Mom and Dad (1945) - Kroger Babb
"[A] boring pseudo sex documentary from the forties brilliantly hyped by the great-great grandfather of exploitation, Kroger Babb. Since the film contained footage of an actual birth of a baby, Mr. Babb realized this was a chance to legally show full-frontal female nudity." --John Waters, Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters, (New York, Vintage Books), p.14
Related: 1945 - Kroger Babb - medicine show - sex hygiene - American cinema - sexploitation - exploitation film
Description
Mom and Dad is a 1945 American film directed by William Beaudine and marketed by Kroger Babb. It has been called the first exploitation film. In 2005, the film was added to the United States National Film Registry. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mom_and_Dad [Mar 2006]
The film was a 20th century medicine show
But this was not Hollywood promotion. In fact, Hollywood spent 20 years campaigning to get rid of movies like Mom and Dad. This was the last wave of the 19th-century medicine shows -- part biology lesson, part sideshow, part morality play, part medical "shock footage" -- and to this day many old-timers regard it as the purest and most successful exploitation film in history. It played continuously for 23 years, still booking drive-ins as late as 1977, and grossed an estimated $100 million. --Joe Bob Briggs, http://reason.com/0311/fe.jb.kroger.shtml, Nov 2003Grindhouse cinema [...]
Grindhouse moves giddily through the decades, passing from '30s "road to ruin" pix to the '40s burlesque and dope films, and into the '50s, when grindhouses became "art houses." The two strains collided in 1955 when huckster Kroger Babb bought the U.S. rights to Ingmar Bergman's Summer with Monika. (Babb was notorious for his 1944 cinematic marriage manual Mom and Dad, which featured a birth in clinical detail.) Besides what the authors call "imported Euro-skin," the 1950s saw the ascendance of Russ Meyer with his classic of voyeurism, The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959). -- Gary Morris, http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/18/18_grind.html
The roots of sexploitation
THE ROOTS OF SEXPLOITATION: BIRTH OF A BABY BAIT 'N' SWITCH with Kroger Babb's "MOM AND DAD" (1945)
In honor of this week's Motion Picture Purgatory review of the phenomenal new Sleazoid Express book (which covers the history of NYC's 42nd Street exploitation films), I thought I'd dig up this piece I wrote on one of the first sexploitation films...
"We can even go way back in history to Mom and Dad, a boring pseudo sex documentary from the forties brilliantly hyped by the great-great grandfather of exploitation, Kroger Babb. Since the film contained footage of an actual birth of a baby, Mr. Babb realized this was a chance to legally show full-frontal female nudity." --John Waters(1)
According to Babb's roadshow salesman in the late forties and early fifties, David F. Friedman, "...in the thirty-five years or so I knew Kroger Babb, never once did he not proclaim Mom and Dad anything but a great crusade destined to save the world from sin and corruption. Never once did he admit to his friends and associates that it actually was the epitome of expert exploitation."(2) The idea of producing Mom and Dad came into being in 1943 while Babb was providing publicity, advertising and touring with an earlier "birth-of-a-baby" show entitled Dust to Dust (actually the 1935 Bryan Foy produced "High School Girl," renamed). The presentation of this film resembled Mom and Dad's ...one of the oldest carny tricks in the book according to Friedman; "...roadshow guys had been working this dodge ever since the silent-movie days."(3) They would book the film into a theater, advertise heavily, promising sights never before seen, run the film, "...always an innocuous small-town morality play in which an innocent young girl, ignorant of the facts of life because her parents thought such things shouldn't be discussed, gets herself in a family way, generally on her first date; do the lecture, sell the books, run the birth reel and the venereal disease reel, pocket the money, settle up with the exhibitor, usually walking out with half the box office receipts, and then blow out of town before the morality crowd could sic the cops on them."(4) -- Rick Trembles via http://www.snubdom.com/BA-02-12.htm
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