Towards a New Theory of Film Criticism, Part Three
3. The Rise of Exploitative and Demeaning Films and Kroger Babb’s “Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl!”:
What does it mean to exploit or demean another human being?
If you have never seen one of the films of Ingmar Bergman, then you have missed out on one of the greatest artists in the history of cinema. The cumulative power of Bergman’s greatest films has to be experienced in order to be understood. No mere description can suffice. And yet, despite the talent, creativity, and imagination of the greatest film directors in the history of film, one of the most embarrassing stories in film history is regarding how Ingmar Bergman was introduced to the United States.
In retrospect, the story is one of clashing cultural values, with the unsavory and sordid values exhibited being the American ones. In 1953, Bergman directed what is often considered to be his first masterpiece, Summer with Monika, a romantic tragedy consisting of high caliber acting, beautiful cinematography shot around the Stockholm archipelago, innovative camera work, and a rather intense realism. But, when film distribution rights were allegedly transferred to an American production company, Bergman’s ninety-six minute Summer with Monika did not open in American theaters.
Instead, in 1955 it ended up in the hands of an American film director named Kroger Babb. Babb was not satisfied with the story and themes of Bergman’s film, which he thought to be too slow and dull. In fact, Babb was not interested in a story at all. What he was interested in was the fact that he had his hands on a “foreign” film and that the film had a nude scene that lasted for a few seconds. Babb was sure that he could use this in order to make money from American consumers. Thus, Babb decided to make some changes to Bergman’s film. These changes may serve us as an illustration of replacing imagination with fantasy.
First, Babb recut the film from ninety-six to approximately sixty minutes. Second, he dubbed it in English with a rewritten (rather than translated) and dumbed down script, using American voiceovers for increasingly stupid dialogue, making the characters say phrases like “Gosh!” “Gee!” and “Nuts!” Third, Babb spliced the already recut film with “stock footage” nude scenes that did not have anything to do with the story or the main characters in order to “sex it up.” Fourth, Babb considered the haunting and melancholy score by composer and violinist Erik Nordgren to not be “upbeat” enough, so he replaced it with a fast-paced jazz score by B-movie studio composer Les Baxter. Fifth, Babb changed the title to something more interesting for the American audience he had in mind, so Summer with Monika became Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl. Finally, Babb began an advertising campaign for the American audience with lurid yellow posters and slogans like “She’s 19 – and Naughty but Nice!,” “No Man Could Ever Hope to Satisfy Her Lust for Love!,” “So Daring We Recommend a Babysitter!,” “She’s Here!” and “Sweden’s Answer to Marilyn Monroe!”
Then, what happened to Bergman’s film became standard practice for the release of other foreign films for theatrical distribution in the United States. Dubbing, replaced soundtrack, adding nude scenes that were not in the original film, and lurid advertising all served to release what were originally intended to be serious films as, what began in America to be called “sexploitation” films. Thanks to this kind of treatment, as film historian Tino Balio writes, “Bergman initially attracted attention in the United States because his pictures were Swedish, which was synonymous with soft porn in the exploitation market.” Four more of Bergman’s films were recut, dubbed and given changed and rather unpleasant titles. While the ads for Story of a Bad Girl contained notices like “Title Song and Musical Score by Les Baxter,” Bergman’s name was nowhere to be found on any of the advertisements. When the film was released in Los Angeles, two of the distributors were arrested for “selling a lewd and indecent film” and prints of the film were confiscated by the police for violating decency laws.
Babb’s Story of a Bad Girl was not interested in telling a story. It was not interested in film as an art form. It was not interested in respecting the actress, Harriet Andersson or her talent as an actress. It was not interested even in respecting the copyright or property rights of Ingmar Bergman and his company, Svensk Filmindustri. Everything about its marketing, production and release was designed to titillate, sensationalize and make money off the American theater audience.
Kroger Babb himself was already notorious as a sort of exploitation snakeoil salesman when it came to making, producing and selling movies that were designed to shock the audience and to sensationalize what was otherwise considered to be in bad taste. While promoting his “sexual hygiene” film, Mom and Dad (1945) to local theaters or county censors, he would show them one cut of the film with less explicit content and then show the more graphic cut of the film to the audiences in the theater. He made no pretense about his purpose as anything other than to make money. “Perhaps Hallmark has never had a fine motion picture,” Babb remarked, “yet it has never distributed an attraction that wasn’t thoroughly exploited, bringing exhibitors millions of extra dollars.”
In summary, thanks to Kroger Babb and a populace willing to buy the movie tickets, Bergman’s Summer with Monika became the American “exploitation” film, Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl. America’s introduction to Bergman was an introduction that avoided everything about Bergman’s storytelling and filmmaking craft that give his films any value.
Perhaps the rise of “exploitation” films in the United States, as pioneered by filmmakers like Babb, ought to tell us something about our culture today. As film historian Eric Schaefer writes, the primary subject of “exploitation” films was always “a ‘forbidden’ topic. The major exploitation topics included sex and sex hygiene, prostitution and vice, drug use, nudity, and any other subject considered at the time to be in bad taste. The forbiddenness of a subject could best be gauged by the mainstream industry’s prohibition of certain topics through self-regulatory mechanisms such as … the Production Code, as well as censorship on state and local levels.” While perhaps one explanation for the emergence of these films could be that they were to the Hays Code what moonshine and bathtub gin were to alcohol Prohibition, the comparison does not explain fully explain their content. Bergman’s Summer with Monika would not have passed the Hays Code, but neither did it pass Babb’s ideas of the sufficiently lurid, sensational, and shocking. It was too artistic, too serious for what an exploitation film needed to appeal to in order to sell.
The producers of these films were not interested in making serious films. Their goal was to find something or anything that would be considered sensational or taboo and then sell it. Unlike American drinking after the demise of the Prohibition, “exploitation” films grew more and more popular in the sixties and seventies with the demise of the Hays Code. The number of different exploitation film subgenres that developed is astonishing and they increasingly gained in lucrative box office success. While Schaefer tries to argue that “exploitation” films could be distinguished from pornography, he admits that they played in the same seedy theaters and both “exploitation” films and pornography would converge by the 1960s.
The result, over the next two decades and more, would be a long list of different categories, including: “sexploitation” (films gratuitously showing extra sex and nudity, often with scenes indistinguishable from pornography like The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959), Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965), Emmanuelle (1974) or even Showgirls (1995)); “blaxploitation” (films marketed to African-Americans, often centered on violent or sexual mistreatment based on race, like Shaft (1971), Black Mama, White Mama (1972) and Foxy Brown (1974)); “cannibal films” (sensationalizing graphic and gory scenes of sex and cannibalism like Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and Eaten Alive! (1980)); “Nazisploitation” (films focusing on the Nazis graphically torturing prisoners in concentration camps, like Love Camp 7 (1969) and Illsa, She Wolf of the SS (1974); “rape & revenge” films (using the camera to slowly display the rape and/or murder of women, and then more graphic violence usually taken in revenge against the rapists, like The Last House on the Left (1972) and I Spit on Your Grave (1978)); “slasher” films (incredibly popular, focusing on a serial killer who hunts, stalks, captures and murders a series of victims in increasingly creative and graphic ways like Jack the Ripper (1959), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th (1980), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and Scream (1996)); “splatter” films (a subgenre to be distinguished from “slasher” films, increasingly focusing on the blood and gore of violent death with even less concern for a narrative, like Jigoku (1960), Blood Feast (1963), Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978)); and “women in prison” films (devoted to sensationalizing sadistic physical and sexual abuse of women prisoners like Women’s Prison (1955), Women in Cages (1971), The Big Doll House (1971) and Barbed Wire Dolls (1975)).
But while the theaters showing exploitation films began to close in the 1980s, the question is whether these types of films continued to be produced and sold. Arguably, with the end of the Grindhouse theaters, exploitation films just moved into the mainstream. The sensationalism, the exploitation and commodification of sex, the lurid advertisements and marketing, the appeal to the fantasies of the viewer – all the characteristics of Story of a Bad Girl which made it an “exploitation” film are now common characteristic of popular Hollywood blockbusters. An entire collection of film critics and historians, Eric Schaefer, Jeffrey Sconce and Paul Watson among them, have commented on how exploitation films are now considered “cool” or “retro” and are being sold re-released on DVD. As Jeffrey Sconce writes: “On the DVD market, meanwhile, a proliferating number of companies scavenge through abandoned theater attics and drive-in closets for the most obscure, degraded, and unusual films of the past century, responding to an ever growing audience of ‘trashophiles’. For better or worse, the entire oeuvre of Doris Wishman is now available on DVD while John Ford’s is not.” What used to be considered “exploitation” films have now just been replaced by mainstream Hollywood releases. Ian Conrich, for instance, has written how, once “exploitation” films were no longer given the forum of drive-in and grindhouse theaters, mainstream films, like the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise continued the tradition of the “exploitation” genre. As Watson writes:
Exploitation – the embodiment of tastelessness – is now itself, paradoxically, part of the dominant taste, and its processes and discourses have become integral even to cinema’s most official and mainstream manifestations … [T]he significance of exploitation cinema now lies precisely in its proximity to the present capital-intensive patterns of film production. That is, if the concept of exploitation film can be translated into the present at all, it is as a framework for discussing the production and marketing strategies of the most mainstream manifestation of cinema – Hollywood.
In his book, Teenagers And Teenpics: Juvenilization Of American Movies, film historian Thomas Doherty claims that American “movies [now] cater primarily to one segment of the entertainment audience: teenagers.” In fact, “[w]ithout the support of the teenage audience, few theatrical movies break even, fewer still become hits, and none become blockbusters.” This is a serious claim to make, particularly since Doherty further claims that this appealing to adolescent tastes and fantasies became dominant in Hollywood over sixty years ago. He writes that the “courtship of the teenage audience began in earnest in 1955,” the year Babb’s Story of a Bad Girl was released, and the resulting “shift in marketing strategy and production initiated a progressive ‘juvenilization’ of film content and the film audience that is today the operative reality of the American motion picture business.” Thinking about this in terms of juvenile versus adult values, it is not revelatory to say that growing up means learning how to control impulsive behavior, learning how to make decisions rationally instead of by fancy and in acting with consideration of your responsibilities and commitments to others. Maturity is not always glamorous or fun. Often it means doing unpleasant work or spending time tolerating less than ideal circumstances out of the constraints of responsibility. The question is – which set of values do today’s films glamorize? Disciplining one’s passions and impulses or the pleasure of giving in to one’s impulses? The value of long term commitment or the glamor of the romantic liberties of the self who overcomes restrictions and constraints?
Honestly, it does not take very much creativity to exploit the breaking of some social or moral taboo. Do that and the mere breaking of the cultural norm becomes the film’s selling point. This further explains why fantasy and exploitation films are formulaic and repeat the same narratives over and over again. As Doherty writes, the elements of these films all conformed to the same routine standard elements. “As a production strategy, the 1950s exploitation formula typically had three elements: (1) controversial, bizarre, or timely subject matter amenable to wild promotion (‘exploitation’ potential in its original sense); (2) a substandard budget; and (3) a teenage audience.” If making a film like this resulted in lucrative box office success, there was no reason to differ from the formula. “Together these three elements … remain characteristic of any exploitation movie, whether the scandalous material is aimed at ‘adults’ (‘sexploitation’), African Americans (‘blaxploitation’), or gorehounds (‘axploitation’).” That different permutations of these elements have evolved and expanded into other genres over the years may be granted. In fact, the time may have come where movie producers have learned that using an exorbitant budget with increased technological proficiency and special effects can actually result in higher profits than using a substandard budget. But the marketing of most Hollywood box-office hits still seems to be aimed at an increasingly juvenilized audience – an audience of viewers who enjoy appeals to their fantasies of discarding adult responsibility, impulse control and moral commitment.
In direct and stark contrast to Kroger Babb, who boasted of the money-making of his films, Ingmar Bergman said “I have probably resisted the temptation to make money more often than I have yielded to it. But there were times when I did yield completely, and I have inevitably lived to regret it.” These are the words of a filmmaker with different motives and different ends. Exploring these ends opens up a whole new vast and imaginative cinematic world that often remains closed to the majority of film viewers. However, it is a world that offers an alternative to the increasingly exploitative, sensationalist and money-grubbing, carbon-copy reduplications that Hollywood is increasingly giving us.
References:
– Bergman, Ingmar. Images: My Life in Film. pg. 85
– Conrich, Ian. “Seducing the Subject: Freddy Krueger, Popular Culture and the Nightmare on Elm Street Films.” Trash Aesthetics: Popular Culture and Its Audience. pgs. 118-131
– Craig, Rob. Gutter Auteur: The Films of Andy Milligan. pg. 57
– Doherty, Thomas. Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s. pg. 1
– Balio, Tino. The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946-1973. pg. 131
– Macnab, Geoffrey. Ingmar Bergman: The Life and Films of the Last Great European Director. pgs. 80-81
– McGee, Mark Thomas. Beyond Ballyhoo: Motion Picture Promotion and Gimmicks. pg. 21
– Schaefer, Eric. Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A History of Exploitation Films. pg. 5
– Sconce, Jeffrey. Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics. pg. 2
– Watson, Paul. “There’s No Accounting for Taste: Exploitation Cinema and the Limits of Film Theory.” Trash Aesthetics: Popular Culture and Its Audience. pg. 80
