Exploitation Movies: Slaves in Bondage (1937)

The 1930s produced a cornucopia of grindhouse exploitation films (aka "sexploitation" movies), usually disguised as "educational" movies that were ostensible cautionary tales about one social problem or another.

Here from 1937 is Slaves in Bondage. The title alone ought to explain it all.

Full movie:

Yeah, it ought to, but about the most titillating thing about this movie is its name. The phrase "White Slavery" is a titillatingly catchy early-20th-Century name for sexual slavery and human trafficking. Thanks to the Yellow Journalism of the media of the time, It was actually a socially-shocking Very Big Deal back in the 1920s and 1930s, and this movie exploits that to the hilt: Young girls lured into prostitution by answering an innocuous ad in a small-town newspaper for "manicurists" -- attractive girls only, no experience necessary. Apparently that wasn't enough to bring up any warning signals, since the manicure shop that fronts as a prostitution recruitment center doesn't seem to have any lack of applicants for the jobs. The "job interviews" are unintentionally funny: "I'm sure we can find some ... 'work' ... for you..." after the chief manicurist/procurer named Belle, played as a hard blonde, looks them over from head to toe.
This movie really has a little "something for everyone": A smart-but-naïve girl, a young gung-ho wanna-be reporter, a couple of male acrobats who act out some faintly homoerotic tumbling routines in a boarding house living room, and a sexual smorgasbord at the roadhouse/brothel/nightclub that a customer can choose from, including a couple of -- shock! -- "fetish Lesbian spanking" girls. You pays your money and you takes your choice...

This movie doesn't even pretend to be "educational" ; there's no crawling text -- the so-called "square-up" disclaimer -- at the beginning, and the closest it comes to any kind of lesson is when a grumpy detective lectures the weary seen-it-all editor about it being "the same old story" with the ads in small-town newspapers luring innocent country girls to the bright lights of the big city.

After some boring and kind of confusing subplots featuring pasteboard characters in this cheap mess, a fleeting glimpse of the head Bad Guy (all the bad guys have mustaches!) with his hand on -- again, shock! -- Good Girl Dona's breast, and a fight scene in the nightclub that looks like it was lifted from a Mack Sennett comedy, it all ends well with Dona and the wannabe reporter getting married, him getting a job at the paper, the bad guys going to jail, and everyone living happily ever after.

Except for the "manicurists". After they've served their purpose by parading around in their skivvies -- I guess you could call some of it lingerie -- in several scenes, and acting as sadly comical spanking Lesbians, we don't hear any more about them. Like most of the women in these movies, they are ultimately disposable.

Sidebar: It is not my intention to make light of the very real problem of Sex Slavery and Human Trafficking as it exists now (or then) -- but this movie isn't really about that, any more than it is "about" the so-called White Slavery rackets of the first half of the last century. It's all about exploiting the tittering "naughtiness" factor in the audience.

Oh, and there are no drugs. What kind of self-respecting 1930s exploitation movie doesn't have at least one joint, a line of coke or a syringe in it? Come on!

The money shot: Gotta be the "fetish Lesbian spanking" in the checking-out-the-goods-on-display scene.

Lessons learned: Ads promising no-experience-needed jobs to attractive girls are suspect, manicurists are hookers, and guys with mustaches are always the bad guys.

Directed by Slaves in Bondage on the IMDB
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