GROSS/36 1945 - sex, dread, money
Fake health education for anxious teens
Gross is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.
MOM AND DAD, WILLIAM BEAUDINE, KROGER BABB, HYGIENIC PRODUCTIONS, 1945, 97 MINUTES. HARDIE ALBRIGHT, LOIS AUSTIN
So I said last time that this impossibly bad film was the top-grossing movie of 1945. My sources disagree, though, and, to be honest, I reckon the biggest film of that year was probably The Bells of Saint Mary’s, sequel to 1944’s Bing Crosby vehicle Going My Way (reviewed here a couple of weeks ago). Looks like Bells made $21M domestically - a staggering sum for a film released in the last year of the war. A gigantic hit.
This terrible movie, this almost unwatchable movie - a movie that none of you should be expected to watch (I mean, please don’t) - was probably the number two movie in that year. But it was also an enormous hit, and a kind of grass-roots smash that caught fire town by town across the USA, thanks largely to a cheeky, Barnum-style marketing effort that involved church notice boards, leaflets delivered door-to-door, lurid stories placed in local papers and a kind of hysterical school-gate and bar-room word-of-mouth effort we’d probably call ‘going viral’. Read the excellent Wikipedia entry for the details, it’s fascinating.
Virality
And the reason it went viral? Well, I suppose I ought to tell you what it’s about. I’m going to keep this short.
The storyline is a Hays-era B-movie (C-movie?) staple. Young woman from respectable, middle-class family falls for local boy but he enlists in the Air Force and is almost immediately killed. Grief etc. But the twist here - the miserable, exploitive twist that gets the movie past the censors - is a pseudo-educational element that’s presented as a bold, convention-busting necessity, vital information that young people and their parents alike must have, if they are to avoid shame, sickness and, you know, death.
So, interleaved with the standard-issue, suburban melodrama that would barely have made an impression in ordinary circumstances, is a sequence of sanctimonious classroom scenes and discussions and, later on, prurient medical footage of childbirth and of people suffering from various venereal diseases, including syphilis. The premise is that conservative school boards and old-fashioned parents are keeping vital knowledge about ‘hygiene’ from young people. There’s some straightforward information here - about menstruation and childbirth, for instance - and the filmmakers’ claim is that they’re boldly taking on the task of properly informing teens about the risks they face.
The boys are coming home
In the background is wartime panic in the military hierarchy about VD. Millions of young men are deployed all around the world - thousands of troops are out of action at any one time, recuperating from various venereal diseases. Antibiotic treatments are only just becoming available, for most there’s no treatment at all. And with the war coming to an end these young men, worldly and war-weary and horny, are about to come home.
The movie’s promoter, a brilliant showman-marketer called Kroger Babb, made a career from this kind of low-rent exercise - and not just in film. If there was money in it he was there. He’s not a courageous campaigner, though. He’s a county fair huckster, essentially an inventive con-artist. He’s not a filmmaker, either. He’s in film for the same reason the home shopping barons got into TV. It’s an enormously powerful new route to market, what sales people call a ‘channel’ (Babb’s production company is called Hygienic Productions).
Cinema health
I’ve made an honest effort to find some correspondences here, as I usually do - with movies from other periods and genres - also other plagues and afflictions. The schmaltzy liberal anxiety narratives of the AIDS crisis are probably here in some way. The various paranoid plague dramas coming out of the Covid years too. The steady stream of heart-rending polio and TB melodramas from before those diseases were curable, maybe. But I can’t put much energy into these comparisons.
Mom and Dad is not an interesting film. It’s barely a film at all. It’s a bad-faith exercise, a worthless, mean-spirited money-spinner. Its claimed merits are all bogus. It’s making me weary just writing about it. It’s been preserved in the Library of Congress and I know why they do that sort of thing but really I’d rather they’d tossed it into a volcano. Avoid.
If you insist, you may watch Mom and Dad on YouTube.
If you to want to know what kind of movie the other big hit of 1945 is you could do worse than reading my post about Going My Way.
This film foreshadows in a pretty powerful way the emergence of the teenager as a social group and as a force in the culture. We will certainly meet more teenagers in subsequent years.
My two sources for the big hits of each year disagree about 1945. The Numbers gives me The Bells of St Mary’s and Filmsite Mom and Dad.