Biblio Watchdog
BOLD! DARING! SHOCKING! TRUE! A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959 By Eric Schaefer
Duke University Press, Box 90660, Durham NC 27708-0660, 474pp, $21.95 (trade paper)
TO HEAR Eric Schaefer tell it, exploi- I tation filmmaking, which became an indus­
t r ió lo itself between the time of the First World War and the more permissive Vietnam era, was not truly born until it had first been condemned. America’s postwar transformation from an agrar­ ian, product-based culture to one more urban and consumer-oriented was speeded along by a suc­ cession of reform movements known collectively as Progressivism. With the increase in rural mi­ gration and foreign immigration to the cities, con­ cerns for the welfare of America’s burgeoning middle class prompted a slew of sobersided films revealing the dark side of modernization. The VD drama DAMAGED GOODS (1914), based a popu­ lar 1913 stage play, spawned such imitators as THE SPREADING OF EVIL (1918) and OPEN YOUR EYES (1919, the first film produced by the Warner brothers). While these staid chamber dra­ mas were widely lauded, later films depicting the unpleasant physical side effects of gonorrhea and syphilis mobilized legislators to suppress their exhibition. “Censorship,” Schaefer writes, “which was itself born out of progressive concerns, was marshaled against films that were made to bring about the progressive reform.” The question of cultural self-representation lies
at the heart of Schaefer’s impressive BOLD! DAR­ ING! SHOCKING! TRUE!: A HISTORY OF EXPLOITA­ TION FILMS, 1919-1959. With America emerging as a world power and Hollywood courting respect­ ability by shucking its sideshow origins, produc­ ers and distributors of so-called exploitation films reveled in rubbing unsavory topics in the face of a nation “fueled by moral panic.” What upset the censors who banned sex hygiene films was not so much the close-ups of bodies ravaged by ve­ nereal disease but rather the advocacy of pro­ phylaxis over abstinence as a mode of prevention.
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The times they were a-changing, and the guard­ ians of class and culture feared the middle class was leaving itself vulnerable to a veritable revolu­ tion from below in the form of venereal disease, premarital sex, miscegenation, alcoholism and a predilection for vice. The inherent contradiction of a society attempting to modernize by turning its back on a complicated present to embrace an idealized and largely invented past is the true story of BOLD! DARING! SHOCKING! TRUE! with exploita­ tion filmmaking providing the deus ex machina to reveal the rat caught in the cogs.
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