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 4 of 4)

By the time Kroger Babb came along, the formula for a sex hygiene movie was so well established that all he did was incorporate every element of every sex hygiene movie in history into a single film. But in search of even better profits, he changed the rules slightly. Many of the old sex-hygiene films had played in grindhouses or marginal theaters or even bars and restaurants. He wanted to break through to the biggest theaters in the country.

Howard W. Babb had gotten the nickname "Kroger" from the name of the grocery store where he worked as a boy growing up in Lees Creek, Ohio. Born in 1906, he was a sportswriter, a newspaper reporter, an ad manager, and, by his late 20s, publicity manager for the Chakeres-Warners theater chain, where he distinguished himself with publicity stunts such as having a man buried alive in front of a theater. He got the exploitation roadshow bug when he hooked up with an outfit called Cox and Underwood, which was peddling an aging sex hygiene film called Dust to Dust that was actually a 1935 film called High School Girl with a live-birth reel slapped onto the end. Proving that he was born to be in the business, it's the same plot Babb would use in Mom and Dad. (The Forty Thieves frequently quarreled over territories, but they never sued for copyright infringement. Of course, many of them were carnival men, who regarded all cons as ancient and passed down from generation to generation, but they may also have simply sold stories the same way they occasionally sold sideshow acts.)

Anxious to go out on his own, Babb got 20 investors to put up the money to make Mom and Dad. The script was written by Mildred Horn, who would later become his wife, and who would also write Man and Woman and Boy and Girl. To direct he hired William "One Shot" Beaudine (so named because he never did a second take), who dated back to the Bowery Boys serials and had made over 200 B movies. He made the whole film in six days in 1944.

Perhaps the most revolutionary thing Babb did was to give his film such a bland and praiseworthy title. Who could object to a movie called Mom and Dad? This wasn't a movie about crazed sex maniacs or loose women or pregnant girls or the vice rackets. It was a movie about the education of all the moms and dads in the world, and, in fact, he wanted every mom and every dad to see it. His principal weapon, when he came under attack, was the very ordinariness of his story.

End of the Hygiene Era

Babb was not just prepared for the inevitable censorship battles he would face. He egged them on. He stirred up the Catholics at every opportunity, capitalizing on the church's "C" rating (for "condemned") of his film. He wrote fake letters to the editor in advance of the film's arrival in town, hoping there would be controversy. His most successful letter was supposedly written by the anonymous mayor of a small town. The "mayor" explained that he had opposed the showing of Mom and Dad in his town, too, but then the 17-year-old daughter of a local churchgoing couple found herself "in trouble." He saw Mom and Dad with a friend, and as a result had the courage to tell her parents about her predicament. They were shocked, but forgave her. The girl gave birth to a healthy boy, which was adopted by a childless couple. The girl then completed high school and is now engaged to a fine young man. The mayor goes on to thank Babb for having the courage "to tell young people what their parents didn't." And the letter ends: "P.S. That girl was my daughter."

Babb's company, Hygienic Productions, sent out an advance man to place letters like this, buy advertising, do mailings, and hold screenings for town fathers and religious leaders. (If the town's leaders liked the film, a "soft" campaign would be used. If they didn't like it, a "hard" campaign, advertising it as "the movie self-styled moralists don't want you to see," would be used. Both campaigns worked.) The advance man would be followed a week later by a crew of four -- including "Elliot Forbes" and two "nurses" -- to actually manage the film during its run. The crews would stay on the road for 20 weeks at a time. Babb even had one all-black crew for black theaters, with Olympic champion Jesse Owens substituting for Elliot Forbes.

As the Mom and Dad exploitation scheme evolved over time, it attracted imitators. By 1950 there were so many sex-hygiene roadshows that they were starting to get in each other's way, and after a town was "scorched" by a promotional campaign, it would be spoiled for any film arriving later. So four of the films -- Mom and Dad, Street Corner, Because of Eve, and The Story of Bob and Sally -- banded together to form Modern Film Distributors, carving out territories and agreeing not to steal markets.

But the genre's days were numbered. The irony of the sex-hygiene explosion is that it depicted a world that didn't exist. The communities in the films had more in common with turn-of-the-century towns than with anything more modern. Millions of young men had already been exposed to venereal disease films during World War II, and millions of women had been touched by out-of-wedlock births, abortions, or abandonment. Perhaps the films succeeded because they gave a comforting message to panicked moms and dads, promising that, with just a little more education, these things could be eradicated. But many of the problems already were being eradicated, first by penicillin, which had made new syphilis cases virtually unheard of by the time Mom and Dad came out, and then by more sophisticated forms of birth control that gave young girls more control of their sex lives.

The biggest irony of all is that the public schools actually did follow Kroger Babb's example and start showing sex-education films not unlike The Facts of Life: An Explanation of Sex Cycles. And once the information was available in schools, Babb was out of business.

The immediate cause of Babb's declining box office, though, was the burlesque film, which showed up in the early '50s. Crudely made movies filmed in aging burlesque halls, featuring strippers and comedians doing what they'd been doing for decades, these offered titillation and a hint of nudity without any of the scarifying disease subtext. By the time the second wave of nudist films came along, in 1959, it was all over for sex hygiene.

Kroger Babb died January 28, 1980, in Palm Springs, California, at the age of 73. And now, friends, you've seen the entire production. If you have been shocked and educated, please show the management your appreciation. By your applause.