THE BIG BIRD CAGE (1972), SWEET SUGAR (1972), TERMINAL ISLAND (1973)

PHENOMENALITY: (1)*naturalistic* (2,3) *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: (1, 2)*fair*; (2) *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*


As escapist as the early seventies WIP are in essence, it's interesting as to how often they explore the sexual politics between males and females.

THE BIG BIRD CAGE was a conceptual "sequel" to 1971's successful THE BIG DOLL HOUSE, also directed by Jack Hill. However, this time there's no weirdo warden in charge, and Hill's script emphasizes trippy, goofy scenarios far more than Don Spenser's grim script for HOUSE. Like HOUSE, the women's prison is situated in some tropical country, and events unfold before the eyes of an innocent "new fish" (Anitra Ford's character "Terry"). This time, as if to counteract the hot lady convicts' ability to charm their captors, all of the guards guarding the prison are homosexual. The ladies labor in the shadow of a huge mill, the "bird cage" of the title, where at least some of the characters perish, metaphorically being ground up in the mills of commerce-- that is, when the prettier ones aren't being pimped out to rich guys in the city.

Opposed to the corrupt local regime are a team of quasi-Marxist revolutionaries, led by Blossom (Pam Grier) and Django (Sid Haig). However, these are no liberating forces, for Blossom and Django only want to free the female convicts for the same reason the capitalists do: to prostitute them for the cause. At this point in Grier's career, she had yet to play starring roles in films like COFFY and FOXY BROWN, and perhaps for this reason, even when she gets herself sentenced to the cane-fields, she never really seems a part of the ensemble of "birds." Indeed, whereas HOUSE was fairly strong in creating a group of simple but memorable "types," none of the characters in CAGE stand out very well, despite a sprightly comic scene involving a tall lesbian trying to beat up a shorter girl who continually tempts and mocks her. There's a muddy catfight between Blossom and a blonde chick that reverses the verdict of HOUSE, and a final shootout at the climax, but it's all pretty unfocused.

By contrast, Don Spenser followed up his seminal contribution to WIP films by contributing the screenplay to Michel Levesque's SWEET SUGAR. (A writer named R.Z. Samuel, with no other IMDB credits, is credited with the original story, but there's no telling what he did at this late date.)

The film is named for its heroine, comely Sugar Bowman (Phyllis Elizabeth Davis), but although she fills the role of the "new fish" sent to a cane-cutting tropical prison, Sugar is clearly meant to be the star of the show, while all of the other lady convicts who aid her comprise her retinue. From the first Sugar is portrayed as a seventies version of an independent woman, having sex with anyone she cares to but ostensibly never doing it for money, or even just for dinner and a movie. But for obscure reasons she's framed and sent to cut cane. This time, there's not a lot of talk about pimping the ladies out-- some of them are even allowed to go into town when they finish their labors-- but Doctor John, both the warden and the prison doctor, has another purpose. He's the epitome of a mad scientist, working on various esoteric projects for no stated reason. At one point he hooks Sugar up to a testing machine while injecting her with a female hormone, but her sexual paroxyms break the machine, probably a swipe from a similar scene in BARBARELLA. Later for even less reason he injects cats with a local drug to make them crazy, and then has the cats tossed at rebellious convicts. There's even a moment when he seems hip to the traditions of voodoo, for when Doctor John executes a voodoo-worshiping male convict, the crazed physician starts rambling about the voodoo god Ghede for some reason.

Most of the other guards and prisoners are nugatory characters, so that all the best scenes are those in which Sugar, the self-assured hot girl, keeps putting down the nutty doctor despite the power he wields over her and her fellow inmates. In contrast to many WIP films of the time, Sugar escapes her tormentors and returns to her normal life unscathed.

TERMINAL ISLAND might be termed a very minimal form of "science fiction," in that it takes place in a near future, when capital punishment has been outlawed in the U.S. However, the government has solved prison overcrowding by sentencing a couple dozen convicted murderers to sink or swim on an isolated island. "New fish" Carmen (Ena Hartman) provides the audience with a viewpoint character, and I would think that Hartman was trying to do a "Pam Grier tough girl" performance if it wasn't for the fact that the two movies were shot about the same time, with COFFY making it into theaters only a month or two ahead of TERMINAL. However, director/co-writer Stephanie Rothman doesn't maintain her focus on Carmen, on the island's only doctor Norman (a pre-stardom Tom Selleck), or on much of anyone. By the time Carmen gets there, the convicts seem to have separated into "really vicious murderers" and "not so bad murderers," and for the rest of the movie Rothman simply depicts a series of intermittent conflicts between the two groups. I suppose the "not so bads" comprise the film's ensemble of central characters, but I could hardly keep track of who was who. Marta Kristen has a nice scene or two as a lady scientist who helps her allies make gunpowder, and Phyllis Davis rubs royal jelly on a guy's dong so that the local bees will sting him into impotence. But nothing really hangs together; it's a bunch of random, poorly-staged fight-scenes and fleeing-scenes that aren't up to the standards of even a mediocre WIP flick.

Though all three films contain a lot of violence, none of them are organized enough to be considered in the combative mode, though SWEET SUGAR comes closest to the model.