Retrospective Film Review

Lady in a Cage (1964) • 60 Years Later — the middle class under threat in an early home invasion film

A woman trapped in an elevator can only look on as violent criminals ransack her home.

Philip French, a British critic with his tongue presumably in cheek, described Lady in a Cage as belonging to a genre he termed “cable hangers” or “shaft operas” — films set in elevators, that is. And certainly, the nominal premise is the plight of nice Cornelia (Olivia de Havilland), who becomes stuck in an elevator at her pleasant home and watches helplessly as a collection of marauders enter to wreak havoc amongst her objets d’art.

But Lady in a Cage isn’t truly about being stuck in an elevator at all, and it’s certainly not a “trapped” film in the style that’s become popular in recent decades — Phone Booth (2002), 127 Hours (2010), Buried (2010) and so on. It makes little use of the elevator’s claustrophobic potential; more of the action takes place outside the elevator than within it, often in parts of the house not visible from it, or even outside the house altogether.