Cinema: Olivia Goes Ape

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Lady in a Cage. A power failure. In an elegant old mansion a self-service elevator stops suddenly at an awkward level between floors. In it, mildly startled, stands a middle-aged woman with a book of poems in one hand and a Lowestoft jar in the other. "Don't worry," she reassures herself. "This can't last more than a few minutes." But it does. It lasts all day, a day of wrath that changes a cultured woman into a caged beast and adds Olivia de Havilland, now 47, to the list of cinemactresses (Bette Davis, Joan Crawford) who would apparently rather be freaks than be forgotten.

Unable to open the elevator door, the woman (Olivia) presses the panic button. In the service street behind the house an alarm begins to jangle. A drunken derelict hears it, wanders up to the kitchen door, peeks in, sees a bottle of wine vinegar, deliriously smashes a window pane, enters the house and goes staggering through it in search of liquid plunder.

He finds it, but then he finds so many other wonderful things to steal that the sight sobers him and he runs off to collect a more efficient colleague (Ann Sothern). Poor slob, he also collects three predatory teenagers, two boys and a girl, who tail him back to the mansion, snatch his boodle, conk him cold and, finding nothing better to do, kill him.

All this the trapped woman watches in helpless horror, but fear and anger do their work in her, and when the killers at last come to kill her they discover that the lady in the cage has turned into a tigress.

Lady, in short, is just a routine withdrawal from Hollywood's bottomless blood bank, but it does give Olivia a grand chance to go ape. She gibbers, growls, simpers, screeches; rolls her eyes, tears her hair, rattles the bars, climbs the walls, bawls a snatch of Alouette, jabs a villain's eyes out with some jagged metal strips; and at the climax, screaming like mad, crawls through the nearest gutter in a $400 negligee. Attagirl, Ollie.