Touches You

Absolutely Fantastic

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

All the performances were excellent in this movie, except maybe the head prison matron played by film veteran Jane Darwell. This film was exciting from the first moment with a very early rock 'n roll song TOM'S BEAT to the last scene. Prison scams, girl fights, threats of violence at every corner, a prison break, lesbianism, all adds up to an entertaining film. Stand-out performance by Adele Jergens as a gun moll.

A pretty young woman by the name of "Anne Carson" (Joan Taylor) gets mixed up with two other men in a bank robbery and gets a 5-to-10 year prison sentence even though she declares her innocence. Along with that, $38,000 was stolen and since she left one person at the bank and the other person is dead, everybody thinks she hid the money. And everybody wants it bad. Anyway, for a women-in-prison (WIP) film made in the mid-50's this movie wasn't too bad. Not only did Joan Taylor give a pretty good performance but she was rather cute too. Along with that, I liked the way the director (Edward L. Cahn) depicted her lesbian cell-mate "Melanee" (Helen Gilbert). Although certainly tame by today's standards, it was rather racy for this particular time-period. I also appreciated the fact that her other two cell-mates, "Jenny" (Adele Jergens) and "Dorothy" (Phyllis Coates) weren't bad on the eyes either. After all, they could have looked a lot worse. All in all then, I rate this movie as slightly above average.

Going by the title and the cover, I was expecting a straight-up Girls-In-Prison flick (duh!), but this film seems less concerned with daily prison life than with the plot that has several characters, operating in & out of prison, looking for the still-missing loot of the bank robbery which got the heroine, Joan Taylor, in prison in the first place. Everybody thinks that she has the money hidden somewhere and....spoilers follow....everybody is right! That's quite a twist on most pictures of this kind: the innocent-looking heroine thrown into the cesspool is actually guilty! But don't worry, there's a kind preacher there to help her regain her conscience. The film does have some prototypical elements of WIP movies (including a very short and shot from a great distance mud fight that reminded me of Roberta Collins vs. Pam Grier in "The Big Doll House"), and there are subtle but unmistakable clues that Helen Gilbert's character is a lesbian who gets angry at Taylor for rejecting her. There is also an earthquake sequence, pretty well-done, and an IMPRESSIVE stunt of a woman climbing onto the back of a moving truck and then getting thrown on the ground. It's too bad that between these moments the film is actually quite boring. (**)

I bought a VHS copy of this odd little women-in-prison film on eBay because it featured the sublime Phyllis Coates (the first "Lois Lane" on television and, arguably, the best ever) in a supporting role as 'Dorothy', a disturbed inmate. A small but memorable role for Phyllis here: oddly enough her character assumes every new female inmate is a woman named 'Lois' who broke up her family and led her to murder someone.Lots of great-looking women inmates throughout the film. Prison life is pretty rough, with lots of meaningless busywork for the inmates.The opening scene is pretty avant garde; the director deserves credit for his experimental approach to introducing the characters.