Don’t know where Laura W. found this trailer for the 1967 exploitation film Teenage Mother, but we are all eternally grateful she did:
After watching that atrocious dreck, I’m sure you’re asking yourself three questions:
- Were the 1960s really like that? — Of course not, no more so than life in 2011 is like movies in 2011. The tacky clothes and silly hairstyles were the most accurate part of the film.
- Was this really an ‘educational’ film, as the narrator declares at the end? — Of course not. This low-budget movie used the “educational” pitch as a type of promotion that also served to get it into small-town theaters, where managers might face community backlash if it were obvious they were just showing a cheap titilating “teen sex” picture.
- Whatever happened to the ‘star’ of this film? — Arlene Sue Farber, who was 19 when Teenage Mother was made, enjoyed modest success as an actress, and actually had a small part in an Academy Award winner, The French Connection, in 1971. Her last acting role was in 1976 and, according to IMDB, the now 63-year-old Farber was last reported to be living in California.
Permit me to observe that this monumentally stupid film, and its “educational” promotion, perpetuates the fundmental falsehood of all sex-education efforts: Namely, the belief that most sexual problems are caused by a lack of knowledge, rather than a lack of virtue.
Here we are, more than four decades later, when knowledge about sex has never been more readily available, and yet we have even more sexual problems than Americans had in 1967.
