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"Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!"
A History of Exploitation Films, 1919â"1959
By Eric Schaefer Duke University Press
Copyright © 1999 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9596-6
CHAPTER 1
"An Attempt to 'Commercialize Vice'"
Origins of the Exploitation Film
The entire motion picture industry has recently come in for severe criticism on account of such so-called health films as Fit to Win and The End of the Road, with which the recognized producers had nothing to do. One young girl, after attending a public presentation of one of these, said, "I never want to see another movie!" —Photoplay magazine, 1919
Exploitation films are usually thought of as ethically dubious, industrially marginal, and aesthetically bankrupt. That they emerged from the mainstream industry, indeed, that their origins can be traced to respectable films made with the alleged "good intentions" of decreasing human suffering, is another paradox surrounding exploitation. But progressivism, the movement that gave birth to these films and was then instrumental in suppressing them, was itself filled with paradoxes. Progressivism was not a coherent ideology but a series of political, economic, and social reform movements that flourished in the early twentieth century. Some progressives were strictly concerned with the welfare of farmers and the agricultural sector. Some attempted to curtail the power of industry through "trust busting"; others looked to industry for management solutions with which to cure some social ills. Some progressives favored reinvigorating political energies of the people through populism; others sought to empower a new class of technocratic experts. Some attempted to improve the lot of newly arrived immigrants to America's cities; others hoped to keep them out. Arthur S. Link and Richard L. McCormick note that "different reformers sometimes favored the same measure for distinctive, even opposite, reasons. Progressivism could be understood only in the light of these shifting coalitions." What the progressives did share was a concern over the consequences of industrialism, an interventionist stance, and a Protestant moralism that could be justified through scientific disciplines such as statistics, sociology, and psychology. The progressives "made the first efforts to grapple with the ills of a modern urban-industrial society."
The cycle of white slave films that appeared in the early teens can be seen as precursors to the development of exploitation films. These films about the supposed traffic in white slavery—the buying and selling of girls and women for the purposes of prostitution—were the result of progressive anxiety over industrialization and the growth of the cities. They foreshadowed exploitation films in their promise of titillation, their professed educational mission, their topicality, and their construction of a social Other—the prostitute, in this instance. To locate the origin of exploitation films, we must look to another series of motion pictures spawned by progressive reform: the sex hygiene film. In the course of just five years, the sex hygiene film moved from being relatively common and accepted to being the scourge of the young movie industry. Censorship efforts directed at hygiene films not only excised the subject from the mainstream but served to create a separate industry that began to make films on topics that Hollywood would no longer approach. As a result of censorship, the exploitation film emerged as a distinct class of motion picture, existing alongside the classical Hollywood cinema from the late teens to the late fifties.
To understand the controversy that surrounded and resulted in the suppression of sex hygiene films, it is necessary to examine the social evaluation of venereal diseases and their treatments in the years prior to World War I. Medical progress throughout the nineteenth century had increased physicians' knowledge about the systemic threat of syphilis and the seriousness of gonorrhea. Yet the diseases were also attended by a social stigma that led many physicians to adopt the attitude that patients who suffered from the maladies were only receiving their due for moral transgressions. In his social history of venereal disease, Allan M. Brandt states, "Because of misunderstandings of the pathology of the disease, as well as a desire to avoid the moral opprobrium attached to venereal infection, physicians often ascribed deaths due to syphilis to other causes." Prince A. Morrow, the progressive physician who led the fight against venereal diseases at the turn of the century, claimed in 1901 that from 5 to 18 percent of all men carried syphilitic infections.
Such efforts to call attention to and combat venereal diseases were certainly designed to decrease pain and death. However, the attention to sexually transmitted diseases accorded by Morrow and other progressive physicians stemmed not so much from the desire for accuracy in recording a cause of death as from fears that venereal diseases were among the major reasons for declining birthrates among the middle class, a phenomenon labeled "race suicide." As Brandt notes, "Morrow's view demonstrated the wide-spread medical concern about the declining size of the white, middle-class family and provided a means for members of the profession to join the debate about the future of domesticity." The gravity that progressive physicians attached to the potential decline of the white, middle-class family is also related to an attendant fear of the lower classes. Brandt elaborates:
The substantial professional interest and popular anxiety that extra-genital infections generated ... reflected concern about changes in American society during the late nineteenth century, particularly the heterogeneity and unhygienic nature of the burgeoning cities. Innocent infections promoted apprehension of the city, the working class, and the new immigrant populations, ultimately encouraging racism, and nativism. Progressive unease about hygiene, contagion, and cleanliness were evoked in the belief that in the brief contacts of everyday life—at the grocery, in the park, at the barber shop—these infections, originally obtained in "immoral" circumstances, could be passed to native, middle-class "moral" Americans. ... Venereal diseases had become, preeminently, a disease of the "other," be it the other race, the other class, the other ethnic group.
Brandt's contention that underlying concerns about sexual diseases were phobias of contamination by nondominant social groups is confirmed by period hygiene books and articles.
In a 1921 booklet, The Control of Sex Infections, J. Bayard Clark laid much of the blame for the spread of VD on modern industry and the working class. Clark wrote that professional prostitutes were not the largest source of the diseases because they knew how to stay free from infection. Instead, he pointed to working girls from shops and factories, servants, "and those who idle at home" as responsible for almost three-quarters of recorded infections. "This is doubly unfortunate," Clark wrote, "as these girls not yet cut off from self-respecting sources of support still carry the hope of husbands and homes. Let us now move backward, as it were, and see if we can tell where the responsibility rests for this group of infected and oftentimes sexually ruined industrial workers who ignorantly spread the majority of sexual havoc to all classes of society." Clark identified industrialism, which put young women to work while in "the flower of maternal possibility," as the source of the spread of venereal diseases. And he located in the working class the conduit that carried "the social evil" from the lower classes to the middle and upper classes.
In a similar vein, a paper delivered at the National Conference of Social Work in 1919 by Edgar Sydenstricker of the U.S. Public Health Service quoted statistics showing 5.5 percent of white army cadets "'representative of the better class of young men found in our colleges'" suffered from venereal disease, as compared to 16 percent or more of recruits "regarded as representative of 'mechanics, artisans, and untrained laborers.'" Sydenstricker suggested that those in the lower economic strata were faced with conditions that led to "increasing sexual excitement and ... lowering self-restraint." He continued: "There hardly will be any disagreement on the general observation that among the economically less favored group of our population these conditions are far more pronounced than among the well-to-do. These influences arise not only from the conditions which directly stimulate sexual activity but also from the conditions of living. The lack of healthful recreation and avocational opportunities, the monotony of daily life and work, the brevity of formal education—these factors which may be considered just as seriously as the more direct and positive forces that lower the standard of morality and tend towards vulgarity and grossness of thought." Whether because of social conditions or "direct and positive forces that lower the standard of morality," the upper and middle classes had located the source of venereal disease in the lower classes.
The fullest expression of this class doctrine can be found in the ideology underlying the pseudoscience known as eugenics. The eugenics movement was an attempt to combat "race suicide" by encouraging the "fit" white, Anglo-Saxon, middle and upper classes to have large families and "better babies" while attempting to reduce the growth of the "unfit" lower classes through means ranging from immigration restriction to sterilization. The threats posed to the status and power of the bourgeoisie by immigrants and the lower classes drew financial support for the eugenics movement from many bankers and businessmen. Writing about the movement, Thomas M. Shapiro notes that "by focusing on both class and racial challenges, the propertied class simultaneously united on the basis of class consolidation and segmented the working class along race and ethnic lines." He suggests that eugenics gradually spread from the upper classes throughout society to become the pervasive ideology, nurturing attitudes of "racism, superiority, and outright hatred among the American people—all in the name of science." Discourses on venereal disease and eugenics were so tightly intertwined as often to be inseparable.
The problems of venereal disease were exacerbated by what came to be known as the "conspiracy of silence." Although physicians spoke of venereal diseases among themselves, little information was available to the society at large. In 1906 Edward Bok, editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, published a series of articles on VD. His effort resulted in the loss of seventy-five thousand subscriptions. As Morrow claimed in 1906, "Social sentiment holds that it is a greater violation of the properties of life publicly to mention venereal disease than privately to contract it." The same sentiment was echoed fifteen years later by Clark as he spoke about "a subject which polite society has seemingly not cared to meet face on." Ironically, the conspiracy of silence prevented the lower classes, who were identified as the cause of venereal diseases, from receiving medical and preventive information about them. As Brandt notes, Margaret Sanger's pamphlet, What Every Girl Should Know, was confiscated by the U.S. Post Office in 1912 because its references to syphilis and gonorrhea were considered obscene under the Comstock Law. Although the "conspiracy of silence" was relieved somewhat in 1909 when Paul Erlich developed a viable treatment for syphilis, the heartening information about prophylactic measures was counterbalanced by moralists who claimed that dissemination of the knowledge would encourage sexual promiscuity.
Science offered new hope for sufferers of syphilis, but this was militated by old moral interdictions as issues of class and sexuality kept tensions high. It was in this highly charged atmosphere that the first play to attack directly the problem of venereal disease was produced in the United States. Some novels had obliquely referred to venereal disease, and Ibsen's Ghosts, with its references to Osvald's "hereditary illness," had been produced in America as early as 1882. But it was Eugene Brieux's Damaged Goods that pulled back the veil of secrecy that cloaked venereal disease and spoke the word syphilis on stage for the first time. In 1913 Brieux's play was staged in New York City, produced under the auspices of the Medical Review of Reviews to stave off possible public protest. The drama told the story of a young man who contracts syphilis. He marries to collect a dowry despite the protests of his physician, eventually infecting his wife and baby. Lacking much dramatic action, the play was often described as a "preachment" or "medical sermon." Its staid tone and the sponsorship of the Medical Review of Reviews combined to keep opposition to a minimum.
Damaged Goods was endorsed by many in New York society, who engaged boxes for the initial "special" performance. In a feature story, the New York Times said that the play had been given "the approval of many of our leading men and women" and that a special performance had been arranged for President Woodrow Wilson and the Congress in Washington, D.C. Most reviews of the production rhetorically asked if the stage were the proper place for the discussion of venereal disease yet concluded that Brieux's play served a useful purpose. A review from Hearst's Magazine is representative: "I would wish to take a young boy or girl of mine to see this play. If they could get harm out of it, I confess I do not understand how.... This play puts the horrible truth in so living a way, with such clean, artistic force, that the mind is impressed as it could possibly be impressed in no other manner." A New York Times editorial conceded the good that could come from dramatic treatment of "subjects generally considered too delicate for common conversation," but concluded, "It invariably causes harm, too, by its appeal to the merely curious and morbid minds." Nevertheless, the conspiracy of silence had been broken and venereal diseases became legitimate subject matter for drama. "Damaged Goods," writes Brandt, "became a symbol of a new sexual openness."
It was only a short time before Damaged Goods and its star and driving force, Richard Bennett, made the transition from the stage to the screen. Scenarist Harry Pollard expanded Brieux's chamber play for the American Film Manufacturing Company, and the film was released by Mutual in late 1914. In a letter to the New York Times in 1952, Terry Ramsaye described the movie as a prestige production, claiming that it was "pretentiously made, for that day, at a cost, including promotional expenses, of less than $50,000, and its states' rights ... sold for $600,000, thus indicating a boxoffice take of probably more than $2,000,000." Ramsaye claimed that the production required special promotion and commanded higher ticket prices. Reviewers for the industry trade magazines seemed to be caught up in a progressive fervor when they discussed the film. Variety's reviewer urged, "See Damaged Goods, and after seeing it, tell your son or daughter to see it, and let them tell other boys and girls, and you tell other fathers and mothers, until all the world has seen Damaged Goods on the picture screen." The Moving Picture World found the film "free from taint which inheres in most of the 'sex problem plays.' It does not parade evil in order that good may come of it."
What was being praised? For one thing, the reviews took special note of the social status of the protagonist. George Dupont was described as "a young man of excellent home," a lawyer by profession, who is set to marry "a prominent society belle." George gets syphilis from a "street walker." Annette Kuhn notes that "VD propaganda films ... construct sexually active women as the principal cause of venereal infection"; it is also important to note the low social station of those women and how the disease is visited upon those of the upper classes. The social dynamics established in Damaged Goods, and repeated in most other hygiene films of the period, illustrate Brandt's claim that venereal disease was seen as a malady of the Other inflicted on the bourgeoisie.
Sander L. Gilman has described the Other as that onto which we project our anxieties, externalizing our loss of control. The Other is not random, nor is it isolated from historical context. He suggests that when a group makes demands on a society, "the status anxiety produced by those demands characteristically translates into a sense of loss of control. Thus a group that has been marginally visible can suddenly become the definition of the Other." Gilman goes on to describe how difference, in a variety of guises, threatens order and control: "This mental representation of difference is but the projection of the tension between control and its loss present within each individual in every group. The tension produces an anxiety that is given shape as the Other. The Other is protean because of its source, the conflicts within the individual as articulated in the vocabulary of the group. Qualities of the Other readily form patterns with little or no relationship to any external reality." Industrial workers, immigrants, and blacks from the South were moving to America's great cities in tremendous numbers in the 1910s. At times, these groups made specific demands regarding working and living conditions; at other times, they appeared to require special treatment to be socialized or broken of "bad" habits or traditions. Such demands, or the perception of demands, led to a sense of loss of control over the reproduction of a class and a way of life, resulting in the middle and upper-middle classes projecting their fears on groups with lower status.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from "Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!" by Eric Schaefer. Copyright © 1999 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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