Mom and Dad
Mom and Dad is a 1945 film from the USA, directed by William Beaudine, running 97 minutes. reelscum files it under classical exploitation.
- Year
- 1945
- Country
- USA
- Runtime
- 97 min
- Director
- William Beaudine
- Updated
- 10 Aug 2026
- Obscurity
- cult (37/100)
Defined in the glossary: Classical exploitation
Kroger Babb toured it for twenty years with a fake nurse in the lobby.
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.
The numbers
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Where to watch
Legal options in USA
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The cycle in depth
- The grindhouse and where the word came from
What a grindhouse is: a continuous-performance theatre, the 1925 trade term behind the word, and how the programming got its reputation.
- The B movie and the double bill it was made for
A B movie is what an exhibitor took to get the A picture, a flat-rate second feature, and the 1948 Paramount ruling ended the arrangement.
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