Kate Jackson Does Time in Inmates: A Love Story

Kate Jackson’s incarcerated again in Inmates: A Love Story (1981), and while it’s frustrating that her love interest is Perry King and not Meg Foster, we must learn to accept it and move on with our lives. (Gluttons for punishment will recall that Foster was King’s lesbian love interest in 1978’s seven-layer dip of offensiveness, A Different Story, in which he also played gay, but that’s a rant for another day.) If you can manage your disappointment, even as Jackson wears flannel and performs garbage duty, you’ll be rewarded with a bizarre, mostly enjoyable telefilm with a rare early ’80s lesbian subplot.

Jackson’s Jane Mount (no comment on the butch surname) is doing “a nickel to a dime,” as she puts it, at the Greenleaf State Co-Correctional Institution, an experimental coed facility. The men and women bunk in separate areas but fraternize in the cafeteria, prison yard and other shared spaces. Sexual contact is a verboten but couples pair off anyway, which is how Jane’s closest friend, young Grace (an affecting Fay Hauser), becomes pregnant. When Grace spots the baby’s father canoodling with another inmate, Jane tells her to leave and approaches the cad with her cafeteria tray — and a trademark mischievous Jackson smile that signals he’s about to receive a helluva comeuppance.

Jane is a mother herself, who harshly forbids her daughter from visiting her in the joint. Other than her friendships with Grace and the gregarious self-styled mafioso Flanagan (Tony Curtis), she is closed off to almost everyone and everything. “Jane don’t care nothin’ about nobody,” the sadistic Marty (Arva Holt) observes, while lesbian Salt (Rita Taggart) says “Hey, Jane! You ain’t care for men. You ain’t care for chicks. What is it with you? You too good for us?” Salt is the white half of an interracial couple; her partner is known as Pepper (Cynthia Avila). As their release date approaches, they huddle together near the fence to mysteriously scrutinize each new busload of male arrivals.

Gorgeous Roy Matson (Perry King), an accountant who shows up in a three-piece suit, immediately lands on their radar and everyone else’s. A white-collar criminal who was in the news for cooking his employer’s books to the tune of $30 million, he’s promptly jumped outside the showers and mercilessly beaten by a group that includes hardened criminal Virgil (Paul Koslo). Flanagan, who’d been loitering near the men’s room (not for the first time, one suspects), waits until the coast is clear to rush to his side and administer aid.

Flanagan drags the bloodied, moaning newbie back to his cell with Jane’s help and touts her felonious bonafides. “Hey, let me tell you, pal, she has got the most talented fingers in the business,” he boasts, and I’m contractually obligated to say something about that for the benefit of certain readers, but it’s so hard to narrow it down to just one joke. Flanagan’s motormouth rambling is irresistible to a scenery-chewer like Curtis, whose performance, like his wardrobe, is almost indescribably horrible. (Why is a guy named Flanagan punctuating his stories with “I says,” like my great-grandparents who were raised in Yiddish-speaking homes? I would’ve loved for prison records to reveal his name was actually Feldstein.)

Inmates, which is more of an ensemble piece than a straightforward starring vehicle for Jackson or King, is a potpourri of subplots both melodramatic and gritty. That includes Flanagan’s unconvincing affair with Sunny (Pamela Reed), a hooker whose cheap hair, makeup and accessories are the same type of drag as Flanagan’s pimp-meets-cat-burglar-meets-Gorton’s-fisherman getup. Curtis moved more gracefully in heels circa Some Like It Hot than he totters around in cowboy boots here, but his character’s arc takes an intense turn late in the film that finally matches the actor’s penchant for pathos.

Capably anchoring it all are Jackson (whose Thin Ice premiered around the same time) and King. Jane and Matson are an attractive pair with decent chemistry, whose relationship develops in fits and starts due to her standoffishness. Some of the film’s worst missteps involve acts of violence separately committed against each of them, including Jane’s implied rape and Matson’s protracted suffering following his assault. The screenplay, credited to Delia Johnson and James G. Hirsch, is a messy tonal hodgepodge. In addition to everything else, there’s a lumbering subplot involving prison superintendent E.F. Crown (Shirley Jones in a series of drab women’s blazers) pressuring Matson to cover up her financial malfeasance.

Inmates: A Love Story (directed by Guy Green, whose film adaptation of Jacqueline Susann’s Once is Not Enough will get the deluxe treatment here eventually) is unconvincing during its edgier, and schmaltzier, sequences. Where it really pleases is when it ventures into the comical and unconventional. Take, for instance, Jane’s subtle amusement on movie night when Salt approaches Matson about a dalliance with Pepper. Later, during a Christmas party, Jane munches a cookie in the background as the lesbians jointly proposition him and finally explain their predicament: they’re not kinky or sexually frustrated, they need a sperm donor.

“Look, Matson, I know you think we’re a couple of freaks,” Pepper tells him. “But we’ve been together longer than most straight couples I know.”

“Yeah, and we weren’t even freaks until they went all progressive and brought the men in,” Salt adds, in the film’s only acknowledgement that lesbianism was the norm at Greenleaf until the prison went coed. Unfortunately, male homosexuality isn’t addressed, other than the quiet care Matson takes not to turn his back on Virgil’s gang. (Here we should note that cowriter Hirsch later penned The Rape of Richard Beck, a landmark telefilm starring Richard Crenna as a detective who reconsiders his stance on that crime after surviving an assault.)

“We’re gonna get out and we want to have a kid, that’s all. And we’d be good mothers,” Pepper concludes.

“I’m sure you would. And I don’t think you’re freaks,” Matson replies with sincerity, before apologizing that he can’t help them with this task. No small number of characters have unhappy endings in Inmates. Surprisingly for the times, Salt and Pepper aren’t among them, which almost makes up for Jackson once again playing it straight.

Additional screen caps are posted here on Instagram.

Streaming and DVD availability

Inmates: A Love Story hasn’t been released on DVD and no authorized copies exist on streaming platforms. The best you can currently get is a taped-from-TV VHS transfer on YouTube. For anyone in search of more Kate Jackson content, Amazon has several of her telefilms available for streaming at no cost, as does Tubi.

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