D2D entry #65: The Big Bird Cage (1972, Jack Hill)
(Featured in Dusk to Dawn #1.)
Roger Ebert is generally a very intelligent, perceptive and generous writer. However, like all of us, he sometimes makes assertions that ring a bit false. For instance, his review of Switchblade Sisters contains several sentences that come just short of calling exploitation mainstay director Jack Hill a useless hack. I haven’t yet seen Switchblade Sisters, so I can’t say whether or not it accurately represents the Jack Hill I think I know. What I can say, though, is that the work I’ve seen from the man displays an acute understanding of genre mechanics, audience expectations and the value of keeping both in flux.
The Big Bird Cage, today’s example, reads on paper like a fairly typical Women-In-Prison effort, with scantily clad babes stuck in a tropical hellhole at the mercy of sadistic guards and each other. Throw in some violence, some simmering lesbian tension and lots of cheesecake, and bang! you got a movie. What’s fascinating about Bird Cage, then, is the way that Hill pushes against the tropes and thematics of the genre while throwing in more tonal shifts than a South Korean film festival. The prison shenanigans don’t even start until roughly fifteen minutes into the film, by which point we’ve already gotten Pam Grier playing a guitar, a political shootout in a Filipino nightclub and Sid Haig at his most charmingly lecherous. The fallout from the shootout lands professional harlot-to-the-powerful Anitra Ford in the titular place, a tropical prison barracks/labor camp where women toil day in and day out processing sugar cane in an enormous bamboo structure. As Ford tries to use political connections to get her out of the prison, there’s a parallel strand with Grier and Haig’s revolutionary group conspiring to land Grier in the prison (presumably to strike a blow of freedom against The Man).
Beyond the flipping between the A plot and the B plot, the tone of the film is wont to change from cut to cut, so that low comedy will follow sadistic acts of violence and the antagonistic relationship between sassy black chick Carol Speed and taciturn Amazonian lesbian Karen McKevic suddenly turns credibly tragic when one of them bites it in the Bird Cage. Then there’s the big fiery action climax; what starts triumphant gradually darkens as many of the female denizens, unexpectedly, start getting mowed down. Yet there’s still time for a side trip involving rape — and when that WIP mainstay rears its ugly head, it’s not man-on-woman or woman-on-woman per the usual, but three sex-hungry female prisoners forcing themselves on one of the flamingly gay male guards. (PC attitude is in short supply — Haig manages to infiltrate the prison by caricaturing himself as homosexual.)
Then there’s the matter of Hill’s eye. Even in the midst of dreck and degradation, he can still find the occasional elegiac image (like the long shot of Ford, suspended by her hair, cast against the rich orange-yellow of a Filipino sunset). And when the nasty warden finally gets his, Hill pulls a meta-cinema trick that brings the film that much closer to Two-Lane Blacktop. He may not be Fellini, but the motherfucker knows what he’s doing.
