Mémoire

I'd heard that LLMs are good at identifying TV shows and movies from general descriptions so last week I tried it out on a show I'd stumbled across in my childhood in the unsupervised way kids find things that aren't made for them. I fed Claude what I remembered:

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 eight 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.