This film provided one of my most interesting viewing experiences during 2009. It was a fairly hard to find acquisition, and one for which I'd been searching for several years. I reviewed the movie in one of my other film groups, but I don't think I ever posted it here. So here are my remarks, for your intended edification and amusement.
I've got another pair of exploitation films lined up to watch sometime in the near future (Street Corner, She Shoulda Said No). Of course I've already seen many of the drug-and-sex dramas made by Dwain Esper and others in the early 1930s, all of which seemed far more exploitative than Mom and Dad, which actually put forth a relevant argument despite its shoddy production values. Has anyone else seen any other enjoyable/interesting exploitation films from the same era?This motion picture, condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency in its heyday, is itself the Holy Father of all poverty row exploitation classics, one that auteurs such as John Waters still value to this day. Directed by William Beaudine and produced and promoted by showman Kroger Babb, this potboiler cleaned up at the box office during the 1940s. It was rereleased around the world throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Its fame and scope of influence were such that it was added to the National Film Registry in 2005. You can read more about the history of the film here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mom_and_Dad
The story’s fairly straightforward, and likely nothing you haven’t already seen in other exploitation tales of woe, only the wildly inconsistent tone of this melodrama makes it seem even campier than the lesser-known fare from the same era or their spawn, the ABC Afterschool Special. It's the story of all-American, cheerful, sickeningly swell teenager Joan Blake (June Carlson). She has a sensible father (George Eldredge) and a kind though slightly nerdy brother (Jimmy Clark), but her mother Sarah (stone-cold Lois Austin) assumes the moral superiority of Phyllis Schlafly and exercises the forbearance of Joan Crawford. Sarah can't watch a group of strangers having drinks while seated on a train without threatening to tell her local equivalent of Focus on the Family and force the poor partiers to wear scarlet letters for the rest of their natural lives.
If any form of pleasure is exhibited, report to us and it will be prohibited.
And if you think Sarah's riled about these crazy kids, you don't want to know what she thinks of kindly progressive teacher Carl Blackburn (Hardie Albright) and his newfangled ideas about teaching "hygiene" in high school. Rather, Sarah wants her little Joanie to grow up ignorant of sinful sex til marriage (when, we assume, she would give her the appropriate advice on how to close her eyes and think of Uncle Sam).
But Sarah's whimsical carnality-free world comes crashing down when hot young stud Jack Griffith (Bob Lowell, who for those of you MST3K fans was the star of I Accuse My Parents) struts into town. He sweeps Joan off her feet and before long, Joan's sneaking out for an evening alone with Jack. Pretty soon, Jack gets Joan "in trouble." Rather than disgrace her family with the news of her pregnancy and deny her mother the pleasure of crusading, a hysterical Joan tries to handle the problem herself.
They were well over 17, and they were fully dressed.
Uh-oh.
The eventual fallout from Joan's problem eventually forces the school board to reconsider its policies concerning no sex ed in schools, and as a result Mr. Blackburn finally gets that course in hygiene that he's been begging for. And so do the viewers. Through the last 20 or so minutes of the film, we're treated to both the boys' and the girls' lectures, which one is left to assume was what sold tickets back in 1945. Girls get films about ovulation and pregnancy (here's where, as the film promises, we see "the actual birth of a baby!") while the boys are treated to scare films about gonorrhea and syphilis.
While the treatment of the subject matter is like something out of camp heaven (e.g., at the beginning the audience is asked to rise and sing the national anthem), I nevertheless found myself in agreement with many of the film's claims. For instance, it's absolutely spot-on with its indictment of parents' lack of spine when it comes to teaching kids about sex, and that sex ed/ "hygiene" courses do fill an important function (a claim that must've seemed daring in 1945) despite the constant criticism of conservatives.
A word of warning: Any attempt to play a drinking game with this film's use of the word "swell" may prove fatal.
