Distributor Blue Underground has made a mint making the digital
age safe for the best of sexploitation and other niche cinema of the 1960s and ’70s,
and their superlative treatment of those genres continues with 1975’s willfully
sleazy Women Behind Bars, a screwy and
somewhat flatly peddled little crime flick with a hearty serving of naked lounging
about and a twist ending in which director Jess Franco cameos and gets gunned
down.

99 Women and Barbed Wire Dolls) is marked by all the sort of familiar bits one would expect from the genre,
from bumping fuzzies and sexual favor brokering to a reprehensible warden and monologues
about the pleasure of cigarettes and sweltering heat. Somewhat underwritten, the
film is also marked by the same amusingly weird mixture of overly formal dialogue
(“We will do everything in our power to help you forget, as far as possible,
your condition as women condemned to punishment by society,” says Carlo) and cheerful
over-emoting that are also a fixture of the this field. Though careful zooms in
on pubic thatches and plenty of bared bosoms gain featured time, much of Women Behind Bars is shot as a gorgeous,
alluring travelogue — one manner in which Franco’s work differentiates itself
from that of many of his colleagues.

Presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a solid Dolby
digital soundtrack, Women Behind Bars
comes housed in a regular Amray case in turn stored in a thin cardboard
slipcover. Apart from the movie’s French theatrical trailer, the disc comes
with but one supplemental bonus feature. Given that it’s a newly filmed 17-minute
interview with Franco, however, one easily falls for this offering. In his
wide-ranging chat — which is thankfully subtitled, given the heavily accented Franco’s
penchant for slipping between English and Spanish — the filmmaker touches on his
initial inspiration for working in the genre (an old Corinne Luchaire flick
entitled Prison Without Bars), and
also notes that William Berger was his initial choice for the role of grubby warden
Carlo, but a late scratch, necessitating the casting of Weiss. The movie’s
outdoor locations are also compared with present-day Nice, and Franco talks a
bit about his love affair with Romay, which would begin on this film, and last
to this day. C+ (Movie) B (Disc)