Pretty Baby (1978) | Brooke Shields, Keith Carradine

Pretty Baby (1978) | Brooke Shields, Keith Carradine | Susan Sarandon's best film!

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Pretty Baby (1978)

	Pretty Baby (1978) Brooke Shields, Keith Carradine Paramount, 1995 average customer review:based on 36 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Storyville, New Orleans. 1917.

Storyville, New Orleans. 1917. Brooke Shields(Violet) is the daughter of prostitute Susan Sarandon(Haddy). The camera follows Violet around and shows the goings on within the New Orleans style brothel mansion through her eyes. She is a surprisingly strong central character and the brothel provides a fairly stable family environment which sometimes seems more like a boarding school than a bawdy house. The old Madam looks out for her girls and the girls look out for each other. Shields is friends with both the colored Jazz pianist, the voodoo fortune teller, the worldly photographer as well the other little kids. Her childhood seems charmed, rich.
Louis Malle in his earlier classic Murmur of the Heart examined bourgeois norms and found them to be far from moral, and in this movie he is examing what most deem an amoral atmosphere and finding much there that is admirable. He is celebrating moral freedom within the rich and racially diverse culture of New Orleans and he is examining moral hypocrisy as all the patrons are the wealthy and "respectable". Malle sets up an equation that perhaps parodies the age old artist/patron relationship. The most obvious arts being patronised are the sensual arts but also the mansion is a social club with its own jazz pianist, paintings on the wall, and there is a general joie de vivre that is lacking in the normal world. The brothel is seen as a kind of timeless sanctuary of the better things in life. Birth and death are kept out of the main parlor to preserve this illusion. At the end as this world that Malle and Nykvist have so carefully put together comes apart the mood is one of regret that it can't keep going on. This is not a message film and Malle is a director who does not insist you see things any particular way. Certainly the young Brooke Shields appearing as she does is meant to shock and no one thinks little girls should grow up to be prostitutes but the other extreme of growing up in the narrow confines of puritanical mainstream America also has its limits. The former world is amoral but it is lively and awakens the imagination and senses, the latter world is moral but overly protective and stultifying.
Malle leaves things unresolved and the photographer played by Kieth Carradine embodies the ambivalence best of all. Carradine is attracted to the prostitutes existence, and he seems at home with them(much in the same way an artist in the same period found himself at home in Paris)but he keeps his distance for awhile, treating them only as art objects. Once he steps over his own bounds though he becomes as morally questionable as the prostitutes themselves. At the end he is still divided as to what is the best life for young Violet. So among everything else in the movie you have this little allegory of the bohemian artist as well. Music throughout is by piano professor Jellyroll Morton who is thanked in a note at the end of the picture. Malle is a director who never made a bad picture, and never made an ordinary one as well. One of my all time favorite directors. Also recommended by Malle: Murmur of the Heart, Atlantic City, My Dinner w/Andre, Crackers, May Fools, Damage, Vanya on 42nd Street.

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Susan Sarandon's best film!

For all the hype over "Thelma & Louise," et al., PRETTY BABY, hard to rent but easy to buy, is probably the best effort Susan Sarandon has ever put forth. In the prime of her youth, she displays her acting talents frequently and generously, both of them. And, even though the full frontal theatrical-release scene of Brooke Shields is cut from the video version, Sarandon takes up the slack admirably. She falls into the role of a New Orleans prostitute mother as if it required no acting at all. This film is sine qua non for soft porn collectors.

Provocative, yet Truthful

To day something like this would not happen, but in the days this move is in, it was common. What people will do to try to make themselfs happy. Like they say, the grass is always greener on the other side!

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Pretty Baby!!!

I will had put 3 and 1/2 for this movie. The movie had a good atmophere, it sure was different. The story is good but a bit disturbing. Brooke Shields act very good for her age but she get on my nerves with her attitude but that's how she was suppose to act so she was very good. I think for such a young girl we should not had seen her naked, the movie didn't need to see her, a young kid/teenager naked, well I think no movie should put up kids naked. All the cast are good. It's a okay movie but maybe a bit disturbing!

A look inside the Red Light District

This story takes place at the turn of the century in New Orleans'. A prostitute becomes pregnant decides to keep her baby and gives birth to a daughter named Violet. They live in the brothel where she continues to work. Twelve years later, Violet is old enough to attract the attentions of the brothel's customers. Her mother agrees to have her virginity auctioned off to the customers of the house. The story really starts when Violet draws the affections of Bellocq, a photographer who has been working on a photo series about prostitutes. Violet's blend of childlike innocence and adult sensuality is profoundly attractive to him, but their relationship quickly becomes a problem. Which is enhanced when her mother leaves Violet behind to get married. The film's sexual content is sensual without being especially graphic. This is really a film about desire and attraction.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, page 6, 7, 8

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