Kroger Babb's roadshow: how a long-running movie walked the thin line between exploitation and education

Reason, Nov, 2003 by Joe Bob Briggs

The mother has been the busybody villainess of our story all along. As the member of a women's club that constantly crusades against public lewdness and drinking--the same club that got the science teacher fired--she believes that sex should never be discussed in the home. Her reaction to the news: "Who was the boy? I'll have him arrested."

"They didn't tell me his name," replies the defrocked teacher. "After all, why blame the boy?"

The hysterical mother demand to know who Blackburn would blame. "I'd blame you, Mrs. Blake," he replies, "you and every parent who neglects the sacred duty of telling their children the real truth. Why were your children afraid to come to you in their trouble? Why did they have to come to me for advice? Remember this, Mrs. Blake, when your children have to go to someone else for advice, you've fallen down from your job."

In the next scene Joan and Mrs. Blake are riding the train to Boston, where Joan will finish her pregnancy in secret under a doctor's care, but the grim faces of mother and daughter tell us all too plainly that their lives will never be the same.

Pickles and Beaver

At this point the story is, for all practical purposes, over. There's one point of minor suspense--will Joan be OK and what will she do with the baby?--but very little is made of that. In fact, the whole first 90 minutes has been a set-up for three films-within-the-film that everyone will remember long after they've left the theater.

With wife and daughter packed off to Boston, Mr. Blake is suddenly roused out of his blase attitude and tells Blackburn that he intends to go to the school board and get him rehired. Now snore than ever, "They need that class in social hygiene!" Cut to the principal's office where, in one of the more forced segues in screenwriting history, the returning teacher tells the principal, "I was talking with Mrs. Hayworth yesterday. You know, she's the sister of the famous Chicago specialist Dr. Ashley. She tells me he has some wonderful films explaining childbirth. But best of all, she says he's due here for a rest in October!"

"Do you suppose we could get him to talk to a small group like ours?" asks the principal.

"Well, I'll ask her to write to him about it. You never know until you try!"

In the next scene Blackburn is introducing Dr. John D. Ashley, an obstetrician, to a class of high school girls. Dr. Ashley has been kind enough to bring along some films made in his hospital. The first one is called The Facts of Life: An Explanation of Sex Cycles. An authoritative narrator begins: "Every girl should know the functions of the female body." Charts are revealed, showing the female menstrual cycle, drawings of the genital organs, how ovulation occurs, how spermatozoa impregnate an ovary, time-lapse depictions of the growing fetus, and then suddenly--almost without warning--graphic footage of a live birth!

The umbilical cord has scarcely been snipped before the second film commences: Modern American Surgery, in which a "famous American Surgeon" will perform a Caesarian section on-camera. In an operating theater full of white-masked attendants and spectators, we watch as the incision is made ("from pubis to umbilicus"), as layer after layer of the skin and womb are cut open, as water and other fluids spray wildly, and then as the baby is removed with forceps. The film lingers for the sewing up and a few injections "to relax the mother," followed by an encomium to "one of the great miracles of modern surgery."