Friday night at the home drive-in: Caged Men Plus One Woman AKA I’m Going to Get You… Elliot Boy (1971)

Friday night at the home drive-in: Caged Men Plus One Woman AKA I'm Going to Get You… Elliot Boy (1971) by #EdForsyth w/ #RossStephenson #MaureenMcGill #PaulKelman & #AbdullahtheButcher "It's Shocking! …It's Devastating! …It's Explosive!" #Canada #UK #NotQuiteClassicCinema pic.twitter.com/NwZdu36KJe

— Angus Kohm (@AngusKohm) August 31, 2019

I first read about Caged Men Plus One Woman AKA I’m Going to Get You… Elliot Boy in Gerald Pratley‘s book A Century of Canadian Cinema. I’d been working on a a research project that had me searching for obscure Canadian crime films, and Pratley’s book had been a good source of unfamiliar titles. Unfortunately, a surprisingly large number of them were impossible to track down. In some cases, I wondered if the movies had ever had a real release. Pratley saw them, so they must have played a festival, or had a premiere screening somewhere. But it seemed like some of them had never secured a real distribution deal, and simply vanished. Others may have been distributed, either theatrically, or on VHS back in the day, but were now totally out of print and/or circulation.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Caged Men Plus One Woman AKA I’m Going to Get You… Elliot Boy was available on Blu-ray and DVD from Code Red Video.

The movie was originally released in 1971, the same year as Fortune and Men’s Eyes, another Canadian movie, that one based on a successful Broadway play (written by Canadian playwright John Herbert). Both Caged Men… and Fortune and Men’s Eyes deal with the shocking realities of what goes on behind prison walls – including the now familiar (but at the time groundbreaking) prison movie tropes of openly gay characters, and straight men being forced or coerced into sex with other men. Had the makers of Caged Men… been influenced by Fortune and Men’s Eyes? The play premiered in 1967, so it’s possible. But perhaps it was just the right time for this kind of story to be told. And it’s interesting that Canada seemed to be the right place to tell it.

Caged Men Plus One Woman AKA I’m Going to Get You… Elliot Boy is it’s own movie with it’s own story. But it would make an interesting double bill with the more well known, and perhaps more respectable, Fortune and Men’s Eyes.

Fans of wrestling will be interested to see Abdullah the Butcher playing a character named Abdullah, who is a big fan of music.

The One Woman in question is Maureen McGill, who has several Makeup Department credits on the IMDb. Caged Men Plus One Woman AKA I’m Going to Get You… Elliot Boy is her only acting credit.