Louis Malle directed Pretty Baby, an erotic historical drama, starring Brooke Shields, Keith Carradine, and Susan Sarandon.
Grade: B
The screenplay, written by Polly Platt, focuses on young prostitute of age 12 in the red-light district of New Orleans circa 1917.
The film’s title is inspired by Tony Jackson’s song “Pretty Baby,” which is used in the soundtrack.
Although the film was mostly praised by critics, it caused significant controversy due to its depiction of child prostitution and the nude scenes of Brooke Shields, who was 12 years old at the time.
In 1917, during the last leg of legal prostitution in Storyville, the red-light district of New Orleans, Louisiana, Hattie is a prostitute working at an elegant brothel run by the elderly, cocaine-sniffing Madame Nell.
Hattie has given birth to baby boy and has a 12-year-old daughter, Violet, who lives in the house.
When photographer Ernest Bellocq arrives, Hattie and Violet are the only people awake. He asks to be allowed to take photos of the women, to which Madame Nell agrees only after he offers to pay.
Bellocq becomes a fixture in the brothel, photographing the prostitutes, mostly Hattie. His activities fascinate Violet, realizing he’s falling in love with her mother, which makes her jealous.
Violet is a restless child, frustrated by the long, precise process Bellocq must go through to compose and take pictures.
Nell decides that Violet is old enough to lose her virginity in an auction. After bidding war among regulars, Violet is bought by an apparently quiet customer.
Hattie, aspirin to escape prostitution, marries a customer and leaves for St. Louis without her daughter, whom her husband believes to be her sister. Hattie promises to return once she’s settled and broken the news to the spouse.
Violet runs away after being punished for hijinks. She then asks Bellocq if he will sleep with her and take care of her. He initially says no, but then he takes her in. In many ways, their bond resembles that between a parent and child, with Bellocq standing in for Violet’s absent mother. Bellocq buys Violet a doll, telling her that “every child should have a doll.”
Bellocq is entranced by Violet’s beauty and youth, but she gets frustrated by his devotion to his photography and lack of care for her.
Violet eventually returns to Nell’s after quarreling with Bellocq, but social reform groups are forcing the brothels to close.
Bellocq arrives to wed Violet, but two weeks after the wedding, Hattie and her husband arrive from St. Louis to collect Violet, claiming that her marriage is illegal without their consent.
Upon hearing that Violet does want to go with them, he lets her leave, realizing the benefits of schooling and more conventional lifestyle.
Controversy
After her acclaimed Oscar-nominated performance as child prostitute in Taxi Driver (1976), the studio wished to cast Jodie Foster as Violet. However, Malle thought the role should be played by a 12-year-old only, and Foster was already 14.
Brooke Shields maintains that it was no big deal to shoot her nude scenes. “I did not experience any distress or humiliation,” she writes. What she does remember was trying not to look as if “I’d just sucked on a lemon” before her on-screen kiss with Keith Carradine, who was 29 (“Keith was so kind,” she writes) and being soundly slapped–on-screen and for real– by Susan Sarandon.
Pretty Baby received R rating in the US, X rating in UK (18 following a change to the ratings system), and an R18+ rating in Australia, for nudity and sexual content.
Gossip columnist Rona Barrett called the film “child pornography,” and director Malle as “combination of Lolita’s Humbert Humbert and (by that point) controversial director Roman Polanski.”
In Argentina, the film, along with another of Paramount releases (Looking for Mr. Goodbar), was banned under the regime of Jorge Rafael Videla during that country’s last military dictatorship due to the “pornographic” content.
For five years, the film was also banned by the apartheid regime in South Africa.
The scenes involving nude 12-year-old Brooke Shields were also controversial. The BBFC originally censored two scenes for the release in the UK to remove nudity, but the uncut version was released on DVD in 2006.
Critical Status:
The film won the Jury’s Technical Prize at the 1978 Cannes Film Fest.
In his N.Y. Times review Vincent Canby wrote: “Though the setting is whorehouse, and the lens through which we see everything is Violet, who herself becomes one of Nell’s chief attractions, Pretty Baby is neither about child prostitution nor is it pornographic.” Canby described Pretty Baby as “the most imaginative, most intelligent, and most original film of the year to date.”
In contrast, “Variet”y wrote that “the film is handsome, the players nearly all effective, but the story highlights are confined within a narrow range of ho-hum dramatization.”
Pretty Baby earned only $5.8 million in the US box-office.
Cast
Brooke Shields as Violet
Keith Carradine as E. J. Bellocq
Susan Sarandon as Hattie
Frances Faye as Nell
Antonio Fargas as The Professor
Matthew Anton as “Red Top”
Diana Scarwid as Frieda
Barbara Steele as Josephine
Seret Scott as Flora
Cheryl Markowitz as Gussie
Susan Manskey as Fanny
Laura Zimmerman as Agnes
Miz Mary as Odette
Gerrit Graham as “Highpockets”
Mae Mercer as Mama Mosebery
Credits:
Produced, directed by Louis Malle
Screenplay by Polly Platt, story by Polly Platt, Louis Malle
Cinematography Sven Nykvist
Edited by Suzanne Fenn
Music by Ferdinand Morton
Distributed by Paramount
Release dates: April 5, 1978
Running time: 109 minutes
Budget$3 million
Box office: $5.8 million
