When chaos consumed the White House Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday night, I didn't hear a peep. I can count on one hand the number of people who mentioned something the next morning, and most of it was to ask if there was a chance the shooting was staged.
– Andrea González-Ramírez on The Great Numbing Out.
There is an old movie I saw when I was young, in the 1970s, and I wondered if you could work out which one it is. I watched it on a black-and-white TV, although I have the feeling it was filmed in colour. It was medium to low-budget. It could have been a movie made for TV. The movie is about a mature or infirm woman living in a brownstone-style apartment with a basement. A repairman (an plumber?) comes to her house to fix something, and she traps him in a cage (or a room with a cage door) in the basement. The man has done something bad to the woman's daughter: he has abused her or possibly murdered her, but got away with the crime. This trap is the woman's revenge. There are scenes where he confronts her angrily but cannot escape. He is younger and stronger than her and would pose a real threat if he escaped. The woman plans to murder him. She keeps him captive, feeding him. There is a scene where she sprinkles a white powder on a dark jam sandwich and feeds it to him, drugging him. After he falls unconscious from the drug, she enters the cage and spreads a plastic sheet on the ground with the intention of murdering him and dismembering the body. That's all I remember about the film. Can you work out what it might be?Hey presto, Claude found the film that's haunted me since I was seven years old:
That's almost certainly Revenge! (1971) — an ABC TV movie. The match is remarkably close to everything you remember:
- It's a made-for-TV film from 1971, featuring the magnificent Shelley Winters as an unhinged mother who lures a man to her home and imprisons him in a cage in her basement, as revenge for harm done to her daughter.
- She lures him by engineering a switched briefcase, then brains him with a fireplace stoker and chains him in a cellar cage.
- The film's tone matches your recollections perfectly — he is younger and stronger, a real threat if he escaped, and there are confrontational scenes while she holds him captive.
- One reviewer specifically recalled the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches — which almost certainly corresponds to your memory of the drugged sandwich with white powder sprinkled on dark jam.
- It stars Shelley Winters as the mother and Bradford Dillman as the captive man, and runs just 74 minutes – tight and economical, as TV movies of the era tended to be.
- The original source novel by Lou Ellen Davis was titled There Was an Old Woman, a nursery rhyme reference that fits the "mature woman vs. younger, stronger man" dynamic you described.
- The San Francisco setting (brownstone-style architecture) and the black-and-white look on your TV also fit – it was shot in actual San Francisco locations. It's quite a sought-after cult oddity now. Well worth a rewatch if you can track it down!
The teleplay was by Joseph Stefano who wrote The Outer Limits and – hello! – the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Revenge! is online and continues to disturb.
"I think the way that we perceive time now — because everything is simultaneous — chronology has kind of gone out of the window, especially with music. Everything is simultaneous, right? So I feel like we're naturally selective when we think about that 25 years. It actually feels, to me, quite compressed when you only think about the times we were actually working. I mean, we took like a six or seven-year break. I think doing all these interviews at the moment, and being asked questions about the early days, it's started to feel closer in a way. It's funny how our minds play these tricks."
"This was a terrible sign right from the start: Fox made us pay for our lunches. We'd have to go to the commissary to buy it and that wasn't worked into the schedule, so we had to make it over there and eat in costume sometimes."