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

Reason, Nov, 2003 by Joe Bob Briggs

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 fiancee 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."