PRETTY BABY, a retrospective

PRETTY BABY (1978)─Directed by Louis Malle from a screenplay by Polly Platt. The year was 1917, the year the United States entered World War I in the waning days of legal prostitution in the infamous red-light district of the Storyville section of New Orleans. Hattie (Susan Sarandon), a prostitute working in an elegant brothel run by the Madame Nell, has a twelve-year-old daughter Violet (Brooke Shields). Introverted photographer E.J. Bellocq (Keith Carradine) comes calling with his camera.
    Bellocq asks permission to take photographs of the women. Madame Nell agrees, but only if he pays. Peculiarly, Bellocq chooses only to takes pictures, he never has sex with any of the women.  His sole passion is photographing whores. His particular favourite subject is Hattie, as he photographs Hattie, we come to understand that the camera, the act of taking pictures has somehow become a surrogate extension of Bellocq's repressed sexuality. His strange demeanor and odd mannerisms fascinate Violet, whom he initially regards as a pest.
     The character of E.J. Bellocq is based on a real photographer who captured on glass plates of silver nitrate the real prostitutes of Storyville. Though the specific story built around him in the movie is fictional. The real Bellocq photographs are used to create a sense of the time and place and evoke the movie with authenticity.
     Over the next few months, Nell decides that Violet is now old enough for her virginity to be auctioned. At the auction Violet is bought by an apparently quiet customer, but her first experience of sex is brutal. Hattie, meanwhile, aspires to escape prostitution. She marries, and abandons Violet, leaving her daughter behind to face a life of prostitution. Bellocq continues to spend time with Violet, entranced by her beauty, and photogenic face. When the brothel closes, Bellocq marries Violet, ostensibly to protect her from a dangerous world; however there are some who question his motives.
     At the beginning of this film, there's a tight shot on Violet’s strikingly beautiful face. She appears to be watching something with great interest and we hear a woman moaning off camera. Since Pretty Baby is a movie about prostitution, one might naturally assume that the child is watching some sexual act. Actually, it’s just the opposite; as the moans turn to cries of pain. We realize with a wink and a nod that Director Louis Malle has tricked us. We see that it’s not a woman in the throws of ecstasy but rather a woman in labor, and that Violet is witnessing her baby brother being born.

     Pretty Baby is famous for one thing and one thing only: twelve year-old Brooke Shields get'n nekid. Brooke has four separate nude scenes, including one scandalous scene where she is seen completely naked lying in repose on a couch, while Bellocq takes her photograph. Apparently child nudity, any child nudity has been deemed too much for our modern American twenty-first century sensibilities.  If you view the new politically corrected  DVD version of Pretty Baby, be forewarned, the movie has been censored by re-framing the original scenes. This was done to avoid any naughty shots of Brooke’s pubic area or her baby buttocks.  If you want to see the original theatrical movie as shot, cut by Malle, you need to find  a VHS version.
     On the other hand, if all you want is to see nekid pictures of  Brooke Shields, the nudity in Pretty Baby is pretty tame by comparison to the Gary Gross photo shoot.  Two years earlier, before the hue and cry over Pretty Baby, Teri Shields, the consummate stage-mother allowed her then ten-year-old Brooke  to pose for photographer Gary Gross WARNING THESE PHOTOGRAPHS ARE EXPLICIT.  Brooke Shields by Gary Gross.  *Whew* Brooke poses completely nude in  a bath tub,  we’re not talking baby’s first bath pictures here. Brooke is posed, tarted up, oiled down, in all her full frontal prepubescent glory. No higher authority than the U.S. Supreme court ruled these pictures "art" and not child pornography.  Art or not, they are way too controversial to post on this blog.  Pretty Baby remains a testament to the fact that the 70’s were a vastly more liberated time, at least when it comes to issues of a naked child's sexuality. No American studio could (or would) make this film today.

Pretty Baby (1978)  ** ½