Half of film noir’s iconic femme fatales—Ida Lupino, Jan Sterling, Cleo Moore, Audrey Totter—are packed into the cells of this prison melodrama, with Lupino delivering a striking turn as a sadistic warden, her performance laced with subtle hints of lesbian desire. Howard Duff plays the sympathetic prison doctor, dispensing predictably patriarchal advice to both the oppressed and the oppressor. Meanwhile, Vivian Marshall adds an eccentric touch with her spot-on impressions of Bette Davis and Tallulah Bankhead. Despite juggling a large cast and shifting rapidly between characters, the film achieves an impressive balance, managing to give each woman her own narrative space—all within a brisk runtime.

This low-budget tale of tyranny and rebellion was tightly directed by the ever-efficient Lewis Seiler, a Columbia veteran since the early 1930s. It belongs to the studio’s long-running cycle of prison films—works that, surprisingly, often advocated for prison reform and humane treatment, and were built on recycled plotlines, stock characters and even reused footage. (Here, the opening prison shots from Hugo Fregonese’s My Six Convicts are repurposed.)