Mom And Dadis an American sexploitation film directed byWilliam Beaudinethat wasso scandalous the National Legion of Decency (NLD) condemned it. The NLD was a faith-based censor that sought to exercise control over the content of films by persuading its members not to attend certain films that offended Christian morality. It also became one of the highest-grossing films of the 1940s despite its many legal challenges and suggestive subjects, precisely due to a scene containing a live human birth.It is said that the film faced nearly428 lawsuitsduring its run!The film owes its success to a novel marketing campaign by the film producerKroger Babb.
Mom and Dad (1949)
When a high-school girl gets pregnant and her boyfriend dies, the sex-ed teacher shows her a film about childbirth and the dangers of venereal disease.
The 40s in America were a puritanical time when goodChristian morality and sensibilities prevailed throughout many American households. The sexual revolution of the swinging 60s was nearly two decades away, and the vast majority of Americans were living in a button-down golden age of middle-class expansionism. Indeed, when it came to issues of pre-marital sex, mum would be the word. It was something people didn’t talk about in polite circles andcertainly not something decent people watched in movies. In some ways, producer Kroger Babb was a visionary. He understood that there is no such thing as bad press and that a spectacle rakes in the big bucks. So, as reported byVariety,he cobbled together a meager budget of $67,001.12 from investors and spent six days in 1944 in five separate studios making one of the mostcontroversial films of the decade.
Mom and Dadis, on its face, a straightforward film aboutteenage love. Joan Blake (June Carlson) is in love with the dashing pilot Jack Griffin (Bob Lowell). After pitching some severe woo at the young and unwed woman, they have sex. Joan is totally ignorant about sex, and after the doomed couple’s affair, she petitions her mother, Sarah Blake (Lois Austin), for “hygiene books.“Hygiene books were an effort by era progressives to regulate sexual behaviorand disseminate sexual health knowledge. Think of it like a high school health class. Joan’s mother, of course, says no because Joan isn’t married. Then tragedy strikes. Jack’s plane crashes, and he dies, and Joan finds out she is pregnant, out of wedlock, a huge moral mistake for the time. Unable to talk to her parents, the troubled young woman turns to her teacher, Carl Blackburn (Hardie Albright). Carl is unpopular with the locals for teaching about sex and has subsequently been fired. He blames Joan’s parents for her ignorance, which has unwittingly put her in this less-than-ideal situation. Joan confronts her mother, believing parents have a moral obligation to tell their children the truth about such things, and then stuff gets gross.
The film then takes a very medical turn, presenting the audience with charts and reels replete with graphic images of the female anatomy. Reels of live births flicker across the screen with screaming babies or, in some cuts of the film, silent and stillborn babies. Audiences are treated to visuals of caesarian births in addition to more conventional births, and one can almost hear the gasps and scorn of the public. The majority of the film is just filler. Melodramatic fluff to graft the clinical reels on, but it creates one hell of a spectacle that provokes disgust, ire, and intrigue. It’s no wonder that the NDL wanted to ban the film. Yet despite this fact and multiple lawsuits, the film went on to be wildly successful.
Kroger Babb Was A Marketing Genius
Of the film,Washington Postcritic Kenneth Turan said that the film did not “flourish because of its birth footage or because of its puerile plot, which Babb himself disparages … [its] success flowed, rather, from Babb’s extraordinary promotional abilities.” He was a type of performer, more akin to a huckster from a traveling medicine show. He knew how to create a spectacle, so he took some 300 prints of the film and distributed them to markets around the United States. In the weeks before the film’s release,Babb would drum up a moral panic and garner attention bysending letters to local newspapers and church leaflets protesting against the film’s moral basis. He, in effect, protested his own movie!
According to biographer Eric Schaefer, in his bookBold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A History of Exploitation Films,the letters were fake attestations by imaginary mayors from neighboring towns who would express concern about local young women who had seen the film and had their sexuality awakened as a direct result of viewing the film. The unusual letter-writing campaign was typically supported by employees of either Hygienic or Hallmark Productions, Babb’s production company. The idea was to overwhelm those sleepy little towns that the film was being shown in with letters and attestations to create an air of controversy around the film. Local pitches saw limited adult-only screenings segregated by genderwith live lectures from “Fearless Hygiene Commentator Elliot Forbes.” Who was Elliot Forbes? He wasn’t actually a real person! Several actors portrayed the commentator who would lecture the audience on matters of sexuality akin to that unfortunate health school teacher. These actors were often also employees of the production company or sometimes out-of-work actors who wanted to get in on the joke. Sometimes “nurses” would also be in attendance in case people fainted from the shock, or so Bobb Briggs is inclined to point out in his bookProfoundly Disturbing.
It is an old cliché, but there is no such thing as bad press. The film has since grossed between $40 million and $100 million, according to Turan, and is consideredthe most successful sex hygiene film ever released. Proof that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, so to speak. Babb’s campaign was nothing short of brilliant. A song and dance routine that made a mark out of every uptight moralist shaking their bible in moral outrage. While it’s clear that Babb knew that sex sells and that controversy is good advertising, he perhaps unwittingly exposed the profound ignorance of audiences when it came to sexual health. The clinical reels were an educational backdoor into a subject matter that wasn’t acceptable then. Babb didn’t just open that door; he kicked it off its hinges with a song and dance routine that shook the fabric of society.
