joined the bathroom queue, enviously eyeing the cozy fur adornments my line-neighbor was sporting, I did hope aloud that the second feature might be at least a bit lighter fare.
And it was, sort of. The narrative arc of the women in both films fit the festival’s theme to a T: good girls gone bad, their soft, youthful innocence and girlishness hardened by the dark forces of the world, and the men they attach themselves to, until they become murderous and cold, unwomanly in their ferociousness, only to collapse back to the ease and protection of the patriarchy by the end. Ruth Roman’s Cay, a “hard-as-nails taxi dancer” in New York in “Tomorrow is Another Day” is bad, does bad, but somehow manages to position herself favorably at the end. Her fast-talking quips are fun, but hardly more than that—worth about as much as that 10-cent dance.
I found Cochran hardly believable as a still-tender and innocent (and again, at least hetero-virginal) former convict, too naive to the world and the ways of wicked women to realize he’s been set up by his desired and soon-to-be-lover. Brief moments of “passion” break up the remainder of Cochran’s restrained performance, and in those his intensity reads true, with a hand around a neck or a forced attempt at a kiss. (Rode’s earlier mention of Cochran’s real-life antics led me to search once back home, which quickly showed Cochran’s “womanizing” to have been in fact far, far darker.)
Plot lines remained unresolved, with vague addressing of a crooked cop’s connection to Cay (business partners? Lovers? Blackmailer and mailee?) and the home life she ran from. Clark gets released from prison, gets a job, gets a girl, and goes on the run in just one day? Blows his whole wad on that first (professional) dame he hasn’t even kissed? The film is full of cheesy, campy lines delivered straight, about as easy to stomach as the trajectory of the story. Good triumphs over evil, brunettes are as dangerous as blondes, and in just ninety minutes a man’s entire free life flashed before our eyes before swiftly ending back where the film began. Robert Burks, one of Hitchcock’s faves, was cinematographer, and so gorgeous shots of sad faces and lettuce fields, montages of hard labor, poverty, and the American west abound. But beautiful did images alone cannot make up for the absurdity of the plot, the abrupt ending, and I left the theater giggling—but no question I’ll be back next year for more.
Caged is available to stream on TCM through Friday the 7th, watch it now! Tomorrow is Another Day is available to stream on Max.
