Pretty Baby (1978) on Netflix
Photographer Ernest Bellocq comes to Madame Nell's New Orleans brothel to photograph the women. Twelve-year-old Violet lives there with Hattie, her prostitute mother.
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Trailer
Plot summary
In 1917, Storyville, the red-light district of New Orleans, is in the last months of legal prostitution. Hattie works in a brothel run by Madame Nell and raises Violet, her twelve-year-old daughter, and a baby boy there. A photographer, Ernest Bellocq, arrives with his camera to document the women. Because Hattie and Violet are the only ones awake, Nell lets him photograph them after he pays her. Violet finds his work fascinating and thinks he is falling in love with her mother.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Pretty Baby (1978)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Following her acclaimed performance as a child prostitute in Taxi Driver, the studio was keen on casting Jodie Foster as Violet, but Malle rejected the idea as he thought the role should be played by a 12-year-old only, and Foster was 14.
- The continuing controversy over Shields's underage nude scenes got the film banned in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Saskatchewan until 1995, banned in Argentina under the regime of Jorge Rafael Videla, and banned for five years by the apartheid regime in South Africa.
- When the film was submitted to the British Board of Film Classification for cinema release it ran into legal issues: the Protection of Children Bill, which became the Protection of Children Act 1978 and criminalised indecent images of individuals under 16 in England and Wales, was going through Parliament at the time.
- The film is based on the true account of a young girl groomed into prostitution as a child, recounted in historian Al Rose's 1974 book Storyville, New Orleans, and on the life of photographer Ernest Bellocq, who photographed New Orleans prostitutes in the early 20th century.
- Platt initially planned for the role of E. J. Bellocq to go to Jack Nicholson, but Malle denounced this and offered the role to Keith Carradine instead, which Carradine was confused by as he bore no physical similarities to Bellocq.
- While majoring in French literature at Princeton University, Shields wrote her senior thesis on the pre-adolescent journey in the films of Louis Malle, comparing the themes of lost innocence in Pretty Baby and Lacombe, Lucien.
- Malle said of the production: "Pretty Baby was harder than I expected, and in the meantime, I fell in love with America." After filming was completed he chose to become a U.S. resident and stayed there for the remainder of his life.
