Original subtitles

Hi, my name is Eric Schaefer, and I'm the author of Bold, Daring, Shocking

a history of exploitation films from 1919 to 1959.

And it's my pleasure to be your guide through Kroger Babb's Mom and Dad, the

blockbuster exploitation hit of the post -World War II period.

This film made $16 million in rentals.

more than huge hits like The Best Viewers of Our Lives, and it was only

outperformed by a couple of Walt Disney's animated features during the

I'll be talking about the film, its makers, and the unique way in which it

presented to the audience.

Now, the titles for this film make it look like any B -movie from the period,

and in fact, Mom and Dad was shot on the lot of Monogram, which was one of the

most prolific B - or Poverty Row studios during the 1940s.

But Mom and Dad was not a B -movie. It's an exploitation film.

And during that time, an exploitation film was usually understood to be a low

-budget, independent film that usually dealt with some sort of taboo topic,

things that the mainstream Hollywood industry would not touch due to the

production code or due to state and local censorship.

They were almost always shown for adults only.

We'll talk a bit about William Bodine here in a few minutes, but what we're

seeing here now is known as a square -up in exploitation films.

These were titles or crawls at the beginning of the film that explained

movie was going to be exposing some sort of social problem, drug use, sex

ignorance, prostitution, and so on.

and that it was necessary to do so in order to educate the public.

Now, this was all sort of an effort to give these movies some semblance of

respectability and kind of amp up their educational quality.

Ignorance is sin. Knowledge is power, we are told here.

And during this segment, the Square Up is advocating for sex education in the

schools. claiming that kids aren't bad, but that millions may suffer from VD

without this education.

And the conclusion of the square up suggests that if we have saved one

from unwed motherhood or venereal disease, then our mission will have been

fulfilled. And that was a pretty typical ending for an exploitation movie square

up.

Now, as the film proper opens, we see this train coming around the bend, and

are introduced to three -quarters of the Blake family.

We are going to see Mom, Sarah, and Dad, Dan, and their daughter, Joan.

Now, George Eldridge, who played Dan, had a long career in Hollywood, but he

mostly confined to supporting and bit roles that were often uncredited. He

play a reporter here or a cop there or a guard there.

He often appeared in over a dozen movies in any given year during the latter

40s. Now, as we...

Look across the aisle of the train here, we see a guy with a drink in his hand,

and that's Wheeler Oakman. He had been a prolific actor in the silent era, but

by the 1930s, he was pretty much confined to B -movies as well and to

exploitation movies, such as Slaves in Bondage and Escort Girl.

Lois Austin, who plays the mother, Sarah Blake, had a pretty similar career to

Eldridge. She played bit and background parts.

She certainly makes a very good prude in Mom and Dad.

And right off the bat, we learn that Sarah is filled with all sorts of

about permissiveness, about sex, and about drinking as well.

And she is shocked, shocked to see this sort of behavior occurring on a public

conveyance.

Now, our lead in Mom and Dad is June Carlson. She plays Joan

Blake, the innocent young high school girl.

She had been a child actor, and it appeared as the daughter Lucy in 20th

Fox's movie series The Jones Family.

This was certainly her biggest role, and she left the movie business just a few

years later to start raising a family.

She was about 20 years old at the time Mom and Dad was filmed and supposed to

playing, say, a 17 -year -old. And you will certainly notice that a lot of the

so -called teens in the movie look pretty long of tooth.

Some in the classroom scenes later appear to be pushing 30.

Now, here we are arriving in Centerville.

The name of the town is certainly meant to convey an averageness that most

viewers at least...

middle -class white viewers could relate to.

As the trio await the arrival of son Dave, Jones spots her high school

teacher, Mr.

Blackburn, who drives into the parking lot.

He's the biology teacher at school, and he's going to prove to be Sarah's foil

and Joan's salvation as this movie plays out. He falls into a role that I've

referred to as the crusader, and this is usually a doctor or a teacher who...

bucks the self -styled moralists and insists that young people have to

education about sex, drugs, or whatever the topic happens to be.

Now, Blackburn is played by Hardy Albright, who's probably the most robust

actor in this film, at least in terms of his career.

But again, he was primarily working in B movies.

He left the business in the late 1940s and taught drama at UCLA for quite

some time, but he eventually came back into acting during the 1960s, doing

spots on TV shows like Perry Mason and Leave it to Beaver.

As the Blake family arrives home, we meet the last member of that family.

That's Dave, and he's played by Jimmy Clark, whose Hollywood career, again,

consisted mainly of small, uncredited roles.

Now, you'll notice that compared to a lot of exploitation movies from the

the photography in Mom and Dad is sharp and focused.

Marcel Le Picard was the cinematographer. He was a Frenchman who,

had been working in Hollywood for 30 years doing B -Westerns and other low

films. He also shot several other exploitation movies, such as Child Bride

Race Suicide.

The last member of the household is Junella, the Blake's maid. She's played

Willa Pearl Curtis, and she was in the kind of stereotype role that most

-American actors were forced to accept during the time.

She also appeared in Kroger Bad Prince of Peace a couple of years later.

Now, as these opening scenes play out, Let's take a couple of minutes to talk

about the director.

The film was made by, directed by William Bodine. He was born back in

and he worked as a bit actor in early one -reel films for D .W. Griffith at

Biograph Company, and then worked as an assistant director for Max Sennett and

also for Griffith. He eventually graduated into directing short films in

-teens, and then on to features.

Probably some of his best -known features were Little Annie Rooney and

both of which starred Mary Pickford in the mid-'20s, and then later The Old

Fashioned Way with W .C. Fields in 1934.

Around that time, he went over to England to work for a time, and when he

returned to the United States, he could never really reestablish himself with

the major studios.

About the best he was able to do was...

doing a couple of movies in the Torchy Blaine series at Warner Brothers. So he

fell into B and Poverty Row filmmaking.

He did a lot of work for Monogram, including dozens of East Side Kids and

Boys movies, Charlie Chan flicks, Bela Lugosi cheapies like The Ape Man and

Voodoo Man, and Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. And then he did a lot

TV work as well in shows like The Naked City and The Green Hornet. And he

wrapped up his career making a couple of classic bad movies, quote -unquote,

Billy the Kid vs.

Dracula.

and Jesse James meets Frankenstein's daughter.

He has been referred to more recently as William One -Shot Bodine, although

he never seems to have used that moniker while he was alive.

But he was undeniably very fast and extremely prolific. He made hundreds of

movies and...

scores of TV episodes before he died in 1970.

And as we can see, as these scenes play out in Mom and Dad, his direction may

not have been inspired, but he was certainly competent. And that's a lot

than you can say for a lot of the directors who were working in

films during the time.

It does take quite a while for mom and dad to really get moving as we're

introduced to all these characters and given a bit of an idea, a little insight

into what makes them tick.

And they're all treated with a pretty broad brush.

Joan is pure and innocent.

Dave is very earnest.

Sarah is obviously a busybody who's filled with neuroses.

Dan, the father, has a very blasé attitude about everything.

And it's these character dynamics that are going to really sort of bring out

drama as we move along.

As the kids head off to the dance here, let's take a little while to talk about

the real mastermind behind Mom and Dad. It wasn't William Bodine. It was the

film's producer, a guy named Howard W. Babb.

Babb was known as...

Kroger throughout his life. And he was born on December 30th in 1906 in Lees

Creek, Ohio.

He was raised and educated in the town of Wilmington, which wasn't too far

As a kid, he had a paper route, and he began to clean up at the town's

offices after hours.

And it seemed that promotion was in Babs' blood from a very, very early age.

He served as a cheerleader at Wilmington High School and also at Wilmington

College. He became a sports writer and an ad manager for the town newspaper and

eventually married Toby, who was an office girl at the newspaper.

And all the while, he was engaged in various sorts of promotional activities

around town, such as having a guy named Digger O'Dell buried alive under a

downtown street for six days.

So during the Great Depression, Babb worked as an advertising manager for the

Chikaris theater chain in Ohio.

He eventually became publicity director for several other theater circuits, and

he even promoted traveling stage shows, including one called The French Follies.

And here we're introduced to Jack Griffin, who is going to prove to be

corrupter.

But getting back to Babb, around 1939, he entered into a partnership with two

other Howards, Howard Russell Cox and Howard Underwood, and they were peddling

roadshow attraction called Forbidden. Now, the core of the program was a

print of Brian Foy's 1934 exploitation film called High School Girl, and they

slapped a couple of old medical reels onto it.

and ran all over the Midwest showing this film, Forbidden.

Babb hooked up with them. He eventually secured the rights to show the movie,

the high school girl portion of the movie, in 36 states. And he then bought

newer clinical reels showing childbirth and the ravages of venereal disease. And

he called this program Dust to Dust, which featured a live lecture by Cox on

evils of sex intolerance.

He then got Mildred Horn, who was a newspaper writer from Indianapolis, to

new hygiene books.

Dust to Dust Attractions became based in Wilmington, and Babb served as the

general manager while this film played hundreds of dates over about three

But Babb was really itching to make a modern sex hygiene film.

He was unable to interest Cox and Underwood in the project, so he

joined with J .F. Josie of Cleveland. He was a Monogram stockholder, and

together they produced Mom and Dad for their new firm, Hygienic Productions.

Now, the film was written by Mildred Horn, who Babs would leave his wife to

with, and they eventually got married many years later when Toby consented to

giving Kroger a divorce.

The movie was shot on the Monogram lot.

Budget was around $65 ,000 or so, and it had the production values very

typical of a monogram B -movie production.

Most exploitation movies from the period were made for considerably less than

that price, and a lot of them looked considerably worse.

So for all intents and purposes, Mom and Dad was really just sort of a remake of

High School Girl.

but just with a fresh gloss for 1944.

Now, as we move through the whole high school dance sequence, we're going to

several featured performers.

We've got the Jitterbugs here. We're going to have a soloist. And then this

of crazy family acrobatics act.

And these things, while they may look like they're supposed to be adding some

sort of production value, were really just sort of padding in order to be able

to get the film up to a sort of respectable running time.

And this was a typical exploitation film technique.

As Jack and Joan look at the moonlight, Jack begins to make his moves

on Joan, and even though she's rather smitten with him, we really see that he

somebody who wastes absolutely no time.

Once Mom and Dad was in the can, or completed, by Babs' own account, he and

Josie were met in Hollywood by representatives of of the Catholic

Decency. That was the much feared moral watchdog group that the Catholic Church

had looking over movies in the United States, looking for issues of

immorality and so on. And these emissaries of the Legion of Decency

threatened... Babb and Josie that they were going to give mom and dad a C or

condemned rating unless the pair shelled out a minimum $50 ,000 contribution.

So after some quick thinking, Josie said that they would consider making that

payoff if the Legion looked the other way for a year or so, so that their

investors could make back their money.

These two guys apparently seemed happy enough with that sort of arrangement.

And actually, mom and dad was not condemned for two years after its

it took a full two years for them to issue the condemned rating.

Unfortunately, Babb in his recounting of the story doesn't indicate whether they

ever made the quote unquote contribution to the Legion of Decency.

Now, for years, Babb also threatened to make a film that he titled Father Bingo,

which was supposed to be an expose of the gambling rackets in the parish

Now, he never really intended to make that movie, but he certainly did enjoy

toying with the Catholic Church and the Legion of Decency.

Mom and Dad has to be one of the most banal titles in the history of

exploitation films.

Most had very lurid titles like Sins of Love or The Naked Truth and The

Road to Ruin. And I can only surmise that Babb wanted a title that wouldn't

upset the town fathers when his production rolled into town and was on

one of their theaters.

But what the film lacked in terms of a title, Babb made up for with his hard

sell techniques.

One of his mottos was, you got to tell them to sell them.

And the thing that made Mom and Dad such a success was Kroger Babb's exhibition

policy, which had to be followed to the letter by any theater that wanted to

book the movie.

What BAB put together was billed as a complete program, and that included the

feature Mom and Dad and the live Elliott Forbes lecture.

The press book mandated that no short subjects could be shown during Mom and

Dad.

And another aspect of the presentation policy stipulated that the show times

to be exactly three times a day, performances for women and high school

girls at 2 p .m. and at 7 p .m., and then at 9 p .m. a show for men and high

school -age boys.

and one of the reasons they actually said high school age rather than adults

only was because high school age differed from place to place, and they

always trying to get as many people in through the doors as possible.

The contracts that Babb signed with theaters dictated when tickets would go

sale, when the doors would open, and also when the exits would occur.

And this was a really sort of brilliant strategy because when the 7 p .m.

women's show was letting out, you still had all the men and boys waiting on the

sidewalk out in front of the theater to get in to the 9 p .m. show.

And this resulted in massive.

crowds in front of these theaters, and Babb would take pictures of these huge

crowds and use them in his publicity and as a way to get new bookings for Mom

and Dad.

The admission policy also dictated that there was a single even money ticket

price that was required of all movies playing Mom and Dad.

Theaters had to allow the sale of two booklets.

that Babb had published, The Digest of Hygiene for Mother and Daughter and The

Digest of Hygiene for Father and Son, and those were written by Mildred Horn.

During the end part of the Elliot Forbes lecture, which interrupted the film in

the middle of its running, and you often have nurses going up and down the

aisles selling these little pitch booklets for a dollar each.

And all of that money went back to Hygienic. It was not shared at all with

theater owner.

So as mentioned, and as we'll see in a little while here, the film would

actually stop, and the eminent hygiene commentator, Elliot Forbes, would take

the stage and provide a live lecture.

There was no Elliot Forbes.

He was just played by an actor or a carnival talker. And his sole purpose

help sell those little pitch books.

And at least some of those were printed by an outfit called Livestock Press in

Omaha, Nebraska, that operated near the stockyards.

There's something strange about that.

But anyway, Mom and Dad was essentially a prepackaged sex hygiene roadshow, and

bad step -by -step provisions on how to sell this spectacle left very, very

little room for error on the part of the exhibitor. But, of course, there was

really no room for innovation either.

As the fabulous Lippins do their thing here, I'll let you know that in the

years of Mom and Dad's release, Hygienic had a half a dozen bookers.

trying to get the film into Mom and Dad around the United States, and there were

as many as 26 units traveling the country, each with its own advanced man

its own Elliot Forbes.

And there was even a unit that played African -American theaters that had the

Olympic gold medalist Jesse Owens appearing instead of the fake Forbes.

Ah, it's the next morning, and Joan seems to be...

dreaming blissfully, no doubt, about her new love, Jack Griffin.

But, of course, as Sarah comes in and wakes her and she discovers that Joan

a new love interest, things are going to get very, very difficult.

Now, Mom and Dad became a smash hit, and it certainly wasn't because of

the... insipid melodrama here, combined with the insipid music on the

soundtrack. It was largely because of Babb's ability to sell this

film to theaters.

In 1945, Babb received a letter from a guy named C .W. Davis.

He was the manager of the Rockingham Theater in Reidsville, North Carolina.

And Davis wrote, Dear Mr. Babb, I have been in show business since 1919,

have been local manager in Reesville since March 1, 1923.

We played quite a number of states' rights or ballyhoo shows, many with sex

angles, to get them in in nearly all the cases you hide when the patrons go out.

I must hand it to you. You have an organization and a production that hits

between the eyes.

It packs them in, and most important of all, it pleases them with a wallop. And

Bab received dozens upon dozens, if not hundreds, of letters from exhibitors who

were very pleased with the performance of Mom and Dad.

It was said to give them a box office hypo or hypodermic shot in the arm

when, at this time, box office was beginning to fall off around the

Now, about a year later, after Davis' letter, Time magazine ran an article

on mom and dad and said that by this time, by April of 1948,

the film had taken in $8 million from 20 million moviegoers, and that over the

course of the year that it had been in release at that point, it had been

peddled in 42 states and in Canada.

And the Time magazine article went on to say, The film is shown only to unmixed

audiences after a town has been saturated with ballyhoo that leaves no

the livestock unaware of the chance to learn the facts of life.

And they then went on to mention the lecture during the intermission or the

midpoint in the film and the sale of the sex hygiene pamphlets. And they gave

the figure that to date.

The sales at a dollar apiece had reached $7 million.

So Mom and Dad was a considerable hit, and it was certainly lining Kroger

Babs' pockets with cash.

Crokerbab had built up a formidable organization to get his movie out there.

And in 1947, he actually organized a multi -day convention in Los Angeles

couple hundred people attending business events, social events, and so on, all

for hygienic productions.

Cash prizes were even given out to theater owners for outstanding

Now, this little bit of business here between Sarah and Dan as she's talking

about her women's club might seem kind of funny today. But in point of fact,

back at that time, women's social clubs often wielded a good deal of power,

especially in small towns and particularly regarding issues of

Mom and Dad becomes a tremendous box office hit.

Even despite its financial success, it still faced a number of challenges.

And one of those challenges came in the form of censorship.

The other challenge came in the form of competition.

Now, with regard to censorship, when Mom and Dad appeared, the production code,

which governed the content of Hollywood films, was still in force.

And Mom and Dad never got a seal of approval from the MPPDA or the

MPAA, as it would soon come to be known.

And at the same time, Several states had censorship boards, like New York,

Pennsylvania, Kansas, Ohio, and others, as well as some cities, like Atlanta and

Chicago. And it was essentially kept out of those places with censorship boards.

The film was also challenged by municipal authorities in hundreds of

across the nation, and Babb spent what may well have been hundreds of thousands

of dollars, if not even maybe into the millions of dollars, defending mom and

dad and fighting for the right to have it exhibited.

And he won all but a handful of those cases.

Now, I know that may seem like it makes him sound like a great defender of the

First Amendment, but...

Babb was first and foremost a canny businessman, and he knew that spending a

thousand dollars here and a few thousand dollars there could, in fact, result in

tens of thousands of dollars in the coffers of hygienic production when he

able to win a case and be able to show the film in a particular city, a state,

or a small town.

Now, there were also calls for censoring Mom and Dad from other unofficial

channels as well.

So, for instance, not long after the film was released in June of 1945, it

played in Joliet, Illinois.

And a doctor, Philip McGinnis, who was a health officer in Joliet, sort of

inserted himself into the run of Mom and Dad while it was in town.

He called the movie lewd, obscene, and immoral.

He said that doctors, not police, were the best judges of hygienic movies and

went on to say, quote, Today, the public's emotions running as rampant as

do because of the world conflict to permit anything that emphasizes

is bad.

That picture is rotten.

Sometimes people wonder why juvenile delinquency is on the increase.

If they'd used a little common sense, they could see the forest through the

trees. We must have sensible medical censorship to overcome evil influences

the minds of our youth, such as this picture has proven to be.

So mom and dad certainly did make its share of enemies along the way.

Now, beyond censorship, the other big challenge that mom and dad faced was

competition.

Now, there certainly would have been other older sex hygiene films that would

have been circulating on the exploitation market in 1945, but they

held up.

candle to the brand spanking new mom and dad.

But certainly producers could not have helped but notice just how many bookings

this new film was getting and how much money it was making. So naturally, that

led to a lot of imitation.

And in 1948, there were three new films that hit the screens that followed the

mom and dad formula very, very closely.

These movies included Street Corner, The Cause of Eve, and The Story of Bob and

Sally. Street Corner was the one that paralleled Mom and Dad the most closely.

The only real difference is that the main character in that film, Lois,

Joan in Mom and Dad, winds up getting a back alley abortion that almost kills

her. The other films were...

basically variants on the same theme, although there were some differences.

For instance, Because of Eve featured photos of models in its hygiene reels

who were fully nude. So you had full frontal nudity in Because of Eve.

And these films all wound up competing with each other from 1948 on and

often wound up undercutting each other's potential profits.

A truce of sorts between these battling hygiene films was finally achieved in

1950. Babb teamed up with the distributors of the three other films to

Modern Film Distributors. And Modern, which was based in Chicago, wound up

controlling all four films, and that eliminated most of the competition and

fighting for territories and for profits.

Moving into the 1950s, the movies began to shift into the drive -in market.

And that became a very popular market for the sex hygiene films. But Mom and

still had some really big openings in cities like Chicago, where it eventually

prevailed against censorship and was able to get bookings. It eventually was

able to get passed by the New York State Board of Censors in 1956, which was, of

course, a full 10 years after it had been initially released.

David F. Friedman, who worked with Babb at Modern, has recounted how he

ended up with Mom and Dad on ten screens in Chicago around 1958.

And, of course, each one had a lecture by Elliot Forbes.

But he says nobody ever asked how Elliot Forbes could be in ten different places

at once.

Now, Friedman, of course, he went on to be a very important exploitation and

sexploitation producer himself in the 1960s and the 70s. And if you're

interested in Kroger Babb and if you're interested in reading some really fun

stories, I'd encourage you to track down a copy of the late Dave Friedman's

memoir, A Youth in Babylon, which is a great read, and you'll learn a lot more

about Kroger Babb.

We're now well into a half an hour of Mom and Dad, and it's at this point that

we finally get to some of the dramatic moments in the movie.

Jack has been putting the moves on Joan since he met her at the high school

dance. He's managed to convince her to sneak out of the house for a date,

essentially turning her into a delinquent.

And now he's going to really begin to put the pressure on Joan. He professes

love for her, but she is clearly in a very vulnerable position.

She's not familiar with what Jack is doing.

And the pressure just continues.

to build and to build.

Jack sweet talks Joan.

She never actually consents to what is happening now.

And as we dissolve and see them

Driving down the road, Jack has clearly gotten what he wants, and Joan is

clearly very upset. And who couldn't blame her? She's basically

undergone what we would today call a date rape.

And in some ways still at it, Jack manages to steal a goodnight kiss.

Lois rather abruptly turns her back on him and marches into the house.

Now at this time, especially during World War II, there were growing numbers

men and women who were having premarital sex.

And that was a fact that would really sort of explode into the public

in the next few years after the release of Mom and Dad with the publication of

the Kinsey reports.

But at the same time, the so -called double standard was still very firmly in

place. And that sort of unspoken double standard said that it was okay for men

to have premarital sex, but it was not okay for women to.

And we know as we watch Joan lie in bed and pace around and so on that it's that

prohibition that is really beginning to eat at her. She's lost her

valued virginity.

We get over a minute of Joan displaying her guilt,

her anxiety, and her shame on her face and with her body language.

As Joan comes in to the breakfast table the next morning, you can still see her

body language. She's very stiff. She seems to almost be collapsing in on

as Junella offers her some pancakes.

One of the things to notice about this particular scene is that it's all done

essentially as a single setup, where we have the camera placed so it can capture

all three characters talking, Junella coming in and out of the kitchen door.

So very, very simple.

to set up and to shoot. And any time you had more than something like this, say

doing shot, reverse shot combinations and so on, that typically added time

and it added expense to an exploitation film budget.

And they were operating on very, very narrow margins.

So the simpler the better when it came to shooting an exploitation film.

Mom and dad would have had a sufficient budget to allow for retakes, but a

lot of exploitation movies were shot with a ratio of maybe two to one at

Mom and dad, you probably had a chance to shoot a scene maybe three times,

even four times. But typically on most really low -end exploitation films, if

you got in a second take, you were doing good.

Now, Joan has arrived here at the high school. She looks like she's carrying

virtual weight of the world on her shoulders.

And, of course, the first thing she does is get a reminder about the previous

night. And then she's going to get another reminder about the previous

she sits in Mr.

Blackburn's biology class.

Mr. Blackburn begins an impromptu talk about student romances, and

he talks some about social and moral hygiene, suggesting that he had wanted

start a class at the high school about social hygiene, but he had been turned

down by the school board, largely because of busybodies like Sarah Blake.

But as Blackburn speaks...

we can see that Joan feels like he's speaking directly to her.

And he talks about girls who have brought shame to their families, how

had to move out of town, and so on. And this really cuts deeply with Joan.

Now, sex hygiene exploitation films always claim to be educational.

That was what helped legitimize them and helped them get onto American screens.

It's also what often got them into some hot water with real educators and

medical professionals who thought that their territory was being usurped.

A lot of times, the info in sex hygiene films was not terribly accurate or up

-to -date, and sometimes that's what those professionals complained about.

Mom and Dad, for its time, was pretty good in terms of its accuracy.

Now, the education in sex hygiene films basically falls into two main

categories, moral and clinical.

And moral education came out of the dominant Judeo -Christian attitudes

sex, especially keeping it within the bonds of marriage.

And we see that Jones' shame and guilt are really turning her into a basket

case.

education in sex hygiene films was the clinical education, and we'll be getting

to that later on in Mom and Dad. And that included information about

reproduction, about childbirth and venereal diseases.

But it also sort of worked in concert with the moral educational aspects as we

see these images of childbirth and cesarean operations and diseased sex

and so on. And they operated essentially to frighten people into not having sex

outside of marriage.

We see the physical toll that those moral infractions cause.

seem somewhat progressive today in the fact that they were actually talking

about sex education.

They were really doing it in the service of a very conservative worldview.

Any other questions?

Mr. Blackburn, when you're out with your girl and it's a chilly night and you're

riding around and perspiration comes on your forehead, is that love?

Well, Alan, I'm afraid that's just a sign of spring fever.

Well, for tomorrow's assignment, we'll take the chapter in your textbook on the

elementary track.

Class dismissed.

We cut from the classroom to the women's club and

Joan's mother sitting squarely in the middle. So basically cutting from these

kids. to the women who have largely stood in the way of them getting

information about social and moral hygiene.

And we certainly here kind of get the connection between Joan's predicament

and her mother's attitudes.

Joan continues to try to rebuff

Mary Lou.

And the women continue to meet, and they all offer a nice little round of

applause to Sarah.

So the girls wind up in the nook for a soda, and who should Joan see across the

room but Jack, and she immediately turns tail and runs out of the snack bar.

Jack gets a little taste of Mary Lou's bath.

And now as Jack catches up to Joan, he seems to be taking a little bit more

of a sensitive attitude.

I know what's on your mind, and I'd like to talk to you about it.

He says it was all his fault.

She admits that it was all her fault, too.

She gets into the car with him, and yet again, off to a secluded spot, although

the action here is somewhat different than it was the previous night.

I know, dear, and I'm terribly sorry, too.

It was all my fault.

No, it was just as much mine, but...

I just wish it had never happened.

So do I, but, well, it was just one of those things. Joan admits here that she

feels like a leper, that she feels unclean in some way, and it seems as

though she's worried that she's almost contagious and that her shame is going

rub off on her friends and on her family.

In this scene, we really kind of get the one -two punch between sappy dialogue

and sappy music.

And, of course, this film was written by Mildred Horn, who was Babs Paramore

at the time. No doubt he probably threw in an assist, but you can tell that this

was the work of a first -time screenwriter, somebody who probably...

That threw a certain number of Hollywood B -films at the time.

When I come back, I'm going to... When you come back?

Yeah.

Gee, I haven't even had a chance to tell you. Here, Jack drops the bombshell

that he's going to be leaving for the coast and essentially leaving Joan alone

with her own feelings.

And that may be what she's most concerned about.

And then I'm flying out to the coast.

So we fade in

on the Blake family dinner table.

And here we do get things being broken up a little bit more with

different shots of the different characters.

This is the moment where Dave now spills the beans that Mr. Blackburn talked

some about social hygiene in their biology class that day.

This shocks Sarah and is going to send her spinning into action,

and she now has a new nemesis, a new foe in the face of Carl

Blackburn.

and Sarah proceeds to destroy Carl Blackburn's career.

Why don't we get back to Kroger Babb for a few minutes.

Mom and Dad was certainly a singular production and release, but Babb did go

to produce several other movies himself.

One came just a year or two after Mom and Dad. It was called Prince of Peace.

This was a religious film revolving around an annual passion play that took

place in Lawton, Oklahoma.

And it featured a young girl from Atlanta named Ginger Prince, who Babb

tried to promote as a new child star, sort of in the mold of Shirley Temple,

several years running.

The film apparently did reasonably well, primarily with small town audiences.

The next Babb production was one called One Too Many.

That was made in 1950, and this was...

a film about a woman who was plagued with alcoholism. It starred Ruth

who was, of course, in Citizen Kane.

But by 1950, Billy Wilder's Lost Weekend from 1945 had already won a

Best Picture Oscar.

So the notion of being groundbreaking had already been stolen by the time

Babs' movie came out. He then came along with a movie called...

Why Men Leave Home, which was also known as The Secrets of Beauty, and a lot of

Babs films had multiple titles.

This one came along in 1951, and it was a melodrama that dealt with the need for

women to remain beautiful in order to retain their husbands.

Now, both One Too Many and Why Men Leave Home were pretty much duds.

And that left Babb picking up other movies for his company.

Eventually, it came to be known as Hallmark Productions.

And he would take these pickups and try to give them that special magic touch

of America's fearless young showman, as he was sometimes known.

Some of these pickups included She Should Have Said No, which was

released as Wild Weed. That was an anti -marijuana film.

And it starred Lila Leeds, who had been arrested on a dope charge with Robert

Mitchum. Mitchum went on to even greater fame and bigger roles.

Lila Leeds wound up in things like She Should Have Said No.

Another one of Babb's pickups was Monica, Story of a Bad Girl.

This was a sort of tarted -up version of Ingmar Bergman's film Summer with

Monica. Babb trimmed the film down.

He cut out the sort of boring, realistic part, and he emphasized Harriet

Anderson's brief nude scene, added a new jazzy score, and Monica, Story of a

Bad Girl did reasonably well.

There was then Karamoja, which was a documentary about a region in Africa. It

was made up of 16 -millimeter footage that Babb had bought from a Seattle

dentist and which featured a good deal of native nudity.

It's sometimes described as an early Mondo film.

And those were films that combined real footage with fake footage into kind of

shockumentaries.

The last film he personally made was a movie called Walk the Walk from 1970,

that was another anti -dope film.

But, of course, the counterculture was in full flower by then, and so Walk the

Walk tanked, disappeared very, very quickly.

So Babs never really had another film that was as successful as Mom and

Dad.

Uh -oh. At this point, Joan is coming to a realization.

She goes in and talks to her mother.

who, being helpful as always, says that she is too busy for her daughter and is,

of course, shocked that Joan would want any kind of information about

reproduction or hygiene or anything like that, basically telling her that that

is something that can wait until she's married.

Now, as Joan's predicament continues to escalate here, I'll mention that...

Mom and Dad was actually submitted to the Code and Ratings Administration in

1969, got an R rating, and it still managed to get some play dates,

in drive -ins into the 1970s.

Now, Bab died in 1980. He suffered from a number of...

health setbacks. He'd had a stroke. He'd always been overweight.

He had diabetes.

So he passed away in 1980 in Palm Springs.

And by that time, mom and dad was largely forgotten.

But it was added to the National Film Registry in 2005 as a socially

significant film.

Now, it seems like a lot of hucksters, Kroger Babs seemed to have started to

believe that he could sell anything to anyone at any time.

He was so confident in the power of showmanship and in his sales abilities

he was largely blinded to the changes in the film industry, competition from

television, social changes, and so on. And even though he tried to apply his

showmanship techniques to other schemes in the 60s and the 1970s, nothing was

ever as successful as Mom and Dad.

So Joan has already suffered from one shock, and that is realizing that she is

now pregnant.

And here she suffers a second shock as she learns that Jack has died in a plane

crash. So this closes off any possibility for her of a quick marriage,

opportunity perhaps for her and her family to avoid disgrace.

certainly a turning point in the movie.

Now, a lot of exploitation movies were very, very disjointed, very choppy. They

didn't have to follow Hollywood conventions in large measure because

contained this racy or lurid material that you would never see in a movie from

the major studios or even a B -studio like Monogram or Republic.

And it was that material that helped to pull in the audience and also made the

audience pretty forgiving of exploitation movies, at least as long as

delivered the goods.

But Mom and Dad does follow a pretty standard and a fairly smooth narrative

line throughout.

Oh, poor Joan doesn't know where to turn.

Now, this scene in Blackburn's office as the kids are helping him set up his

insurance practice is once again largely padding.

There's really nothing much going on in this scene unless it's simply to sort of

indicate that these high school kids have a certain rapport with Blackburn.

narratively, there's really nothing here to move the plot along.

We're now really getting into the sort of dramatic heart of mom and dad as the

walls are slowly closing in on Joan.

particular moment as she wanders out of the bathroom and talks with her mother,

we realize that she's been suffering from morning sickness.

It's in some ways really not too surprising that this was one of June

Carlson's last film roles.

She

is, in fact, not terribly good.

She's able to smile, she can knit her brow, and she can grimace. And that's

about the extent of her dramatic range.

And we get into this little montage sequence as the calendar pages flip

by.

Joan's situation is getting increasingly worse as the months pass.

She frets.

And as we get into September, in what I think is my favorite moment in the

movie, she realizes that her skirt will no longer fit. She's about three months

pregnant at this particular point, and she does not know where to turn. She's

being eaten alive inside by guilt and by shame.

So eventually she turns to the only person she feels she can turn to, and

is her friend Mary Lou. And she does confide in Mary Lou that she

is in trouble.

She expresses the fact that she is essentially afraid of her mother, that

can't talk to her mother.

So, you know, where do we go from here?

I can't eat. I can't sleep.

I can't stand it much longer.

Sometimes I think I'm going to lose my mind.

Was it Jack?

Yes.

What'll I do? Mary Lou comes up with the practical suggestion that maybe Joan

should go see a doctor. In some ways, it seems like Mary Lou's the only person

in the film who has their head screwed on straight.

Joan finally agrees that she'll seek out some medical advice, and we see

the girls hunting for a doctor in the medical building.

Let's try Dr. Howard.

All right.

Anyone you say.

But suddenly here, Joan begins to hear Mr. Blackburn's voice

all over again, talking about disgrace.

So for all his talk about the need for sex knowledge, it seems that Mr.

Blackburn's little impromptu discussion about hygiene and class is really

driving Joan to the very brink.

As

we

watch Joan become increasingly distraught, increasingly desperate, I

mention that the experience of watching an exploitation film like Mom and Dad

today is very different than what it would have been like when these movies

initially released.

Now, you're probably sitting in front of your screen, either alone or maybe with

a few other people. But back then, you would have been in a theater with

probably hundreds of other people.

And you would have already been exposed to a hard sell, seeing posters and

window cards around in your town or your neighborhood.

You might have been passed a handbill on the sidewalk advertising the film you

were watching.

And you would have come into the theater, which would have been festooned

posters and stills and lobby carts and so on. And you also knew that you were

seeing a movie that was for adults only or high school age and up, as

was the case with Mom and Dad. So you were expecting to see something that was

different than your typical movie -going experience.

Dave, desperate to find his sister, busts into the bathroom

and finds Joan evidently having tried to take her

own life. Pretty traumatic here.

But as we were talking about going to an exploitation movie back in the day,

depending on the type of exploitation film it was, whether it was a sex

film, a drug movie, a vice movie, maybe a nudist film or some sort of an exotic

film, you were sitting in that audience and you were waiting to see some sort of

what I've generally referred to as forbidden spectacle.

That would be seeing the birth of a baby, the details of drug use, some

in one form or another.

So there would have been a real palpable sense of anticipation in that theater.

Now, sometimes that spectacle was spread throughout the film. Other times it was

more contained in a few sort of discrete moments or scenes.

There were some times when it might not.

arrive at all and audiences were really peeved in those instances.

In the case of Mom and Dad, it does eventually pay off here, but one has to

through a good deal of rather turgid melodrama before we actually get

there.

And so Joan tells her understanding brother that she is in

and that the late Jack Griffith was the father.

What are we going to do?

I don't know, Butch.

I've never been able to figure out why Dave calls his sister Butch. I guess

maybe he wanted a brother instead.

Certainly wouldn't find a brother in the position that Joan is in.

He kindly reminds her, no more of that crazy suicide stuff, sis.

Dave turns to the only person who may be able to understand and provide some

help, and that is our friendly purveyor of fire and auto insurance, Carl

Blackburn.

Dave cuts right to the chase here.

I need your help.

I mean, we need your help.

We?

Yes.

Joan and I.

What's wrong?

Well, Joan's in trouble.

You'll notice that none of the characters ever utters the word pregnant

the film, even though we're going to see the results of pregnancy very, very

graphically in just a few minutes.

I think the pipe means that Carl Blackburn is thinking.

What can we do, Mr. Blackburn?

Let me think about it for a while, Dave.

You run along.

Take care of your sister.

Thank you, Mr. Blackburn.

Gosh.

You're a swell guy.

Yes, Mr. Blackburn is a swell guy.

But we know he's been put in a really tough situation because he has to take

his glasses and go stare out the window.

As Carl strides up to the Blake home, we know that we're finally arriving

at the confrontation that mom and dad has really been spoiling for for over an

hour. And that is where the forces of enlightenment in the form of Carl

Blackburn are going to confront Sarah, who represents ignorance and prudery.

Blackburn gets a less than warm welcome from the snitty Sarah.

I think you'd call this important.

But he has something in store for her.

It has nothing to do with insurance.

Then what did you want to see him about that's so important? As he tells her

that Joan is pregnant.

Kyle Blackburn, how dare you say such a thing? Because it's the truth.

So you better call Mr. Blake and let him know about it right now. Or Sarah is

dumbstruck. Good to see you again.

What are you doing?

Beating the lioness in her den?

Not exactly.

Dan, I've just had the shock of my life.

Joan is in trouble.

Trouble?

What sort of trouble?

Sexual trouble.

All of the discussion here is in rather hushed tones.

Dave came into my office yesterday.

I suppose that's supposed to give an idea that this is a very, very grave...

Carl begins a process of shaming Sarah.

And as she tries to find someone to blame for Joan's situation,

Blackburn turns the tables and tells Sarah, that she is actually

the one to blame.

I wouldn't blame her any more than I would the boy.

Well, then who would you blame?

I blame you, Mrs. Blake.

You and every parent who neglects the sacred duty of telling their children

real truth.

Why were your children afraid to come to you in their trouble?

Blackburn continues to dress down Sarah.

for not providing Joan with the education that she needed to avoid the

that she finds herself in right now.

But, of course, for Sarah, all she's worried about is her own reputation and

will she ever be able to face her club members again.

Blackburn offers one more little zinger, and the scene ends.

At this point, the projectors would have stopped, and the person playing Elliot

Forbes would have stepped onto the stage or in front of the screen and given a

10 - to 15 -minute lecture.

But just to stress again, that lecture was really nothing more than a pitch to

sell the little sex hygiene booklets at a buck a pop.

Now, Dave Friedman has said that they always expected the Elliott Forbes' to

skim off $20 or $30 a week in book sales, and Babb himself wound up in

with the IRS and claimed that it was the accounting for the book sales that were

at the root of his tax problems.

And now our story continues.

We learn here that Sarah and Joan are headed out east to Boston.

Presumably that's so the prying eyes of Centerville will not be on Joan as she

grows great with child and then has her baby.

Now Dan comes to visit Carl Blackburn. He is very grateful for his help.

And Dan seems to have learned a lesson about just sort of stepping back and

being an observer.

So he tells Blackburn that he is going to right the wrong that his wife

perpetuated and get Blackburn's job back at the high school so he can begin

to teach social and moral hygiene to the students. The boys and girls of this

town are a lot more good by going back. They need that class in social hygiene.

Yes, they need it all right.

Well, Carl, I'm going to see to it that the school board reinstate you at their

meeting next month. And you can write an insurance policy on that.

We have the headline announcing Blackburn's return to Centerville High.

And interestingly enough, the superintendent seems to have changed his

about Carl's radical ideas and now seems to be very gung -ho.

about the idea of having this sex hygiene class.

The question of textbooks, they gloss over pretty quickly here as the

turns to the more modern method of education, and that is motion pictures.

But best of all, she says he's due here for arrest in October.

Do you suppose we could get him to talk to a small group like ours?

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

I wish you all the luck in the world, Carl.

Thank you, John. Thank you.

We dissolve in on the classroom, and once again Carl Blackburn is at its

but this time he's in front of a movie screen.

Now, having films within films in sex hygiene movies had occurred before, but

with Mom and Dad, the technique really becomes a staple.

Now, Mom and Dad's audiences were segregated by sex, and you'll note here

the classrooms are segregated by sex as well. The girls will be watching the

film on reproduction and childbirth, and later on, the boys will watch the film

on venereal diseases.

Now, using movies as an educational tool had received a huge boost during World

War II as the government produced hundreds of films for training purposes.

And it was around this time that classroom films on sex education were

beginning to be made. The actor Eddie Albert, who is probably best known for

TV show Green Acres, produced a movie called Human Growth in 1948 for his

educational film company.

And I've always thought it was quite likely that he was inspired by Mom and

or by some of its imitators.

And indeed...

Those classroom films will eventually supplant theatrical sex hygiene movies

we move into the 1950s.

Now, we're the audience for mom and dad, but we're also being put into the place

of the kids in the classroom. We lack information, and we are put in the

position of learners or pupils.

We now get to what most of the mom -and -dad ticket buyers had really paid to

see, and that was the clinical reels.

Now, as I've already indicated, the promotion of mom -and -dad was a key to

success, but Kroger Babb also benefited from some very, very lucky timing.

Mom -and -dad appeared as World War II was ending and just as the baby boom was

beginning.

And it would really be an understatement to say that Americans, and most

especially women, were hungry for information about the mechanics of

and childbirth and so on.

I don't know if it was ever the case with mom and dad, but in the 1930s,

were stories in trade papers of women in theaters rioting when a sex hygiene

film was supposed to be shown, but it was shut down by the local authorities.

Now, I'm sure a lot of women and men were hoping to get information about

contraception as well. It had only been since 1937 that the American Medical

Association had accepted a resolution that recognized that contraception was

important bit of knowledge for patients to have, and they also acknowledged that

the subject should be taught in medical schools.

As Mom and Dad alluded to, sex ed was not something taught in public schools

the time, certainly.

The thought was that sex education was something that belonged in the home.

of course, we now know what can happen if it is left in the home and to people

like Sarah Blake.

Now, people came to Mom and Dad hoping to get information about contraception.

They found that conspicuously absent.

Family planning was really not part of mom and dad's game.

We get a lot of information about

the female reproductive anatomy in this film, but none about the male anatomy at

all. I guess that's in keeping with the sex segregation that was practiced by

mom and dad.

The animation in these movies is actually pretty well done, and it's

lot better than many of the earlier sex hygiene exploitation films.

People would have come out of Mom and Dad with at least a rudimentary

understanding of conception and fetal development.

Stage by stage, as you see illustrated.

I hope all of you appreciate the great importance of proper prenatal care by a

good physician.

Now, as you watch these remarkable pictures showing the development of the

within the mother's womb, you must realize that proper diet, exercise,

medical care are very essential during this vital period.

After growing within the mother's womb for approximately nine months and being

nourished by her bloodstream, The child becomes fully developed and is ready to

be born.

We now get to our first real instance of spectacle in Mom and Dad.

You know, in this day and age, audiences have become pretty jaded. They're

accustomed to seeing all manner of sex and violence and gore on screen.

But when I've shown Mom and Dad or other films like it in classes or similar

situations in the past, it's the scenes of childbirth that really still have the

power to freak people out.

So the idea of having uniformed nurses in attendance at Mom and Dad, whether

they were, in fact, real nurses or not, was a pretty clever move on Babs' part.

At least it would have kind of served as a warning to the audience that what

they were going to see was not for the faint of heart. And, indeed, there were

reports of people passing out or getting ill during the clinical reels of Mom

and Dad and other similar movies.

Every newborn child must be given an immediate application of silver nitrate

the eyes to prevent possible blindness.

After complete precaution is taken to establish identification, the baby is

placed in the nursery.

This was a time when the whole birth process was really becoming very

medicalized. And so we kind of go through and see some of these instances

how the process was in some ways institutionalized and medicalized.

Still a lot of people, even back when mom and dad came out, who were having

their children at home.

Now we get to the cesarean operation, and it's this

section that really has the ability to make many people in

an audience very, very queasy.

You'll note that on some of these titles in the clinical reels, there is a

copyright notice for hygienic production.

And I think that's because in the past a lot of the clinical reels could be

duped and pirated and so on, and Babb wanted to ensure that that didn't happen

with his clinical reels.

Now as we begin to...

get to the operation.

There's sort of a sense of suspense building.

And

we

finally cut to the chase, so to speak.

You can imagine that for a lot of young women seeing mom and dad and watching

these images, that they would have served as a real disincentive on having

premarital sex, or it certainly would have pushed them to get information on

birth control, the information that they weren't actually getting in mom and

dad.

As the sex hygiene exploitation films moved into the 1950s, there was...

sort of an arms race in terms of birth reels.

Initially with Mom and Dad and other films, you start out with a regular

and then a cesarean operation.

But by the 50s, those were no longer good enough. So some movies featured the

birth of twins. And then you had some that featured the birth of triplets.

And black and white footage was eventually replaced with color footage

on. And, of course, seeing a cesarean operation in color would have made it

the more graphic in its depiction of the process.

The quantity of water varies in different births. Some of you may wonder

keeps the baby from drowning.

You see, it doesn't start breathing until after the delivery.

The surgeon determines the position of the head.

And if it does not rotate forward properly, then forceps are applied with

care not to bruise the infant.

Only gentle, slow, upward pressure is used to aid the baby to turn within the

uterus. As you view these pictures, all of you certainly can realize the

importance of a modern and fully equipped hospital in every community.

It is too bad that your mothers during their youth didn't have an opportunity

see pictures like this and learn these important facts.

Injections are given for the purpose of relaxing the mother and enabling her to

rest easier. Of course, she remains under complete anesthetic throughout the

operation. After the baby is born, then starts the final repair.

The uterine peritoneum is closed with continuous chromic catgum, replacing the

bladder over the uterine incision.

The abdominal incision is then closed layer by layer as it was opened. The

retention sutures are used to prevent reopening of the wound by any abnormal

stress. You will note how this relieves any tension on the incision.

The skillful surgeon whom we are watching perform this operation was the

originator of the technique in which buttons are used.

When we consider the long and costly years of training a young man must go

through to become a physician and the additional study required to be a

successful surgeon.

Pictures like these which enable the public to witness their great skill make

fully appreciate our nation's great medical fraternity. As the repair of the

incision is completed, note that the patient has two neat rows of buttons.

Always remember the great importance of proper prenatal care by your physician

all through the months of pregnancy.

You have just witnessed one of the miracles of modern surgery, and this

mother are just as strong and healthy today as if her child had been born,

So you and the girls in Mr.

Blackburn's class have survived the birth reels. You are to be

This title card coming up harks back really to the silent

era, and you would think this bit of information about time passing could

been woven into the dialogue, but...

Mildred Horn and Kroger Babb were by no means seasoned screenwriters.

And as the scene plays out, though, we do get another hit for the importance

of educational films, particularly sex hygiene films used in a classroom

setting. Well, we had a letter from Sarah yesterday. I guess everything's

as well as can be expected.

You know, Mr. Blackburn, I sure wish you taught our class in radio mechanics.

That Mr. Pearson's a nice guy, all right, but...

Hello. Hello.

flip and we're back into Mr.

Blackburn's classroom.

This time it's the boys who have assembled and they're about to watch the

dreaded venereal disease films.

Now as

Blackburn introduces Dr.

Burrell. You may recognize him if you're familiar with the old Superman TV show

from the 1950s with George Reeves. This is John Hamilton, and he played Perry

White on that TV show.

As Dr. Burrell talks here, I'll just mention that Babb's battles in the

over mom and dad, which almost always involved the spectacle of these clinical

reels, really contributed to the chipping away of film censorship in the

States, so much so that it had disappeared to the degree that Babb

present an early nudie cutie in 1961 called Kipling's Women.

But by the late 60s, he was sounding a lot like that Dr. Philip McGinnis of

Joliet, who I mentioned earlier, as he complained about lousy, filthy pictures.

But Babb never gave up on his belief in the power of showmanship.

In the early 1970s, as he was preparing to launch a scheme that he called the

Idea Factory, Babb wrote, Showmanship is an indefinable force.

You or someone gives birth to an idea.

You analyze it. You decide it might prove good. You give it a whirl. If it

clicks, you puff out your chest and call yourself a showman. If it flops, you

start looking for someone else to blame.

That's show business.

Here you see the picture of one of our country's many public health officials.

They are trying to awaken everyone to the seriousness of venereal disease.

Today there are millions whose bodies have been wrecked by these two diseases.

The rates of syphilis and gonorrhea had really spiked during the Second World

War, and perhaps you've seen some of those posters that were issued during

war with texts like, you can't beat the axis if you've got VD, or

there's no medicine for regret.

And my particular favorite that asked, loaded, don't take chances with pickups.

Loose women may also be loaded with disease.

So there was a real concern with keeping America's fighting forces on their

toes, healthy, and ready to win the Second World War.

But then those VD rates go down pretty sharply with the mass production of

penicillin in 1944 and then other antibiotics.

However,

there was still concern about the spread of VD in the peacetime United States.

Now, throughout this section, we get quite a few statistics thrown at us.

These diseases are so widespread today, the figures are absolutely amazing.

Unless the public is willing to face the facts... Most hygiene rules were

cobbled together.

from existing footage, whether that was basic stock footage or footage from

medical schools or other health organizations.

And this particular reel, Babb incorporates some shots from No For

That's a 1941 anti -VD film that was made by the Research Council of the

of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the U .S. Public Health Service.

That movie actually featured a number of Hollywood stars, including Ward Bond,

and you'll catch a glimpse or two of Tim Holt here.

Given that this film was kind of a past job, it was put together in a pretty

competent fashion.

Millions make the sad mistake.

Here we have a warning about avoiding quack doctors and ineffective patent

medicines, and the message is to only deal with competent physicians.

And permit the disease to eat its way into their bodies.

If you contract either disease, seek treatment immediately.

If you cannot afford treatment by a private physician...

Go to the venereal disease clinic of a nearby health department.

Gonorrhea is an easy disease to diagnose.

Here we get some information on how the diseases are detected.

There are probably some people in the audience who

would have been made just as ill by seeing that needle.

go into the arm as they would have by any of this other footage.

The

price

of ignorance.

Now, images of the ravages of diseases were meant to act as warnings,

but they also reinforce religious and moral teachings that sex outside of the

bonds of marriage was sinful.

We've already seen the psychological trauma that Joan goes through after

premarital sex, and these images illustrate the potential physical

I think it's safe to assume that the audiences would have become very, very

quiet when this footage began to unspool.

Now

I

want you to see for yourselves just what can happen.

if you are silly enough to joke and make light of these diseases.

These pictures certainly speak the truth.

But many boys and girls today are being misled by their youthful companions into

thinking these diseases are no worse than a bad cold.

After you have looked at these pictures, I know you will realize the great

benefits that can come to all who lead a clean, moral life.

Likewise, you should realize that your health officials are not trying to work

hardship on anyone.

nor are they meddlesome or cranky individuals when they insist that

standards of cleanliness and sanitation be maintained by the public, business,

and industry alike.

When you stop to think that there are millions of cases of these diseases in

nation today, I am sure you will agree even higher standards must be achieved.

There is a kind of hectoring, badgering quality to intertitles like this one.

And that, in some measure, seemed to come from Babb's personality.

He would often refer to people who didn't follow his proven sales

stupid jerks in ads and print material.

So it sounds like he could be charming, but also very abrasive.

Now, he did also issue a version of Mom and Dad without the hygiene footage, and

that was called Side Road, and it was made to be made more acceptable to

that had censorship or perhaps areas that had tougher municipal authority.

But, of course, some of the reason people were coming to see Mom and Dad

because of the spectacle and the shock of that clinical footage.

So when that was removed, it just became a rather limp melodrama about a girl in

trouble. although even that would have been forbidden by the production code.

Now, the VD reel presents a steady escalation in the graphicness and the

nauseating quality of the visuals.

And that's because at their heart, most exploitation movies were warnings about

the pursuit of pleasure for pleasure's sake, whether it was in terms of drugs

sex.

they were designed to keep people on a straight and narrow path of

And these images suggested the results if you strayed from that path.

It's a good thing those nurses were in the audience because they probably had

pull out the smelling salts for more than a few people during this section.

The picture is worth a thousand words, as they say, so I will just shut up for

while. These would never occur if those who contract the diseases would take

treatment immediately.

Modern physicians using the newest drugs can treat and cure gonorrhea in a few

days at very nominal cost if it is caught in its earliest stages.

Syphilis is much harder to cure.

In the early stage, it can be cured in a reasonable length of time through

regular treatments.

However, if the person neglects to go to a physician and permits syphilis to

reach the second stage, it is much harder to cure and requires a long

treatments.

Unfortunately, many permit it to reach the third stage before going to a

Then, in most cases, it cannot be cured.

Frequently, it results in a softening of the brain tissues.

causing syphilitic insanity.

After viewing the horrible condition of these organs and realizing the agony and

pain suffered by these men and boys, I'm sure all of you have had your eyes

opened. Our health departments are making available to every citizen, club,

school, business, and industry much helpful literature describing how to

proper precautions.

The government spends many a dollar each year.

to provide new and attractive signs and placards to further this educational

program. We must bring to all the people... And so are VD Real.

concludes with a bunch of other stock footage, and this all seems to be

introduced to reinforce the notion of maintaining clean minds and healthy

bodies, and implicitly saying that that's what makes for a strong United

of America, as evidenced by the flags on parade.

I don't think anybody has fainted in Mr. Blackburn's classroom.

Thank heavens.

So now we're told that Christmas is over and we find the high school

gang once again gathering at the Nook.

And this material in the nook is basically largely filler.

There's really not much point to it.

This business with the coach is just kind of creepy. But the only really

information we see is when Mary Lou comes to the defense of

Joan in her conversation with the waitress.

And we also get Dave's revelation that he and his father are heading out to the

east for the birth of Joan's baby.

Well,

yes,

but I'm surprised your mother let you keep it. Listen, you, Joan's the best

girlfriend I ever had.

I don't care what you say, I'm sticking by her. That's the spirit, kid.

Well, I'm sorry, Mary Louise.

Say, how's about getting your old man's car and driving some of us guys up to

Union City next Friday night?

Oh, I'm sorry, Al, but Dad and I are leaving for the East Thursday.

Oh, I see.

So here we have a pretty typical tense waiting room scene.

But instead of the usual expectant father who's pacing the floor, we get

parents and her brother Dave.

The doctor finally emerges with news.

Now, narratively or medically, it's not really clear why Joan has been at

death's door, as the doctor says.

But in terms of the film's general sentiments, it would appear that this is

price that Joan has paid for having had premarital sex and for getting pregnant.

The Blakes quietly slip into Joan's room, and the family

is reunited again, presumably.

They have all learned a hard lesson.

Joan slowly rouses, and she greets her parents and

her brother, and presumably she is going to pull through this

ordeal.

Now, this last comment that Dave makes is rather cryptic. It's not clear to me

if in Little Butch he's referring to his sister or perhaps to the baby, which

may have died.

Essentially, we're left to wonder.

Now, Babs' final flourish of showmanship is having Hardy Albright ask the

audience to show their appreciation to the theater management with a round of

applause.

And I hope you've enjoyed listening to this commentary on Mom and Dad,

the most successful sex hygiene feature of all time. If you have enjoyed it,

please give your DVD player a round of applause.

Thanks.