In the opening scene, we see a closeup of Violet (Shields) watching as her mother Hattie (Susan Sarandon)-one of the house whores-gives birth to a baby boy. I read similar accounts of such a district in Chicago in Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America’s Soul. They tended to be named after a particular alderman, whose role it was to placate a morally-outraged and fearful public. Such places, which were seen in many other big cities as well, were designated vice zones-presumably to keep them “contained”. The story takes place in the 1917 New Orleans Storyville district. Like most Malle films, a coherent plot is not paramount and, in this case, we are really seeing a series of vignettes expressing the human condition in a particular time and place. Beyond that, this film features one of America’s most breathtaking beauties, Brooke Shields. Skin gives it a double head nod for the double dose of delicious Ds that Susan displays so wonderfully.After Lewis Carroll’s Alice and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Pretty Baby (1977) is perhaps the most popular metaphor symbolizing the cult of the girl child.
The film also got an Oscar nod for its music. Director Louis Malle won the Technical Grand Prize at Cannes, and was nominated for the Palm d'Or. (If you're intrigued with the wee-Brooke angle, check out Prettty Baby: Brooke Shields (2023), a documentary about the star growing up as a sexualized adolscence.) While Pretty Baby did stir up some controversy, it also received a few impressive accolades. Hattie decides to auction off Violet's V-card to the highest bidder, then takes off for parts unknown, leaving the young gal to her own devices - or rather, that of an older man, played by Keith Carradine. And the innocent daughter? That's none other than a 12-year-old Brooke Shields playing precocious Violet. That gorgeous mother is none other than Susan Sarandon, who bares her beautiful bod in more than one scene. If certain Attorneys Generals were to have their way, the very description of Pretty Baby’s plot would be enough to lock a person up: In Louisiana ’round about 1917, a girl is being raised in the whorehouse where her mother, Hattie, is a prostitute. How is it that the American Zeitgeist dragged itself through the 1970s without dying of shame? There were platform shoes for white guys, coke spoons dangling from the necks of insurance execs, and Pretty Baby (1978) playing in mainstream movie houses in all fifty of the United States.
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