329 - "Pretty Baby" - A Film Critique

"Pretty Baby" - A Film Critique
By Freda A. Gardner and Hugh T. Kerr

Pretty Baby, produced and directed by Louis Malle, story by Polly Platt, music by Jerry Wexler, starring Keith Carradine, Susan Sarandon, Antonio Fargas, and Brooke Shields, Paramount Pictures Corporation, 1978, two hours running time. There is also a Bantam paperback edition by William Harrison and a soundtrack album on ABC records and GRT tapes. The film is based on the illustrated history by Al Rose, Storyville, New Orleans (University of Alabama Press, 1974, pp. 225, $12.95).

THE highly acclaimed film Pretty Baby provokes disturbing questions, but are mostly left unexplored, and the film fails, we think, as a serious visual statement of important moral issues. Critics have lavished extravagant praise on Pretty Baby, declaring that the film is "a perfectly beautiful movie" (Judith Christ), "a labor of love and art" (Liz Smith), "elegant, ironic, and poignant" (Jack Kroll), "penetrating and beautiful" (Norma McLain Stoop), "the most extraordinary film so far this year" (Walter Spencer), "the most imaginative, most intelligent, and most original film of the year" (Vincent Canby).

The names behind the screening certainly promise something special: the well-known French director, Louis Malle; the former Bergman photographer, Sven Nyvist; the talented actors and especially the twelve-year old Brooke Shields who is "adult" in both senses of the word. And the story, set in the red-light district of New Orleans, seems a natural for our sexually insatiable age. There is ample historical and illustrative documentation for this unique social experiment, the only legalized area of prostitution in America, that flourished (if that is the word) from 1898 to 1917, nearly twenty years. Much of the chronicle, in official papers, interviews, and pictures, is available in Al Rose's "authentic" account (curiously unacknowledged in the film's initial credits).

The story has to do with the inhabitants and habituées of a gaudy "sporting house," Nell, the madam (Frances Faye), a dozen "girls," a deaf senator, a tottering old man in full evening dress, various paying customers, a jazz piano player (Antonio Fargas), a photographer (Keith Carradine), a retinue of servants (mostly black), and several illegitimate children wandering around, including "Violet" (Brooke

Freda A. Gardner is Associate Professor of Christian Education, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Hugh T. Kerr is the Editor of THEOLOGY TODAY.

330 - "Pretty Baby" - A Film Critique

Shields), the daughter of a hardened professional (Susan Sarandon) who sometimes calls herself "Hattie" and at other times "Hildegarde" and who refers to her daughter as her "sister." Everything tends to focus on Violet who grows up within this unusual household with equanimity, composure, and eager expectation of the time when she, too, can become a professional.

Since sex is the subject, it may seem prudish these days to raise objections to the film. But we are not disturbed so much by the visual story, which incidentally is remarkably free of explicit scenes or language, as by the failure of the film to deal realistically, subtly, or even incidentally with the very issues implied. We note three such issues.

(1) Pretty Baby poses a dozen perplexing moral ambiguities but deals with them only superficially, if at all. What, for example, do we make of commercial sex, the (sexual) exploitation of women and children, pornography, bestiality, venereal disease, illegitimacy, voodoo magic spells, homosexuality, rape, racial (sexual) segregation, and political corruption that feeds on community vice of all kinds?

We think these and related questions should be dealt with in a film that presumably undertakes to provoke the issues in the first place, and we find irresponsible and misleading those critics and reviewers who call the picture "beautiful," "poetic," and "intelligent." We can't claim to know much about pornography, but it seems to us that in many ways it could be more honest than a film such as Pretty Baby. Pornography may be vulgar and vile, but it doesn't pretend to be artistic.

(2) What we see of Violet (Brooke Shields) in the picture also disturbs us. She is clearly a beautiful young girl, but behind the pretty face is an enigma. She shows no curiosity or intelligence about her environment, she is a clone of her mother (also the daughter of a prostitute), and she destroys everything she touches (photographic glass plates, silver nitrate bottles, the little black boy whom she tries to molest, and finally, the photographer himself). She is the victim of her social conditioning, but we can't sympathize with her because she loves her life and can't conceive of anything different or better. Illiterate and fatherless, she is poised on a life-course that is almost certain to go from tragedy to disaster.

A product of socialization, Violet adopts the values, language, style, and the hopes and fears of those around her. She seems as ready to be auctioned off as the "choicest morsel New Orleans has to offer" as a middle- or upper-class contemporary debutante or "first-junior-prom" attender who wants to get on with life. She is impatient with adults who would "teach her the ropes," responding with the age-old cry of the well-socialized adolescent, "Don't tell me what I already know."

The real obscenity in the film is the seduction of Violet's childhood, with the consequence that she is neither youngster nor adolescent. She can "mother" her baby brother (Will) because her mother is herself a

331 - "Pretty Baby" - A Film Critique

pouting, petulant child, but when Bellocq, the photographer, takes her in (and buys her a cloth doll to pose for a picture), she can drop the brother as easily as the mother can leave both of them.

The Hattie-Violet (mother-daughter) relationship in the film is unreal and unbelievable. Is it possible that Hattie "nails" a paving contractor from St. Louis, leaves her past behind her, attains social respectability overnight, and returns to claim her daughter so she can be educated and brought up according to conventional standards of morality? Hattie is as much of a wind-up doll as Violet, and what possible future family life could compete with the intricate, intimate tapestry woven over the years at the "house"?

The tune "Pretty Baby," written by Tony Jackson of New Orleans in 1916, accompanies words that are all too profound, such as your cunning little dimples and your baby stare-Your baby talk and baby walk and curly hair-Your baby smile makes life worthwhile-You're just as sweet as you can be . . ." Another tune played more than once in the film by the jazz piano player is "Moonlight Bay" (composed by Percy Wenrich in 1912). The mood of this old placebo is caught in the refrain-"We were sailing along . . ." Still another song, by Stephen Foster, "Beautiful Dreamer," encourages us to think that "Sounds of the rude world heard in the day-Lull'd by the moonlight have all pass'd away"! (The jazz, by the way, is something less than foot-stomping. With Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, and Scott Joplin to draw on, as well as dozens of others, Pretty Baby couldn't even get on the program of today's Preservation Hall.) But if the jazz comes through a French horn, it fits the vapid Violet, and her mother, perfectly.

(3) How does Pretty Baby rate as authentic history? Rather well-with one or two significant exceptions. The basis for the film, as already mentioned, is Al Rose's documented and illustrated Storyville, New Orleans (1974), which apparently few of the reviewers bothered to read and, curiously, the book goes unannounced either in the screen version or in the Bantam text edition by William Harrison. Polly Platt, who is credited with the story and screenplay, seems to have lifted most of her material from Rose's book. (In academic and literary circles, that is known, bluntly, as plagiarism.)

Some of the historical realities depicted in the film: (a) there was indeed an officially tolerated red-light district of several square blocks in the city of New Orleans, just north of the French quarter (Vieux Carré), from 1898 to 1917; city alderman Sidney Story pushed the ordinance through, and the district became known as Storyville (much to his chagrin-he hated jazz and loathed the district); (b) the houses of prostitution, both great and small, turned an estimated profit of $15 million a year (as Rose suggests, the cash found its way "into the stockings of the prostitutes, the cassocks of the clergymen who owned whorehouse property, the pockets of the politicians and policemen, and the swelling bank accounts of the landlords"); (c) some of the names in

332 - "Pretty Baby" - A Film Critique

the film belonged to actual people, such as Josie, Hattie, Frieda, Violet, and (Papa) Ernest Bellocq, the photographer (but unlike Keith Carradine, who plays the part, Rose describes the original Bellocq as "a little man who walked like a duck and had a voice that squeaked-a grotesque hydrocephalic"); (d) and a dozen incidental similarities, for example, a voodoo woman with magic spells (goat testicles for gonorrhea, wasp blood for syphilis), a backyard pony (also used for "circus" exhibitions), a madam who kept her piano tuned, a virgin auction, attic births of "trick" babies, marred photo plates (in real life by Bellocq's brother, a Catholic priest), posed portraits on a wicker chaise, a shooting, a "Russian baroness," mother and daughter teams working together (maybe as many as 50 such), a finger-nail of cocaine, racial segregation of houses, and the official closing of the district in 1917 (by order of Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the Navy, and Newton D. Baker, Secretary of War).

With so much fascinating detail, two significant omissions in the film seem all the more glaring. In the first place, there are virtually no scenes of the wonderful, bustling city of New Orleans or of the Mississippi River and its busy traffic. (There is one river swimming party, but it looks more like Frog Hollow Creek than the massive Mississippi; maybe that's what we should expect from a French director and a Swedish photographer-what would they know of the mighty "Father of Waters"?)

But much more importantly, the film-as in its title-prettifies everything and in the process ignores the ugly obverse side of commercial sex and vice. Here Rose's book is instructive as the historical realities are shocking and more melodramatic than the static film sequences. "The vice areas," be writes, "remained disgusting, festering sores . . . , rodent and insect ridden, sanitation free" (the film shows us a single frame of a rat that catches the passing attention of the very young children). "The gutters were open sewers, filled with the contents of chamberpots and garbage cans … Inside plumbing was rare and knowledge of the relationship between dirt and disease was not widespread … Only the strongest-stomached and most lustful of males could have found its products attractive."

Most of the well-known madams (Josie Arlington, Lulu White, Emma Johnson, "Countess" Willie V. Piazza) were rapacious, uncaring exploiters of their human merchandise, and Lulu White (a black who passed as an octoroon) Rose describes as "a monstrosity" with her wigs and her diamonds. Some of Bellocq's portraits suggest that at least a few of the prostitutes were young and attractive. But others were known by such endearing names as "Bird Leg Nora," "Gold Tooth Gussie," and "Big Butt Annie."

While a few of the houses pretended to elaborate decoration and plush furniture, dozens of so-called "cribs" lined the streets where self-employed prostitutes could hire a single bunk by the hour and ply their trade for fifty cents and often for as little as a nickel.

Worst of all were the mounting number of pathetic cases of prosti-

333 - "Pretty Baby" - A Film Critique

tutes and their clients who got "sick" (venereal disease). They not only infected each other with gonorrhea (gleet, clap, little casino), but the grim effects of syphilis (the rales) could be passed on to future generations. Dr. Paul Ehrlich's "silver bullet" against syphilis, 606," became available in 1916 but too late for Storyville, and the discovery of penicillin was still decades in the future. In the meantime, quack cures were sold widely but to no effect, and the victims of the "shadow-plague," as Rose notes, "walked the streets of New Orleans and the other great cities, living corpses, eyelids drooping in early paralysis, hands and body shaking with a palsy not caused by old age." (In contrast to Pretty Baby, the recent TV-made movie, Scott Joplin, shows the anguish, guilt, and early fatality of the musician and his unsuccessful bout with syphilis; his baby dies in infancy, his wife leaves, his fingers will no longer ripple over the keys.)

Can Pretty Baby with all its flaws still suggest anything meaningful for readers of a theological journal ? Maybe.

(1) Many of our theologians and religious writers these days are talking about story and narrative as promising ways to get at religious truth. But the film, which certainly tries to tell a story, can warn us that not all stories are automatically edifying.

(2)There is a difference between story and parable. All parables are stories, but not all stories are parables. A parable can remain simply on the story level, but the parables of Jesus, for example, are endlessly fascinating not only because they are stories but because they can be interpreted on many different, symbolic levels. Pretty Baby, by contrast, is a one-dimensional story and not much else.

(3) The two most interesting characters in the film are the piano player and the photographer. They somehow stay aloof from their squalid surroundings, are immersed in their "art," and look with disdain on what is happening in their midst. It would be provocative to say that (as with the Good Samaritan) the only "redeeming social value" in the film is provided by the least likely possibility (a black jazz player and a homosexual photographer). But that won't jell. Was the piano "Professor" aloof because he loathed what he saw around him, or because he knew, as a black, that he couldn't touch even these women? And Bellocq, the photographer, who says to Hattie's husband when they come to take Violet away, "I can't live without her," does he mean he's in love with this little girl or that she's the child he will never have? The piano player and the photographer play counterpoint to the life that revolves around them, but neither is able to do much about anything. They are ineffectual and pathetic.

(4)No one in the film is in any sense alive. No one really cares for anyone else; everyone has very low self-esteem; the one-big-happy family is composed of disparate individualists who sell love but don't

334 - "Pretty Baby" - A Film Critique

know how to love. Even Nell in her final scene, as "the district" closes, burning paper money over a candle, can't any longer conceive of her income as a method or means for a different or fuller life. With all the pretensions of opulence and moral liberation, life in the "house" is denigrating, demeaning, and depressing. It's not Storyville ; it's Endsville.

(5) When "the district" was closed in 1917, according to Rose, things became much worse in New Orleans. What had been localized now spread, uncontrollably, over the whole city. That's an interesting social-moral possiblity worth exploring, but the film ends before suggesting any evaluation of this legalized experiment in human relations.

A still more disturbing social-moral possibility is the word of Jesus that "harlots go into the kingdom of God before you" (Matt. 21:31; and among those mentioned in Matthew's genealogy of Jesus is Tamar-a sexually exploited woman if ever there was one). But in Pretty Baby we are so busy looking at Violet, savoring the good times everyone is supposed to enjoy, and distancing ourselves from a remote time and place-that the Evangelist's dialectic never so much as surfaces. With so much to work with, it's a pity the film comes up with so little.

But we're glad to note that some of the more localized reviewers of Pretty Baby do not share the enthusiasm of their more prestigious critics. Colin L. Westerbeck, Jr., who writes for the Catholic journal Commonweal, says that Pretty Baby

attempts to replace the old myth that all whores are miserable and selfdespising with a new myth that they live indolent, carefree, enjoyable lives. They're happy hookers all. Since the two myths are equally dehumanizing, it's hard to say which is the more pernicious.
-Commonweal, April 28,1978, p. 275.

Neil Campeas, who writes film criticism for the Princeton Spectrum, a free, advertising weekly, heads a devastating review of Pretty Baby with the title "Pretty Boring." And that's our opinion.