"Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!": A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959 (review)

"Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!": A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959. Eric Schaefer. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999. Pp. xii + 474. $64.95 (cloth); $21.95 (paper).

What is an exploitation film? When I ask my undergraduate students this question, the responses always vary wildly. Some mention the cycle of "blaxploitation" films produced during the 1970s, while others invoke the 1980s teen dramas of John Hughes. A few refer to the low-budget, softcore spectacles of Russ Meyer, but others claim that recent Hollywood blockbusters such as The Matrix (1999) should also rank as exploitation. The multiplicity of answers mirrors a similar confusion surrounding the term within film studies. How do we generate an adequate definition of the exploitation film when we consider, as David Rodowick observes, "that all commercial films manufactured within the capitalist mode of production are exploitive of someone or some class, a fact which is often elided"? ¹

One of the major feats accomplished by Eric Schaefer is to provide the exploitation film with a much-needed historical and stylistic specificity. Schaefer describes "classical exploitation films" (4) as a marginal cinema operating "in the shadow of Hollywood" from the 1920s through the 1950s, dedicated to "dealing with topics that censorship bodies and the organized industry's self-regulatory mechanisms prohibited" (2). The story of the "Don'ts and Be Carefuls" emblematizes Schaefer's depiction of the exploitation film as a fascinating tale of two industries, each dependent on the other for definition. In 1927, during Hollywood's struggle to evade censorship imposed from without by censoring from within, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPDAA) issued a list of "Don'ts and Be Carefuls." The forbidden subjects included nudity, drug traffic, sex perversion, white slavery, venereal disease, childbirth, and miscegenation. Schaefer argues that the topics enumerated in this list (and other, similar documents that preceded and followed it) were not chosen randomly but instead reacted to a "specific threat": those renegade, shoestring-budgeted exploitation films that drew the ire of various religious and community organizations (148). Although the exploitation films were produced outside of Hollywood, it was Hollywood that absorbed the angry demands to reform an unclean movie business. Hollywood adopted the "Don'ts and Be Carefuls" in an effort to distinguish their films from exploitation fare, while the exploitation film "came to be defined by an embrace of the topics made taboo by the 'Don'ts' and later, the Production Code" (148). By the late 1950s, according to Schaefer, classical exploitation films disappeared as a relaxed Production Code allowed Hollywood to cover exploitation topics in its own films.

The considerable scholarly significance of this encyclopedic, exhaustively researched book stems from the absence of a sustained treatment of exploitation cinema by film historians. This cinema left behind few material traces, but Schaefer has nonetheless tracked down enough films, trade paper reports, advertising material, and oral accounts by production personnel to illuminate the contours of a remarkably vital industry. Schaefer's accounts of the exploitation film's mode of production, technical style, distribution strategies, exhibition practices, and major genres not only establish his subject as an important phenomenon in film history but open multiple avenues for further research. The invaluable appendices provide a wealth of information on films rarely (if ever) mentioned by scholars, and the consistent connections made between the discourses of the films themselves and those of contemporary cultural history encourage us to rethink the social contexts evoked and transformed by exploitation cinema, which range from sex education to illicit drug use, eugenics, racism, and progressivism.

Of course, the process of defining a category as potentially expansive as the classical exploitation film also necessitates demarcating what it is not. Schaefer distances the classical exploitation film from drive-in "teenpics," softcore "sexploitation," hardcore pornography, "blaxploitation," and other recognized genres, including horror, science fiction, and the western. Many of these exclusions arise from the decision to date the...