Content area
Full Text
"Boldt Daring! Shocking! True!"A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959. By Eric Schaefer. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. xii, 474 pp. Cloth, $64.95, ISBN 0-8223-2353-2. Paper, $21.95, ISBN 0-8223-2374-5.)
Beginning in the late 1920s, under pressure from censorship forces and in a quest for legitimacy, the motion picture industry cleansed itself of the illicit, the immoral, and the vicious. But while the major Hollywood studios produced lists of subjects that could not be represented on film, independent "exploitation films" filled screens with images of nudists, drug addicts, strippers, back-alley abortionists, and girls "in trouble"-all prohibited by local censorship bodies and the industry's self-regulatory mechanisms. In this remarkably thorough, thoughtful book, Eric Schaefer traces the history of "classical exploitation films" that thrived in the shadow of classical Hollywood cinema from 1919 to 1959.
Viewing an exploitation film, Schaefer argues, was a dizzying, disorienting experience akin to attending a carnival more...