Mom and Dad

The most successful roadshow exploitation film ever made, toured for decades by the showman Kroger Babb. A cautionary tale about a girl who gets pregnant because nobody taught her the facts of life, it built its enormous profits on the promise of clinical footage, screened to segregated men's and women's audiences with a fake nurse selling booklets in the lobby.

The film itself is a dull melodrama; the show around it was the product, and Babb's genius was the marketing, not the movie. It is the definitive example of the education-as-pretext business model.

Historically vital, and the reason the word exploitation means what it does.