Long before such heroines as Eleanor Parker and Shirley Knight were referred to "fish" in such prison movies as "Caged" and "House of Women", none other than Barbara Stanwyck got her chance to put on prison frock and bitch-slap someone who crossed her. Her back story is explored before she enters San Quentin's women's detention center, as she is first seen after the opening credits calling the police to warn them about a man running amuck with a knife stabbing people. It's all the set-up for a clever robbery, but she's instantly recognized and put on trial. She attracts the attention of Reverend Preston Foster, an attractive former slum kid she knew years before, but when she confesses, she's sent up the river and secretly vows revenge. In prison, the women inmates look on at her with curiosity to test her, and when she tells off Dorothy Burgess (an obviously hated prisoner obsessed with Foster), she immediately wins the rest of the prisoners over. One in particular, Lillian Roth, becomes her best pal, while even the prison matrons (particularly an Irish accented Ruth Donnelly) come to like her as well.
But efforts from Foster to get her to repent go unresponsive until Stanwyck sees her way to use him in order to get an early release. This results in violence concerning her ex-boyfriend Lyle Talbot (one of the bank robbers) and her desire for vengeance increases. Good behavior leads to release, and a possible violent encounter with the sniveling Burgess present as a witness, leading to a conclusion that only a few months later would have been unthinkable in Hollywood films. Stanwyck plays the leading lady with gusto, as ruthless as she was in "Baby Face", yet with that hint of vulnerability under the surface, and it is obviously roles like this that aided her in playing the nefarious roles she started over a decade later with the advent of film noir.
The women in prison are a hysterical bunch, with Ms. Roth comically singing "If I Could Be With You" to a portrait of none other than fellow Warner Brothers contractee Joe E. Brown. This is followed by shots of the various women in their cells, including murderous society queen Cecil Cunningham and her Pekingese and a manly cigar smoking prisoner (listed in IMDb credits as a matron) whom Roth had previously warned Stanwyck, "She likes to wrestle". There's a very racist (but funny) moment concerning black prisoner Madame Sul-Te-Wan in a confrontation with Cunningham over "washing her drawers" and Donnelly's presence with a white cockatoo, probably the same one used in a later Warner Brothers movie as the titled character.
Of the prisoners, it is Maude Eburne who steals every moment as "Aunt Maggie", an obvious former madam, delivering an innuendo in every line, and protecting Stanwyck after one particularly nasty confrontation with the religiously obsessed Burgess. "The poor girl just fell down", she tells the head matron after Stanwyck punches her lights out, and with every other prisoner laughing their heads off, it's obvious even to the matron that Burgess didn't just fall down and go boom. Down the list of minor players is none other than Mary Gordon who shows that the kindly landlady and Scottish mother of many a film (including Sherlock Holmes' Mrs. Hudson) could be more than just what audiences had seen her do so many times.
But efforts from Foster to get her to repent go unresponsive until Stanwyck sees her way to use him in order to get an early release. This results in violence concerning her ex-boyfriend Lyle Talbot (one of the bank robbers) and her desire for vengeance increases. Good behavior leads to release, and a possible violent encounter with the sniveling Burgess present as a witness, leading to a conclusion that only a few months later would have been unthinkable in Hollywood films. Stanwyck plays the leading lady with gusto, as ruthless as she was in "Baby Face", yet with that hint of vulnerability under the surface, and it is obviously roles like this that aided her in playing the nefarious roles she started over a decade later with the advent of film noir.
The women in prison are a hysterical bunch, with Ms. Roth comically singing "If I Could Be With You" to a portrait of none other than fellow Warner Brothers contractee Joe E. Brown. This is followed by shots of the various women in their cells, including murderous society queen Cecil Cunningham and her Pekingese and a manly cigar smoking prisoner (listed in IMDb credits as a matron) whom Roth had previously warned Stanwyck, "She likes to wrestle". There's a very racist (but funny) moment concerning black prisoner Madame Sul-Te-Wan in a confrontation with Cunningham over "washing her drawers" and Donnelly's presence with a white cockatoo, probably the same one used in a later Warner Brothers movie as the titled character.
Of the prisoners, it is Maude Eburne who steals every moment as "Aunt Maggie", an obvious former madam, delivering an innuendo in every line, and protecting Stanwyck after one particularly nasty confrontation with the religiously obsessed Burgess. "The poor girl just fell down", she tells the head matron after Stanwyck punches her lights out, and with every other prisoner laughing their heads off, it's obvious even to the matron that Burgess didn't just fall down and go boom. Down the list of minor players is none other than Mary Gordon who shows that the kindly landlady and Scottish mother of many a film (including Sherlock Holmes' Mrs. Hudson) could be more than just what audiences had seen her do so many times.