Bold! Daring! Shocking! True by Eric Schaefer

We get a lot of the vulgar Marxist analysis and male-feminist solicitude that dogs American film scholarship. Respectable critical terms are summoned ('disassembling the canon') and influential thinkers are invoked, often indigestibly. A dose of tabloid-style hypocrisy would be injected: 'timeliness or expose', 'veracity', 'pedagogic appeal'.Īll good sport, but what Schaefer proposes here is nothing less than 'a history of American attitudes about pleasure and desire'.

The ideal 'exploiter-pic' might concern an innocent virgin, seduced into the striptease game, then murdered. Schaefer reads exploitation as a 'cinema of attractions', sensationally exhibitionist rather than narrative driven. Like snake-oil salesmen, the hucksters had to keep an eye on local law enforcement and public morals, but ticket-buyers still lined up. The films were either toured about or franchised from state to state. These anti-venereal pictures were toe-curlingly explicit and when ambitious producers spurned them for more tasteful fare, the exploiters grasped the nettle. In the absence of 'production values', they offered forbidden fruit, inspired by the 'sex hygiene' genre that sprung up with America's entry into the first world war. The films they cranked out were fast, cheap and inept. Between 19, various hucksters sought to make a buck on the fringes of the film business, and found a niche by operating outside Hollywood's self-regulating production code, which sought to ensure 'respectable' entertainment for the aspirant middle class. Extensively footnoted, with three appendices and a 14-page bibliography, it begs the question of what really constitutes 'research' in the field of film studies. This feels like a postgraduate thesis blown up to book length.

It is not surprising that the study of cinema has long had a sociological bent and, accordingly, that bad films are widely seen to be as worthy of attention as good ones.Įric Schaefer acknowledges the comedy of this situation ('Maybe I am just crazy.') in his introduction to this study of early American 'exploitation' movies. There is something about photographing stories acted out in pre-arranged places that betrays an era. Motion pictures cannot help but speak for their times.

Bold! Daring! Shocking! True by Eric Schaefer