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

Reason, Nov, 2003 by Joe Bob Briggs

Babb's company, Hygienic Productions, sent out an advance man to place letters like this, buy advertising, do mailings, and hold screenings for town fathers and religious leaders. (If the town's leaders liked the film, a "soft" campaign would be used. If they didn't like it, a "hard" campaign, advertising it as "the movie self-styled moralists don't want you to see," would be used. Both campaigns worked.) The advance man would be followed a week later by a crew of four--including "Elliot Forbes" and two "nurses"--to actually manage the film during its run. The crews would stay on the road for 20 weeks at a time. Babb even had one all-black crew for black theaters, with Olympic champion Jesse Owens substituting for Elliot Forbes.

As the Mom and Dad exploitation scheme evolved over time, it attracted imitators. By 1950 there were so many sex-hygiene roadshows that they were starting to get in each other's way, and after a town was "scorched" by a promotional campaign, it would be spoiled for any film arriving later. So four of the films--Mom and Dad, Street Corner, Because of Eve, and The Story of Bob and Sally--banded together to form Modern Film Distributors, carving out territories and agreeing not to steal markets.

But the genre's days were numbered. The irony of the sex-hygiene explosion is that it depicted a world that didn't exist. The communities in the films had more in common with turn-of-the-century towns than with anything more modern. Millions of young men had already been exposed to venereal disease films during World War II, and millions of women had been touched by out-of-wedlock births, abortions, or abandonment. Perhaps the films succeeded because they gave a comforting message to panicked moms and dads, promising that, with just a little more education, these things could be eradicated. But many of the problems already were being eradicated, first by penicillin, which had made new syphilis cases virtually unheard of by the time Mom and Dad came out, and then by more sophisticated forms of birth control that gave young girls more control of their sex lives.

The biggest irony of all is that the public schools actually did follow Kroger Babb's example and start showing sex-education films not unlike The Facts of Life: An Explanation of Sex Cycles. And once the information was available in schools, Babb was out of business.

The immediate cause of Babb's declining box office, though, was the burlesque film, which showed up in the early '50s. Crudely made movies filmed in aging burlesque halls, featuring strippers and comedians doing what they'd been doing for decades, these offered titillation and a hint of nudity without any of the scarifying disease subtext. By the time the second wave of nudist films came along, in 1959, it was all over for sex hygiene.

Kroger Babb died January 28, 1980, in Palm Springs, California, at the age of 73. And now, friends, you've seen the entire production. If you have been shocked and educated, please show the management your appreciation. By your applause.