Trivia / Caged

• Banned in China: The film was banned in several states in America. When it was found out that Virginia Kellogg had based the story on her experiences in an Ohio prison, the film was banned there (despite never mentioning where the prison is set in the film).
• Dawson Casting: Marie is nineteen when the film starts and twenty when it ends. Eleanor Parker was around twenty-seven.
• Dueling Works: The film So Young, So Bad was released the same day. That too dealt with Girls Behind Bars, though in that case a correctional school for girls.
• Executive Meddling: The disclaimer that the story was fictional had to be added to get the film allowed in Canada.
• Lying Creator: Eleanor Parker was forced by the studio to say that she did really shave her head for the role. In a later interview, she said it was done with prosthetics and make-up effects.
• Playing Against Type: Agnes Moorehead, as she got older, typically found herself playing grouchy or hammy spinsters. Here she's the Reasonable Authority Figure.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The project was greenlit as a vehicle for Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Bette turned it down, refusing to do a "dyke movie". Eleanor Parker claimed in a 1949 interview that Joan was the one who recommended her for the part.
  • The original title was 'The Big Cage', which would have been a Title Drop from Harper's line to Marie "just like the big cage at the zoo, only this time you have to clean it". Other titles were 'The Cage', 'House of Correction', 'Fallen Women', 'Locked In', 'Condemned', 'The Damned Don't Cry', 'Behind Iron Girls Like Us' and 'The Foresaken'.
  • There was supposed to be an inmate called "Twitch" who was an addict. The censors didn't like this and thus Twitch never made it into the film.
• Write What You Know: Author and screenwriter Virginia Kellogg pulled some strings to briefly incarcerate herself in a women's prison. She basically just wrote accounts of what she saw while she was in there, and her screenplay was nominated for an Oscar.