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 sex hygiene film contributed greatly to the notorious Production Code that would muzzle Hollywood studios for decades to come. The first motion picture censorship law had been passed in Chicago in 1907, and by 1921 seven states had censorship boards, with new ones sprouting all the time. In an effort to head off government control of movies, Hollywood adopted "Thirteen Points or Standards," forbidding such things as the on-screen exploitation of sex, white slavery, nakedness, "illicit love and vice," narcotics use, vulgarity, ridicule of authority, miscegenation, profanity, and disrespect for religion. This list evolved into the "Don'ts and Be Carefuls" of 1927, which specifically added sex hygiene and venereal disease, childbirth scenes, and children's sex organs. And all of this was consolidated into the Production Code of 1930, after which 98 percent of all movies released were judged and censored.

But there was still that 2 percent of movies made outside the Hollywood system. They not only defied the Production Code, but used it as a sort of manual for subjects that could be exploited. There was a boom in exploitation films dealing with crime, white slavery, and drug addiction--not to mention nudist-camp movies. Mainstream Hollywood despised these films, mainly because they feared they would lead to more censorship, but in their efforts to run the exploitation producers out of business they had to argue against what were always presented as educational films. Remarkably, the Production Code Administration eventually issued policy statements saying that the purpose of motion pictures should be pure entertainment, and that education has no place in theaters!

The carnies on the exploitation circuit--guys with flashy names like S.S. "Steamship" Millard and Howard "Pappy" Golden--eventually banded into a sort of informal trade association. Calling themselves the Forty Thieves, they essentially became a vertically integrated outlaw studio, using something called the "states rights" system. In the 1890s, licensing for the Kinetoscope and Vitascope had resulted in the United States being carved up into 32 exhibition territories, and this system of sub-distribution lasted well into the '80s. Hence a producer could sell his film territory by territory, allowing the local "thief" to market it any way he knew how. He could re-edit the film, shoot additional scenes, design his own ad campaign, and create any kind of come-on. (Lobby displays of drug paraphernalia were common in the '30s.) One of the most foolproof gimmicks in the business was live birth footage. No one knows exactly where the footage came from--some say medical training films, some say it was paid for overseas--but within the world of the Forty Thieves, it was constantly recycled into movie after movie.

In 1936 Surgeon General Thomas Parran initiated a public information campaign to stamp out venereal disease, making Hollywood look more and more silly as it tried to ban the films. The studios were especially incensed in 1937 when a film called Sex Madness showed up as the second feature with Shirley Temple's Wee Willie Winkie, but by the following year the government had filed an antitrust suit against them--the famous Paramount case--and they pretty much abandoned their crusade against the exploitation films because it made them look like monopolists.