Kroger Babb was one of two legendary producer/distributors in the field of classic "roadshow" exploitation films -- the other was Dwain Esper, whose legend includes the cult classic Reefer Madness. But Babb and his most renowned release, Mom And Dad, may well have outdone Esper and all of the other competition combined -- by some accounts, that drama of unwed motherhood and its consequences was among the top five grossing movies in the United States in its first full year of release, in 1947, and may have earned as much as $100 million, although proving such guesses, given Babb's dealing in straight cash receipts, might well have been more an issue for psychics and private investigators than accountants.
Born in Lees Creek, Ohio in 1906, Babb -- whose given name was Howard, but picked up the nickname "Kroger," which stuck -- went through several professions, including sports journalism, before becoming associated with movies. As a publicity manager for a mid-western theater chain, however, he demonstrated a natural gift for ballyhoo and was soon getting enviable results with relatively conventional film fare. During the early 1940s, he also showed a knack for selling seemingly unmarketable short films, on exploitative and controversial subjects. Having proved what he could do working with other people's undervalued films, and within the limitations of the established major respectable movie theater chains, Babb decided at the end of the Second World War to take his activities to the next level -- to turn the experience he'd gained over the previous decade toward an effort on his own behalf, with a movie that was his work, as a businessman, producer, and distributor, from start to finish. He brought aboard director William Beaudine plus an inexpensive crew (mostly drawn, like Beaudine, from the usual ranks of Monogram Pictures employees), and a cast that included such reliable old hands as George Eldredge and experienced players players like Hardie Albright. And the result was Mom And Dad, a quickly made low-budget drama about single motherhood, produced at a time when the Hollywood Production Code made it almost impossible to get such a movie released through conventional theatrical channels.
Babb apparently had his strategy for selling the movie worked out before a single frame of film had been shot. Rather than going through one of the major studios and their distribution arms (which would probably not have touched the movie, in any case, except for the lowest possible fees to the producer), Mom And Dad was distributed piecemeal, mostly across the industrial and lower mid-west as well as the border states, often booked into neighborhood theaters that were usually the lowest level of the totem pole for films -- or it was shown in tents set up outside of a major town or cluster of towns. This was what was meant by "roadshow" in this context, a far cry from the similarly designated, more respectable, expensive ticket and reserved seat distribution accorded blockbuster Hollywood pictures such as The Sound of Music in later decades -- at its lowest level, Babb's "roadshow" distribution consisted of men moving the print, posters, and anything else they needed to support the movie in cars, from town to town, with crews often working different counties in the same state, across multiple states. And in each venue, it was supported by a campaign of ballyhoo, which included actors portraying "medical expert Elliot Forbes" in different locales, who would address the audience; and for $1 each, audience members could purchase booklets on male and female sexuality (authored by Babb's common-law wife), which intersected with elements of the "Elliott Forbes" lecture. Not only were the booklets immensely popular -- one couldn't find too many publications dealing with male and female sexuality, especially in small towns, in the mid-1940s -- but they were profitable, and they also lent a peculiar duality to the whole presentation of the film that boosted its appeal. Yes, Mom And Dad, by virtue of the publicity and the ballyhoo, was, on some level, potentially salacious and even titillating, that was a given -- but the presence of the "medical expert" and his lecture, and the booklets, gave the presentation a veneer of respectability. Babb was clever enough to place his venues just close enough to centers of local media, usually newspapers and sometimes radio stations, to engender complaints and controversy (usually fomented or generated directly by Babb himself, or his agents). Thus, he demonstrated an extraordinary ability to appeal to more than one audience, and even more than one side of the same audience member's psyche -- titillating on one level with the seemingly illicit subject matter, but providing a layer of legitimacy for their conscience. And the movie grossed in the tens of millions by some accounts. And most of it, given Babb's notoriously tight-fisted spending habits, was pure profit. What Dwain Esper had done in the 1930s with movies such as Maniac and Reefer Madness, Babb proved could work on a much larger financial scale a decade later, with a campaign that extended to utilizing the best (and worst) tendencies of local newspapers and radio, subjects with which he was intimately acquainted given his earlier career. He had also discovered that the passage of a decade had only made efforts of this kind potentially even more financially rewarding -- after eight years of the Great Depression and four years of war, people were free to indulge themselves, and just discovering that fact as 1946 wore into 1947, and were also restless for new kinds of entertainment and diversions. And in the absence of anything better, Mom And Dad fit that bill.
Although he never saw the same kind of success that he enjoyed with Mom And Dad, Babb went on to market movies dealing with marijuana use (She Shoulda Said No), a re-enactment of the Crucifixion (The Lawton Story aka The Prince of Peace) and also grabbed up the US theatrical rights to Ingmar Bergman's Summer With Monika, cutting it down and retitling it "Monika: The Story of a Bad Girl," with appropriate exploitation art and publicity. (This was the same period in which a canny US distributor had raked in a small fortune in the United States with the finely made and acted Italian drama Bitter Rice, by emphasizing the presence of young buxom women in tight outfits working [and fighting] in the Po rice fields). And Babb was so good at what he did, that he soon found emulators and protege's, most notably future producer David F. Friedman, who credited Babb as his mentor. In the decades after Babb's death (in 1980), Friedman, who lived until 2011, became a primary source for stories about Babb's exploits -- one of the more amazing (and amusing) tales was his account of how Babb, on the pretext of checking out a small local theater in some small industrial city for a possible exhibition, commandeered the facility for three days of showings of one of his pictures over a weekend without paying the owner a penny in rent.
Babb's record of successes declined as the mores and morays of America loosened in the 1960s. With mainstream movies able to show more skin and suggestiveness, even before the final collapse of the Hollywood Production Code, there wasn't too much of a place left for his brand of production or distribution. He remained a well-known and respected force within the industry, however, running a distribution business and producing for television, and also writing columns for trade magazines, and was seemingly always ready to regale other professionals with tales of his successes. Declining health took its toll, and Babb had retired by 1977. He died three years later.