The Mafu Cage (1978)

Director: Karen Arthur
Writer: Don Chastain, based on the play Toi et Tes nuages by Éric Wesphal, translated into English by Richard Cottrell
Stars: Lee Grant and Carol Kane

Index: 2025 Centennials.

The Mafu Cage is an American film that was widely seen in Europe but little seen at home. I can see why, because it’s a very European film, indeed one based on a French play. I can also see why Jerry Gross, a distributor who kept on trying the U.S. market under an array of titles, went bankrupt. I’m European. I adored it.

I’m watching a version called Deviation that includes a brief voiceover at the beginning, as my copy of The Mafu Cage is an extremely dark open matte version. However, that omits the voiceover. Hopefully the rest was unchanged.

We’re in Los Angeles but it doesn’t seem like it because we hardly see it. We spend most of the film at the home of Dr. Ellen Carpenter, an astronomer who specialises in solar activity. If we leave the house, it’s to visit her at work so that we can see the life that she tries to have, a life with a purpose and the potential for more, as a co-worker, David Eastman, tells her he’s in love with her. However, she’s unable to fully embrace life so keeps him at arm’s length.

I mention Ellen first deliberately, for a pair of reasons. One is because she’s played by Lee Grant, a hundred today. The other is that she’s our grounding, our link to normality in a host of meanings. We need that grounding because we spend almost the entire movie with Ellen and her sister Cissy, who is a long way from any of those meanings of normal. Carol Kane delivers a brave performance that would steal every scene if Grant wasn’t there to anchor us.

These sisters grew up in central Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Their mother never comes up but their father, who was some sort of anthropologist, dies and had Ellen promise to care for her sister. What else happened in Africa we don’t know but, by the end of the film, we can guess at quite a lot.

Initially, it seems like that promise is fair, as family ought to look after family. Ellen is older and obviously more responsible. We see her at the observatory taking pictures of the stars, as Cissy’s in the back garden, wandering naked in the undergrowth. Well, she’s wearing a hat. “I don’t know how to talk to people,” Cissy says, “living or dead,” though she keeps a shrine to her late father.

It’s pretty clear that Ellen is happy to live a grown up life in California but Cissy is stuck in her childhood in Zaire. She dresses entirely in ethnic clothing and looks natural in it, down to the face paint. She listens to ambient jungle music and tribal dances, which I’d love to have on a soundtrack CD. She sleeps in a hammock. And there’s an awfully large cage in the house.

It’s called the Mafu Cage because it’s a cage for Mafu. When we first see it, there’s a Mafu in it but it’s dead. Cissy did something bad and Ellen helps her clean it up. And now she wants another Mafu. We don’t know how old Cissy is but Carol Kane was twenty-six, so when I point out that Cissy uses major emotional blackmail, you’ll start to see what that promise got Ellen.

“You’re not my sister and I hate you,” is just the beginning. She won’t eat or drink until she has another Mafu. She’ll assassinate herself in the cage. And she does indeed slice her wrist. She wants a colobus but she gets an orangutan on loan until Zom can locate a smaller monkey like a baboon. Now she’s blissfully happy. For a while. And then she needs another Mafu.

Now you’re starting to see how dark this is, I should emphasise that. The love story that the poster hawks may involve Cissy and Mafu, and we certainly see hints of that, but other hints pretty strongly suggest Cissy and Ellen, even if the latter likes David too, a detail that isn’t lost on Cissy, especially when he comes over while Ellen is away at Kitt Peak for three days.

Frankly, if the film starts edgy and soon gets dark, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t get darker, a lot darker, even if it’s so stripped down that it only features five actors: four humans and an orangutan. Mostly, it’s merely Grant and Kane. And Karen Davis’s costumes, Conrad Angone’s set design and Roger Kellaway’s score.

I found The Mafu Cage fascinating all the way down. Kane’s utterly relentless performance is the pinnacle, making me wonder how an actor could even approach a role like this, spreading from sweet childish innocence to thrashing an orangutan to death with a chain. We can only guess at what abuse in her past led her to this.

Grant’s role is far less obvious but it’s just as crucial. Ellen is Cissy’s sister, but effectively a mother, guardian, lover and caregiver too. It’s not an easy job to do and we see both the joys and the hardships it brings. Grant’s rock solid.

She certainly knew joys and hardships, as an actor who was launched into stardom, only for that to be stripped brutally away for a crucial and sustained period of her career.

I should point out that, while she was born on 31st October in New York City, the year is a question mark, as it’s been given as every year from 1925 to 1931. Official documents suggest either 1925 or 1926, so I’m taking the former.

She started out as a dancer, debuting at the Metropolitan Opera in 1931 in opera and 1933 in ballet. Broadway musical theatre and drama led her to Hollywood, where she reprised her stage role as a shoplifter in Detective Story to an Oscar nomination. The future was bright.

However, that was 1951, the same year that she gave a eulogy for Edward Bromberg, who, she suggested, died from stress caused by the House Un-American Activities Committee. As she refused to testify against her new husband Arnold Manoff, she was blacklisted and, while she found minor TV roles, a dozen years were stripped from her career at its very beginning.

She was finally able to return in 1963 for The Balcony and found success on stage, on TV and in film. She won an Emmy for Peyton Place and, after a strong performance in In the Heat of the Night, won three Oscar nominations between 1971 and 1977 for The Landlord, Shampoo and Voyage of the Damned; she won for Shampoo.

In between, she was the murderer in Ransom for a Dead Man, the pilot TV movie for Columbo; had her own sitcom called Fay; and caught up somewhat for her twelve missing years, even at an age when when roles dry up for women. She moved into directing and a documentary called Down and Out in America won an Oscar.

Still alive to celebrate her maybe hundredth birthday, she continued to act and direct into the 2000s, including roles in Dr. T & The Women and Mulholland Dr. Her most recent work was a 2020 voice role in Killian & The Comeback Kids. So far, at least. Happy birthday, Lee Grant!