The centerpiece of the set is the 1947 teen pregnancy tale Mom and Dad<\/em><\/strong>, which is, per the opening titles, \u201cA VITAL EDUCATIONAL PRODUCTION, Appealing To All TRUE-AMERICANS.\u201d Mom and Dad <\/em>is a legendary title; according to Joe Bob Briggs\u2019s essential book Profoundly Disturbing<\/em>, \u201cto this day many old-timers regard it as the purest and most successful exploitation film in history. It played continuously for twenty-three years, still booking drive-ins as late as 1977, and grossed an estimated $100 million.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Brought to you by \u201cHYGENIC PRODUCTIONS\u201d (seems legit), it concerns one Joan Blake, who is (according to the opening crawl) \u201ca sweet, innocent girl growing up in this fast-moving world.\u201d Alas, poor Joan meets a fast boy from out of town; they neck at a lover\u2019s lane, fall out of the frame, and one month later, Joan realizes that she is \u201cin trouble.\u201d This, we told repeatedly, is the fault of her mother, a real speak-to-the-manager type who believes \u201cignorance is a virtue.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n About halfway into its 97-minute running time, director William Beaudine tosses up this title card: \u201cWe interrupt our story for a few moments in order to present\u2026 IN PERSON\u2026 the famous hygiene commentator Mr. Elliot Forbes.\u201d This is a real remnant from its lengthy theatrical run, and if you\u2019re wondering how they could be sure that Mr. Forbes could make every theatrical screening, there\u2019s a good explanation: there was no such man. \u201cMr. Elliot Forbes\u201d was an actor \u2013 often several, playing the role at simultaneous screenings around the country \u2013 part of the medicine show-style ballyhoo that was so key to the film\u2019s original presentation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Producer Kroger Babb would tour prints of Mom and Dad <\/em>around the land, with a busy advance team plastering small towns with posters, planting preemptively outraged letters in local newspapers, and renting out theaters; \u201cMr. Forbes\u201d would give his live lecture in the middle of the film, and then (and here was the most important part) sell companion paperback \u201ceducational\u201d books at a buck a pop. Babb\u2019s roadshows frequently made as much money on book sales as they did selling tickets \u2013 and they made a lot of money selling tickets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The film would resume after the sales spiel, but the story would not; Mom and Dad<\/em> then clumsily finds a way to further pause the narrative to play a series of full-on \u201ceducational\u201d shorts, in their entirety. First is an old-school sex-ed film, culminating with graphic footage of a \u201cnormal birth\u201d \u2013 reportedly a big draw for the raincoat crowd in those pre-porn days, and I must tell you, if that\u2019s true, these people were far more perverse than we\u2019ve ever imagined. Next comes a \u201cModern American Surgery\u201d film, documenting, with similarly explicit detail, a real live C-section.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These films-within-the-film are screened for a classroom of young women at Joan\u2019s school (her mother got him fired for hinting<\/em> at sex ed in class, but he\u2019s hurriedly re-hired after Joan gets in trouble); then a classroom of young men is shown another \u201csex hygiene\u201d film, about the dangers of venereal disease (\u201cGonorrhea and syphilis show no mercy!\u201d). The arrangement of these sequences is indescribably telling: it is, it seems, the responsibility of girls to have babies, and the responsibility of boys to not get a disease. Women are comforted; men are warned \u2013 terrified, really, by graphic images \u201cshowing the ravages upon the organs of the male.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Similar nightmare fuel fills Sex Madness<\/em>, which shares the second disc of the collection with our old pal Reefer Madness<\/em><\/strong>. The latter was retitled (it was originally called Tell Your Children<\/em>) when it hit the midnight movie circuit in the late 1960s, and became a big counterculture hit for its wildly inaccurate dramatizations of marijuana consumption; its actors smoke joints like cigarettes (the exhales are immediate!) and quickly descend into wild cackles and wide-eyed, manic overacting. Like Mom and Dad<\/em>, it\u2019s basically a Hays Code melodrama, in which we voyeuristically enjoy the bad behavior of The Youths, before watching them pay the piper for their sins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reefer Madness <\/em>finds a couple of nice high school kids turned into murderous dope-smokers by a gang of morals-free, fedora-wearing gangsters; Sex Madness<\/em> (originally titled Human Wreckage<\/em>) is a cautionary tale in which a single sexual encounter ends up with a woman blinding her husband and killing her baby. But first, in a series of scenes barely<\/em> related to much of anything, director Joseph Seiden hangs out at a burlesque show \u2013 on stage, out front, and most winkingly, in the dressing room. The pattern of pleasure and punishment inflicted on its heroine is also put upon the audience; if we enjoy the images of the girlie show, we pay for it by sitting through more images of STI-ravaged organs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Though Mom and Dad <\/em>has long been strangely unavailable, this Madness<\/em> double-feature has been a public domain standby for decades (though Kino\u2019s restorations make them sharper than they\u2019ve ever been). The third disc in the set features two more rarities, this time of the nudist-sploitation stripe: Allen Stuart\u2019s Unashamed: A Romance<\/em><\/strong>, and Carl Harbaugh\u2019s Elysia (Valley of the Nude)<\/em><\/strong>. They\u2019re peppered with the standbys of nudist movies of the era: carefully arranged nudity (butts and boobs only) of an \u201canthropological\u201d nature, capturing these \u201cnudists\u201d (usually actors and models playing nudists) lounging, playing music, cooking, eating, showering, performing ventriloquism (?), and, of course, playing volleyball.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s hard to imagine getting a rise out of the mostly unwatchable (and often downright unpleasant) earlier titles, but real talk: there are genuinely sexy images in these two films. Yet they\u2019re also not built to strike guilt or fear into the heart of the viewer; both of these films concern an outsider coming into the colony, getting a warm walk-through of one kind or another, and enjoying campfire lectures meant to reassure the curious viewer, rather than terrify.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These films are remarkably sympathetic to their subjects, in striking contrast to the other movies in the set, though the circumstances are important: they see nudists as harmless, so long as they\u2019re isolated from the rest of society, and only interacting with each other. But they have one thing in common with the rest: the idea that they can get away with pretty much anything, so long as it\u2019s shrouded in the notion of \u201ceducation.\u201d As Mom and Dad<\/em> never tires of reminding us, ignorance is dangerous, and that wasn\u2019t just a plot point \u2013 it was the M.O. of these social hygiene movies, which managed to simultaneously exploit both the dearth of information and the (ahem) curiosity around these subjects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was all for the good of the children, you see, and we all must see the dangers lurking in these dark underworlds, so we know what to avoid, right? \u201cAfter you have looked at these pictures,\u201d the students are told in Mom and Dad<\/em>, \u201cI know you will realize the benefits that can come to all that lead a clean, moral life.\u201d Um, sure? The three volumes of \u201cForbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of Exploitation\u201d \u2013 \u201c<\/em>Volume 1: Mom and Dad<\/em><\/a>,\u201d \u201c<\/em>Volume 2: Reefer Madness plus Sex Madness<\/em><\/a>,\u201d and \u201c<\/em>Volume 3: Unashamed and Elysia<\/em><\/a>\u201d \u2013 are out on Blu-ray tomorrow.<\/em> \u201cWhat happened?\u201d the doctor in Sex Madness asks, of a female patient who\u2019s come to him with a case of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":13500,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381],"tags":[162],"class_list":["post-13497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13497\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/forbideen-fruit.png\")
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