In the UK, the film’s release coincided with the passing of the 1978 Protection of Children Act, which criminalised the manufacture and distribution of “indecent” images of children under 16. Pretty Baby also raised issues of censorship. Photograph: PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy Naked poses … Shields playing a 12-year-old in Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby (1978). I guess you’d have to have an actress who was older, playing younger.”
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And in 2021 she told the Guardian she “wasn’t personally scathed” by Pretty Baby, adding: “I just don’t know if you could make that movie today. She has said she was “protected in my naivety” during the Calvin Klein controversy. Shields has never directly accused others of exploiting her as a minor.
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“The direct gaze is full of ambivalent sexuality,” People magazine wrote of her in a 1978 profile. Others judged Shields to be “mature beyond her years”, almost as a justification.
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Some, such as US TV host Rona Barrett, branded the film “child pornography”. Shields’s character has a sexual relationship with Bellocq (played by Keith Carradine) and poses for him naked. Platt was inspired by the work of EJ Bellocq, a photographer who portrayed the red-light district of New Orleans, but also by the exploitative 1970s film industry. The director was Louis Malle, admittedly European, but the story was initiated and co-written by Polly Platt, an American. In between came her breakout movie: Pretty Baby, in which she played the 12-year-old daughter of a sex worker in a 1917 New Orleans bordello. In 1980, aged 14, she starred in a controversially sexual ad campaign for Calvin Klein jeans (“You wanna know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing”). Brooke Shields was photographed naked for Playboy-owned Sugar and Spice magazine when she was 10. Nobody really thought much of it.”īut, like the “It was a different time” argument, the “This was Europe” line doesn’t hold a lot of water, not least because US cinema was also using young actors in sexually suggestive content. “In Europe,” she told Variety in 2018, looking back on Romeo and Juliet, “a lot of the films had nudity. Some people have contrasted liberal-minded European cinema with prudish Hollywood – including Olivia Hussey. Trawling through the detritus of European cinema from the 1970s and 80s, there are scores of rightfully forgotten but disturbingly exploitative films, some of which appear to have blurred the lines between “erotic drama” and child sexual abuse. Lawsuit … Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey in a less controversial scene from Romeo and Juliet. And inside it was just tearing me apart.” In 1997, Kinski said: “If I had had somebody to protect me or if I had felt more secure about myself, I would not have accepted certain things. At 17, she was in the sex comedy Stay As You Are, in which she played the regularly naked teen lover of Marcello Mastroianni, who was then in his mid-50s (Lolita-style “forbidden” romances seem to come with this territory). Aged 14, she was depicted fully nude in Hammer horror To the Devil a Daughter, co-starring Christopher Lee. Or how about Nastassja Kinski? When she was 13, German auteur Wim Wenders cast her in 1975’s Wrong Move, in which she appears topless in a sexualised situation (as an adult, Kinski worked with Wenders again in Paris, Texas and Faraway, So Close). What, for example, should we make of Jodie Foster, at the age of 12, portraying a girl forced into sex work in Taxi Driver? Or Jenny Agutter’s naked swim in 1971’s Walkabout, when she was just 16? The scene was filmed with Agutter’s knowledge and consent, and neither Foster nor Agutter has expressed regret or resentment about these roles, but at what age should an actor be considered mature enough to have given that consent? And should they be allowed to change their minds at a later date? The movie industry, especially its output in the late 20th century, is now up for reappraisal, and maybe it needs it.
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