Kroger Babb's Roadshow

How a long-running movie walked the thin line between exploitation and education.

Joe Bob Briggs from the November 2003 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

But wait! There's more! Two scenes later an expert on venereal disease named Dr. Burrell addresses an all-male class. And now comes the piece de resistance. The third film-within-the-film is called Seeing Is Believing, and it's every teenage boy's nightmare, showing grainy footage of syphilis victims struggling to walk, blinded, horribly scarred, teeth rotting, their bodies oozing with chancres and open sores, and, in one case, a fleeting image of a person whose feet have been eaten away by disease. Throughout the film there are silent-movie-style caption cards: "Millions learn these facts the hard-way...by bitter experience!" "The Price of Ignorance!" "Self-Styled MORALISTS Would Like To Keep These Facts A Secret!!!" "Is The Gamble Worth the Price?" The audience sees crippled and blind crying babies, horrible pox-ridden arms and legs, a festering sore where someone's eye used to be, and the big payoff, introduced by the title card "Doctors and Health Officials Agree -- These shocking pictures of infected genital organs will awaken you!" What follows are fully naked bodies, but so bruised and disease-ridden that they're anything but attractive. The film concludes, oddly, with images of track and field athletes, healthy young swimmers, and the U.S. Army marching in formation, as though to say, "This is what Americans should look like."

Joan's story has three more brief scenes, concluding with a doctor coming into a waiting room where the nervous Blake family is pacing and praying, to say "It's all over." Joan has a good chance of recovery. And the baby? In the version I saw, the doctor says the baby has just barely survived -- presumably to be adopted by a childless couple -- but I've also seen accounts by Mom and Dad viewers who claim the baby is stillborn. The fact is, there were dozens of versions of Mom and Dad, including some that didn't have any films-within-the-film, so that the movie could still play in markets with strict obscenity laws. Babb was not above showing his "cold" version to local authorities and screening the "hot" version in the theater. He also always carried with him a "square-up reel." In cases where he was forced to show the "cold" version, he would sometimes be faced with an angry audience that felt cheated by the absence of what they felt they had been promised by the advertising. To appease them, he would quickly rack an additional reel of what the carnies called "pickles and beaver" -- footage of full-frontal nude bodies. Remarkably, it worked. The audience left feeling they had experienced at least a little of the "good stuff."

There's one additional piece of film after the story ends. The final screen image is Kroger Babb himself, sitting at his desk and speaking directly to camera. "And now, friends, you've seen the entire production," he says. "If you agree that these pictures have been bold and shocking enough, that you've learned a very worthwhile lesson from them, I wish you'd show the management your appreciation at this time. By your applause." And of course the theater, so prompted, would erupt in applause, thereby cutting down on the possibility of anyone ever asking for his money back.

Clap Operas

This brief coda is actually the essence of Babb's shell game. He says "if you agree that..." and then includes two reasons to like the movie -- that it was shocking, and that it was educational. But he speaks as though they're the same thing. An astute student of human nature, he knew everyone needed both -- you bought the ticket because you wanted to be exposed to the forbidden, but you told yourself and others that you had no choice but to be educated. It was a movie that could be marketed with a straight exploitation campaign if it played in grindhouses and all-male theaters, or an "educational" campaign that would have entire high schools buying tickets for its students.

Although syphilis and gonorrhea had periodically ravaged America throughout the 19th century, the subject was not addressed on stage or screen until 1913, when Eugene Brieux wrote a play called Damaged Goods. In it, a young lawyer gets syphilis from a streetwalker while drunk at his bachelor party. Ignoring the advice of his doctor, he marries his fiancée in order to collect a dowry, thereby infecting his wife and baby. The drama avoided censorship by being sponsored by a medical organization and exploiting a common fear of the time -- that the upper classes were in danger of strange diseases brought to America by the hordes of lower-class immigrants. When the play was made into a Mutual Film in 1914, it took in $2 million at the box office, a virtually unheard-of amount at the time.

Damaged Goods marked the birth of the sex-hygiene film. A ripoff called A Victim of Sin came out almost immediately, and there were at least 20 more films about VD before 1920. But the real birth of what producers would come to call the "clap opera" occurred at the end of World War I, when a man named Isaac Silverman purchased two films that the armed services had used to train soldiers about the dangers of venereal disease. Fit to Fight, the story of five young men in army training camp, and The End of the Road, the story of two women in trouble, included explicit medical footage showing the ravages of gonorrhea and syphilis, complete with pus-filled open sores.

What could be better for a film-hungry public constantly in search of new sensations? Silverman booked the films all over the country, where they played to capacity audiences, including 12 weeks (!) at the Grand Opera House in Brooklyn. They also attracted the attention of local morals crusaders, who managed to get them banned in many cities. The Catholic Church, upset by the films' advocacy of "chemical prophylaxis," organized a pamphlet campaign to stop the films.

The Outlaw Studio

From that time forward, a new kind of film exhibition would arise. Silverman showed his films to "adults only" (no one under 16), a phrase that would become code for titillating subject matter, and he also segregated the screenings by gender. Babb would later codify this tradition in every contract he ever signed, specifying that the words "Adults Only" must be on all advertising and barring any distributor from showing Mom and Dad to mixed audiences. Women would be too embarrassed to watch a sex hygiene film in the company of men, so he would have two women's-only screenings per day, one at 2 and one at 7. The men wouldn't be allowed to see the film until 9, and by that time they were so overwhelmed with curiosity, wanting to know WHAT THE WOMEN WERE TALKING ABOUT, that his late-night males-only screenings came to be called "The Thundering Herd."

The sex hygiene film contributed greatly to the notorious Production Code that would muzzle Hollywood studios for decades to come. The first motion picture censorship law had been passed in Chicago in 1907, and by 1921 seven states had censorship boards, with new ones sprouting all the time. In an effort to head off government control of movies, Hollywood adopted "Thirteen Points or Standards," forbidding such things as the on-screen exploitation of sex, white slavery, nakedness, "illicit love and vice," narcotics use, vulgarity, ridicule of authority, miscegenation, profanity, and disrespect for religion. This list evolved into the "Don'ts and Be Carefuls" of 1927, which specifically added sex hygiene and venereal disease, childbirth scenes, and children's sex organs. And all of this was consolidated into the Production Code of 1930, after which 98 percent of all movies released were judged and censored.

But there was still that 2 percent of movies made outside the Hollywood system. They not only defied the Production Code, but used it as a sort of manual for subjects that could be exploited. There was a boom in exploitation films dealing with crime, white slavery, and drug addiction -- not to mention nudist-camp movies. Mainstream Hollywood despised these films, mainly because they feared they would lead to more censorship, but in their efforts to run the exploitation producers out of business they had to argue against what were always presented as educational films. Remarkably, the Production Code Administration eventually issued policy statements saying that the purpose of motion pictures should be pure entertainment, and that education has no place in theaters!

The carnies on the exploitation circuit -- guys with flashy names like S.S. "Steamship" Millard and Howard "Pappy" Golden -- eventually banded into a sort of informal trade association. Calling themselves the Forty Thieves, they essentially became a vertically integrated outlaw studio, using something called the "states rights" system. In the 1890s, licensing for the Kinetoscope and Vitascope had resulted in the United States being carved up into 32 exhibition territories, and this system of sub-distribution lasted well into the '80s. Hence a producer could sell his film territory by territory, allowing the local "thief" to market it any way he knew how. He could re-edit the film, shoot additional scenes, design his own ad campaign, and create any kind of come-on. (Lobby displays of drug paraphernalia were common in the '30s.) One of the most foolproof gimmicks in the business was live birth footage. No one knows exactly where the footage came from -- some say medical training films, some say it was paid for overseas -- but within the world of the Forty Thieves, it was constantly recycled into movie after movie.

In 1936 Surgeon General Thomas Parran initiated a public information campaign to stamp out venereal disease, making Hollywood look more and more silly as it tried to ban the films. The studios were especially incensed in 1937 when a film called Sex Madness showed up as the second feature with Shirley Temple's Wee Willie Winkie, but by the following year the government had filed an antitrust suit against them -- the famous Paramount case -- and they pretty much abandoned their crusade against the exploitation films because it made them look like monopolists.

Vices for Squares