One of the posters used to advertise Mom and Dad, a "sex hygiene" film. Movie theaters today have many screens, but mostly one use. With the exception of dinner-and-a-movie set ups, movie houses --that define themselves as such — don’t generally serve a second purpose. How is it then, that back when most theaters had only one screen, they served their communities in multiple ways? They were babysitting services, places to collect free dish ware, or play bingo, and where you went to watch (not just listen to) the news. Even in 1976, the twilight of the single screen era, while I was briefly a co-manager of a 2,672-seat palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, we were a community gathering place. The movie palaces were built to play that role, which is to say they were not unlike medieval cathedrals, the centers of their communities. In just one year under the St. George’s dome, we managed to present the premier of a local magician — then only a teenager, a grad student who specialized in Flamenco guitar, and even a one-day evangelical traveling church, complete with shills who threw down their crutches and miraculously walked to the stage to receive God’s grace. A few graduations, children’s theater (The Paper Bag Players), the young Chaka Khan, a fallen-from-grace Sly Stone: all these things we offered up for local consumption. We dreamed of opening a restaurant in the basement, something which actually might have made money. But one community service we never provided, that 1940’s theaters apparently did offer on occasion, was sex education.
No, I’m not referring to self-help sex ed: like the direct physical instruction in the dark some of us got, while dating, or tips from the screen itself, after the Hayes Code (censorship) went south in the sixties. At the drive-in, I personally learned a thing or two, watching my best friend’s mother, a divorcee, fight off her boyfriend Harvey, an ex-rodeo cowboy, in the front seat. But that’s not the kind of public service I’m talking about theaters offering.
A friend and fellow blogger, Clifford Browder, recently drew my attention to formal sex ed (in those bygone days, “Sex Hygiene”) offered in a small town near where he lived in Illinois, at a local movie theater, when he was still in high school. Here’s Clifford, with a few of my own comments thrown in:
Clifford: When I was a junior in high school in Evanston, Illinois, way back in 1945, we suddenly heard of a movie about sex being shown in Wilmette, the next suburb to the north, with a talk by "Elliot Forbes of the radio," whom we'd never heard of.
VH: In 1965, I attended “Senior Health” on the third floor of my high school in Cincinnati, a class not offered a generation earlier. I envy Clifford; how glamorous to get educated in a movie theater! Popcorn might have made those slides of fallopian tubes a lot more entertaining...
Clifford: [The presentation] was being shown to audiences, segregated by sex. Of course we guys all flocked there, and waited in line while the girls came streaming out.
VH: Imagine what the boys said to each other while watching the girls emerge, or forget about that, just picture the eye-flashes of the bolder girls, the blushes of some shy ones. We were segregated by sex too, but, as I recall, nobody watched anybody streaming out of room 334.
Clifford: Forbes [the lecturer] meant it to be instructional and kept the ribaldry of the kids in check.
VH: Confining teens to theater seats when sex is the bill of fare? That kind of crowd control really impresses me!
Clifford: There was a movie about a likable girl who got pregnant...Also...a film showing victims of advanced VD displaying their diseased organs.
VH: I just stopped envying Clifford’s education. STD on the same screen where, maybe a month before, you might have seen A weekend at the Waldorf, State Fair or The Bells of St. Mary’s? And if you’re gonna show me diseased organs forget about the popcorn.
Clifford: But then the Wilmette authorities closed the show down, claiming that Forbes had used some risqué language. This I doubt. I think they were yielding to howls of protest from local outraged moralists. Too bad. The only official sex ed I was ever exposed to before college.
VH: The Wilmette authorities could well have been reading the fine print of the Hayes Code, which considered the mere mention of many things “perverse”, including venereal disease.
Clifford: Thanks to the Internet, I've learned that the sex film in question was Mom and Dad, made in 1944. It played all over the country and grossed millions. And there wasn't just one "Eliot Forbes of the radio" but maybe 35, lecturing simultaneously...
Mom and Dad was the brainchild of exploitation filmmaker Kroger Babb, who marketed his projects using a “medicine show” model. The movie has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant," despite (because?) it was condemned in 1945 by the National Legion of Decency Yes, that Legion of Decency, those fine folks who brought Hollywood the Hayes Code.
* * *
Afterthought: I love Clifford’s image of multiple Elliot Forbeses. Wasn’t Forbes in some rough way, a little like Betty Crocker? She was a definite fiction, portrayed by various actresses. But what about Elliot? Had he been real once? Apparently, he was not the only actor present at each performance; in theaters where the movie ran, two women also posed as “nurses”...No business like show business!
Afterthought 2: The movie was, apparently, shot in only 6 days, but grossed a hundred million dollars over 23 years! Not bad.
Thanks to Clifford for his insights and for this blog post inspiration!
No, I’m not referring to self-help sex ed: like the direct physical instruction in the dark some of us got, while dating, or tips from the screen itself, after the Hayes Code (censorship) went south in the sixties. At the drive-in, I personally learned a thing or two, watching my best friend’s mother, a divorcee, fight off her boyfriend Harvey, an ex-rodeo cowboy, in the front seat. But that’s not the kind of public service I’m talking about theaters offering.
A friend and fellow blogger, Clifford Browder, recently drew my attention to formal sex ed (in those bygone days, “Sex Hygiene”) offered in a small town near where he lived in Illinois, at a local movie theater, when he was still in high school. Here’s Clifford, with a few of my own comments thrown in:
Clifford: When I was a junior in high school in Evanston, Illinois, way back in 1945, we suddenly heard of a movie about sex being shown in Wilmette, the next suburb to the north, with a talk by "Elliot Forbes of the radio," whom we'd never heard of.
VH: In 1965, I attended “Senior Health” on the third floor of my high school in Cincinnati, a class not offered a generation earlier. I envy Clifford; how glamorous to get educated in a movie theater! Popcorn might have made those slides of fallopian tubes a lot more entertaining...
Clifford: [The presentation] was being shown to audiences, segregated by sex. Of course we guys all flocked there, and waited in line while the girls came streaming out.
VH: Imagine what the boys said to each other while watching the girls emerge, or forget about that, just picture the eye-flashes of the bolder girls, the blushes of some shy ones. We were segregated by sex too, but, as I recall, nobody watched anybody streaming out of room 334.
Clifford: Forbes [the lecturer] meant it to be instructional and kept the ribaldry of the kids in check.
VH: Confining teens to theater seats when sex is the bill of fare? That kind of crowd control really impresses me!
Clifford: There was a movie about a likable girl who got pregnant...Also...a film showing victims of advanced VD displaying their diseased organs.
VH: I just stopped envying Clifford’s education. STD on the same screen where, maybe a month before, you might have seen A weekend at the Waldorf, State Fair or The Bells of St. Mary’s? And if you’re gonna show me diseased organs forget about the popcorn.
Clifford: But then the Wilmette authorities closed the show down, claiming that Forbes had used some risqué language. This I doubt. I think they were yielding to howls of protest from local outraged moralists. Too bad. The only official sex ed I was ever exposed to before college.
VH: The Wilmette authorities could well have been reading the fine print of the Hayes Code, which considered the mere mention of many things “perverse”, including venereal disease.
Clifford: Thanks to the Internet, I've learned that the sex film in question was Mom and Dad, made in 1944. It played all over the country and grossed millions. And there wasn't just one "Eliot Forbes of the radio" but maybe 35, lecturing simultaneously...
Mom and Dad was the brainchild of exploitation filmmaker Kroger Babb, who marketed his projects using a “medicine show” model. The movie has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant," despite (because?) it was condemned in 1945 by the National Legion of Decency Yes, that Legion of Decency, those fine folks who brought Hollywood the Hayes Code.
* * *
Afterthought: I love Clifford’s image of multiple Elliot Forbeses. Wasn’t Forbes in some rough way, a little like Betty Crocker? She was a definite fiction, portrayed by various actresses. But what about Elliot? Had he been real once? Apparently, he was not the only actor present at each performance; in theaters where the movie ran, two women also posed as “nurses”...No business like show business!
Afterthought 2: The movie was, apparently, shot in only 6 days, but grossed a hundred million dollars over 23 years! Not bad.
Thanks to Clifford for his insights and for this blog post inspiration!
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