Eyes Wide Shut

As Eric Schaefer reminds us, and as fading memory confirms, exploitation films of the classic era always began with what was known in the trade as a “square-up.” This was a self-congratulatory prologue, usually spoken by an actor garbed as a doctor, minister or law enforcement official, in which the social problem addressed by the movie (venereal disease, white slavery, doping) was identified, its dangerous prevalence described and the pious hope expressed that if one young man or woman was spared being enmeshed in its toils, the producers would feel they had not labored in vain. Dues to conventional morality thus paid, the orgy of primitive narrative, dim photography, surreal editing, hopeless acting and (if the local censor board had nodded or been otherwise subverted) a few glimpses of T & A could then spool in whatever shady venue the producer had persuaded to book his epic.

It is the singular (and highly instructive) achievement of Eric Schaefer that he has produced a basically good-humored, highly tolerant, historically alert “square-up” for this whole lost, sad, generally risible genre. You emerge from “ ‘Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!’ ” not so much with your respect for the exploiters enhanced but with a heightened sense that in an era when the mainstream movie industry was blanketed by a censorship ludicrous in its detailed prissiness and imposed by a fanatical minority that claimed (without much backup evidence) to be speaking for a somewhat larger minority (the Catholic Church), they performed a useful function. That is to say, their films, crudely made for the crassest of motives, actually addressed certain issues--mainly sexual--of legitimate concern to their audience about which the big studio movies--the popular culture, in general--were obliged to be silent or, at best, to evade.

Schaefer correctly defines his topic narrowly. He is not talking about hard-core stag reels, which were never intended for general consumption. Nor is he discussing poverty-row B pictures, which were made under economic constraints similar to those of the exploitation movies but which shared the bland moral assumptions of the big studio features. His subject is, rather, those pictures made independently on budgets rarely exceeding $25,000 and distributed outside the usual studio channels. It was a tough business, in part because the exploitation producer had dozens of state and local censorship boards (many of which made tidy profits from the fees they charged for examining a film) chopping away at his movies in part because the major theater chains, controlled by the studios, forced him to book the more marginal houses in part because he always had to promise more, in the course of his ballyhoo, than he could possibly deliver. The decision to attend an exploitation movie always represented the triumph of often-dashed hopes over cynically laughed-off experience.

This was a demimonde dominated by guys whose emotional, if not actual, roots were in carnivals, side shows and cheap melodramas--the same low business places where early movies were also rooted, a fact that denied them, as “common shows,” their 1st Amendment rights until they were belatedly granted by the Supreme Court in “The Miracle” case of 1952. These hard-bitten characters knew how to “exploit” a hot topic and get out of town with some bucks in their pockets but with their bridges unburned, so they could return in a year with another racy title.

Yet, as Schaefer makes clear, the attitudes expressed by the majority of their movies were far from transgressive. The business began in the teens of the century with a group of films--alarming and increasingly graphic--about the perils of VD. These were at first welcomed in the better circles, especially during World War I, as useful and instructive. After the war, however, they were increasingly condemned, in part because their illustrations of the diseases’ ravages grew increasingly yucky, largely because any reference to sex in popular culture (unless cute and redeemable, like Anita Loos’ “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”) made people uncomfortable.

But these early films established the narrative pattern that most exploitation films, no matter what their subject, followed. Typically, there was an innocent who was born to be seduced, a vile figure eager to oblige (often with fatal results), an authority figure crusading knowledgeably and passionately against the vice in question and, often enough, a quack, whose false information often greased the skid toward tragedy.

How simple these little morality plays were--nothing in them to bring a blush to a maiden’s cheek--except, perhaps, the occasional glimpse of a toothsome lass in her scanties. And, of course, the obvious requirement that compromising situations be endured if they were to make their educative point. But one is inclined to accept Schaefer’s view that some of these films--particularly the “sex hygiene” films--actually did some social good. It is hard, from today’s perspective, to imagine how difficult it was, just 50 or 60 years ago, to obtain reliable information on birth control or the birth process. A sense of how desperate people were for enlightenment may be gained from the fact that an all-female audience actually rioted in Cleveland in 1932 when the cops denied them the live square-up (a fake doctor lecturing about sex, doubtless with “nurses”--a standard exploitation ploy--to minister to the faint of heart) at a screening of the perfectly respectable Garbo silent, “The Joyless Street.”

Schaefer observes that the exploitation business always owed something to old-fashioned political progressivism and its belief that free and open discussion of any social problem was the largest and most basic step in curing it. But he also, even more forcefully, notes that in practice, these films served a conservative ideology. They tended to make the point that the victims of disease or vice ceased to lead useful economic lives, either as producers or as consumers. They also appealed to the strong nativist streak in American life; their heavies of choice were usually foreigners. Some of the films, indeed, were overtly racist, notably those in the “exotic” subgenre, in which the fecklessness (and licentiousness) of jungle dwellers was often stressed.

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Most important, these films were powerfully class-bound in their attitudes. The “others” they portrayed--prostitutes, for example, or dope addicts who constitute their human mise en scene--helping to lure their middle-class protagonists to disaster were nearly always of the lower orders, and the morality they universally endorsed was abstinence--no if, ands or buts about it. Schaefer points out, for example, that the anti-drug films of the late ‘30s helped freeze the discussion of pot in the dubious place it remains today, as the official entry-level drug, leading inevitably to harder addictions.

This being so, why were exploitation films so consistently attacked, so determinedly marginalized? Partly because their production values were always so ludicrously tacky, which made them hard to defend in polite society. Partly because their middle-class victims discomfited nice people, who preferred sunny ignorance to the dark thought that they, too, were at risk in life. But mostly, Schaefer argues, the problem lay with the Motion Picture Producers Assn., which began to seriously enforce its rigid production code in 1934. It was largely the creation of a frenzied moralist named Martin Quigley, a trade paper publisher and prominent Catholic layman. He held the remarkable theory that movies must be only “entertainment” and that anything that took up serious issues was “improper material for a theater screen,” as one of his publications remarked in reviewing something called “Damaged Goods.” He didn’t entirely mean that. A studio could gingerly undertake controversial topics (for instance, anti-lynching dramas like “Fury” or “They Won’t Forget” when Quigley was at the height of his influence), though in fact, the mainstream was much freer in its choice of subjects and franker in discussing them (see, for example, “Baby Face” or “Heroes for Sale”) before to 1934. After that, no one seeking a seal of approval from the production code administration could get one--and occasionally the exploiteers tried--for something dealing forthrightly with any aspect of the sexual transaction.

The chief means by which Quigley’s keepers of the seal enforced their sour will were two: They had close ties to the Catholic Legion of Decency with its ever-present threat to boycott offending films. More important, though, was studio control of the major theater chains; they simply forced them not to play exploitation films. When the studios surrendered their theaters in the anti-trust consent decree of 1948, it was a major blow to censorship. So, too, were changing postwar mores. Everything from the Kinsey Report to Elia Kazan’s public fight for his director’s cut of “A Streetcar Named Desire” to the successful exhibition of unapproved foreign titles helped number the days of the code administration. The exploiters now found their best topics co-opted by the studios, their worst excesses expanded by the pornographers.

The fact remains, however, that censorship is still enforced by the producers’ ratings board, albeit with more trade-offs allowed, and that the remnants of American Puritanism, its banner now carried by Protestant Fundamentalism, remains alarmingly vocal. But those are matters beyond Schaefer’s purview. He has told the largely lost story of “classic” exploitation films and their enemies very well on the whole. You can’t really blame an academic for making too long a parade out of his research or his lapse into gaga gender study jargon in his section on burlesque films, the stars of which look you boldly in the eye as they strip, daring you to discover redeeming social value in their nakedness. One must set against these minor lapses his refusal to turn his sympathy for the exploiters into hero worship, his cool assessments of their powerful tormentors and, above all, his determination to link their products to larger historical trends and issues. This is an important book, not merely as a study in a forgotten realm of film history but as well-grounded social history, too.*