Tonight Hattie (Susan Sarandon) is giving birth to her second child, although the infant's prospects are not great seeing as how his mother is a prostitute and lives in a Storyville brothel in the New Orleans of 1917. Hattie's other child is twelve-year-old Violet (Brooke Shields), and she is excited at the news she has a baby brother, so runs around the establishment telling everyone she can about the arrival, although there are few who are interested, preferring to get on with their work. Only the piano player Professor (Antonio Fargas) humours her, but even he doesn't really connect with her, as he is more of an observer in this environment...
And the "What the hell were they thinking?" award for moviemaking goes to... Pretty Baby! At the time this came out in America, and indeed the rest of the world, there was a genuine, growing concern about child exploitation, especially of the sexually abusive kind. We're used to people being up in arms about the subject now, and rightly so, but this film was released about the only time that the production could have got away with it, this being the seventies where barriers were in the process of being broken down as to what you could depict onscreen. If you were to release a non-judgemental work about child prostitution now, it would be surprising if anyone would go to see it, or even admit to wanting to.
Those sensitive viewers being about ninety percent of the audience, one assumes, as with no especially awful consequences for the characters in relation to their actions, the film came too close to endorsing what was going on. Not that the filmmakers were encouraging paedophilia, it's just that they don't seem to have thought through how the results of their tale, which was based on actual people of the time shown, would appear. For the first half hour it's all lazy mood and not much happening, and despite young Violet running around the whorehouse little occurs that make it stand out from the average period piece. Then arrives a scene which will have most reasonable people feeling decidedly uncomfortable.
