Sex and Buttered Popcorn (1989)

Posted on Apr 10, 2002 under Documentary, Exploitation |

Written and directed by Sam Harrison
Hosted by Ned Beatty
Produced by Kit Parker and Sam Harrison

I can see that a survey of cheapo exploitation flicks would be a nifty idea for a compilation/documentary. Certainly, it’s a better choice than sitting through the almost thirty films from which the clips were taken. But whose idea was it to have the thing hosted by our on-screen narrator Ned Beatty? With his bowtie, his goofy smile, and his all-too-energetic demeanor, Beatty looks suspiciously as if he weren’t being paid — he looks, in essence, like an eager customer for the films being featured. I’m not saying he’s anything more than a performer giving his employer his money’s worth, but it’s more than a trifle unsettling to see big teddy bear Ned Beatty chortling away over tawdry sex.

But enough about that. This is, as you may have gathered, a survey of the exploitation films that flourished roughly from the 1920s to the 1950s, back during what one may term the “Golden Age” — with the relaxing of obscenity laws thereafter, honest-to-goodness porn eclipsed the titillating fare of the roadshow promoters.

Ah, the apex of silent cinema, when image alone could tell a story…

Accompanied by some genial and informative commentary from interviewees David Friedman and Dan Sonney, we take a quick look at the earliest “skin flicks,” which really relied almost as much on the novelty of motion picture technology itself as the material being presented. But it didn’t take long before the “shocking” fully-clothed belly-dancing of Fatima (1893) led to simple “woman undressing” reels (1910), to full-fledged stories of exotic women seducing stalwart American men, leaving their wives to bare their all in order to regain their affections. Forbidden Daughters (1927) is the example of the latter extensively shown, and it’s especially interesting in that it demonstrates that even before the advent of talkies, women were apparently shaving their, uh, “intimate areas” for the camera’s benefit.

The honest exploitation genre didn’t really take off, though, until dialogue was added. Not that the dialogue was any great shakes, nor were its deliverers; even more so that today, skin flicks weren’t the preferred path to the top for aspiring thespians. As Beatty points out, few of these movies could even be compared favorably to the more legitimate “B-movies” produced during that period. But what they lacked in quality, they made up for in chutzpah, hawking their wares with sensationalistic ad campaigns that are still legendary today.

Beatty enumerates four distinct categories of subject matter of these films, exemplified liberally with clips: anti-social traditions (polygamy or child marriage), anti-social behavior (usually illicit substance abuse), promiscuous behavior, and sexual ignorance. With subject matter like that, the titles fairly screamed for attention: Assassin of Youth, Child Bride, Sex Maniac, Gambling With Souls… Often, several titles were applied to a single movie in succession, since it was a lot cheaper to change a title than to shoot a whole ‘nother movie.

“Grampa, what did YOU do for a living?”

You’ll notice an attitude of shock and outrage implicit in the titles. That’s not by accident; during this heyday, most of these movies presented their subject matter in the form of a cautionary tale, allowing them to spin an edifiying or even educational facade onto topics and footage that would otherwise have gotten them run out of time on a rail. I’m sure it also assuaged the consciences of audience members who could solemnly murmur, “Deplorable!” with drool running down their chins.

Using Mom and Dad (1944), producer Kroger Babb’s insanely successful “hygiene” film as a template (interspersed, again, with plenty of other clips), we get the standard format of these socially-conscious exploitation flicks:

- A prologue, often accompanied by a screen crawl, emphasizing the educational nature of the following depiction.

- The introduction of the evil element (usually a shady guy with drugs or a wandering eye).

Children! Do NOT take candy from this man!

- The exposure of the designated Innocent, usually but not always a naive girl, to the evil element. (Of course there’s an Innocent to be corrupted; it wouldn’t be nearly so shocking if the Corrupt came to a well-deserved end, would it?)

- The entrapment of the Innocent, be it through addiction or whatever. (In Mom and Dad, it’s actually a fairly skillful scene — relatively speaking — in which the naive waif realizes that it’s been over a month since she had her last period; could she be pregnant?)

- The fault-finding. After all, it couldn’t be truly cautionary if the movie didn’t point out whose fault the whole mess is, and pretty directly. Overwhelmingly, it’s the parents of the kids in trouble who’re found at fault, either through their bad example or their unwillingness to educate their children to inoculate them from those worldly temptations. In the case of Mom and Dad, the film actually stops at this point, to let hygiene commentator Elliot Forbes, who accompanied the print on its exhibitions, stand live in front of the audience to explain how the entire mess resulted from ignorance of “hygiene” (we call it “sex” nowadays) and to hawk his his ‘n’ hers sex manuals to responsible parents and their eager-to-learn offspring. (Given the, ah, delicate nature of the subject under discussion, screenings were completely gender-segregated. You mean this isn’t a date movie?) From the fact that Friedman could still deliver Forbes’ spiel from memory in his interview, I kinda want to assume that he played the role of the hygiene commentator at least a few times, though they don’t come right out and say it.

I know about the “beast with two backs,” but this one’s beyond my experience.

- Consequences/just desserts. Again, it couldn’t very well be a cautionary tale without dire consequences — deaths, lives shattered, prison sentences, etc. According to these movies, marijuana could and usually would lead to incurable insanity, and there were always handguns being wrestled for until they went off in the wrong direction. Sometimes, as in Mom and Dad, the “worst possible fate” is averted; in this case, the girl in trouble has a miscarriage, thus sparing her and her family the eternal shame of unwed motherhood. In other cases, well, Ol’ Sparky spelled the end.

- The epilogue. Delivered by an onscreen narrator or commentator, or even by cast members who turned directly to the camera, this was the final stab at education: This could happen to you. Given the fact that these sombre morals were usually given out by those playing authority figures, coupled with the heavy-handed nature of the dialogue itself, these segments often come across much like Kriswell’s parting shot in Plan 9 From Outer Space.

For a finale, after all this, we learn about the “square-up” reel — a racier short subject used to “square up” with an audience that felt that it hadn’t gotten its money’s worth of tawdriness. Often these might be older, silent skin flicks like Hollywood Script Girl or the aforementioned Forbidden Daughters, or maybe a pseudo-documentary on nudism — technically not a sexually-oriented film, but everyone knew what everyone was looking at. (I’m thinking that the inclusion of this footage here amounted to a square-up reel for this video itself.)

Nudist fencing. And here I sit, with more punchlines than I could ever use…

Alas, once laws on explicit material loosened up enough, this kind of teasing exhibition fell by the wayside; aficionados no longer lined up to see Dance Hall Racket once Debbie Does Dallas was available. In many ways, we have come full circle to the early nudie flicks which simply put it out there for all to see, without the need for embellishment and anticipation, for titillation or teasing. One might be able to argue that these films, as base as their production motivations may have been, fulfilled a real need in their educational pretenses, satisfying the curiosity of those who honestly were denied that education in the fairly repressed mainstream society. On the other hand, if that were true, one would expect to see a reduction of sexually-oriented films in a society that is more open and forward with sexuality, as ours has become since those days; but the growth of the porn/erotica industry has paralleled that openness, not been diminished by it. But hell, I’ve already thought too much this week, so I’ll just drop the whole argument and let someone else hammer it out.

Probably the greatest value of this documentary is the comprehensiveness of the survey provided. Exploitation films valued originality or uniqueness even less than Hollywood output did or does; by watching Sex and Buttered Popcorn, one can educate oneself on the entire genre without sitting through dozens of bad films. After all, if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen pretty much all of them.

A Notable Quotable:

(chosen from literally dozens of howlers)

“Oh, you American mothers! With your rich parties and beauty shops and your silly flirtations! Wasting your lives and neglecting your duties! Letting your children run wild for lack of sensible parental supervision!”