Sex Madness (1938)
A cautionary exploitation melodrama follows a former beauty queen who contracts syphilis after a casting-couch encounter, tracking her descent through quack cures and ruined engagements as a stand-in doctor lectures the audience on the dangers of venereal disease.
Produced by grindhouse specialist Dwain Esper (though film historian Bret Wood has argued the direction is more plausibly Joseph Seiden’s), Sex Madness belongs to the same disreputable lineage of Depression-era “hygiene” scare pictures as Reefer Madness, sold to theaters as public health warnings and to audiences as something considerably racier.
Background
Dwain Esper directed Sex Madness, a 1938 exploitation film presented as a warning about venereal disease, with Vivian McGill, Rose Tapley and Al Rigeli in the cast. It belongs to a genre of hygiene films that combined melodrama with lectures delivered by a doctor within the film. The story follows a former beauty queen who contracts syphilis after a casting-couch encounter, and it tracks her decline through quack cures and ruined engagements. The running time is about fifty-two minutes, and the film is a useful example of how such films sold moral instruction as sensational entertainment.
What to watch for
Pay attention to the lecturing doctor, who interrupts the drama to explain the disease to the audience, a common feature of hygiene films of the period. The melodrama is staged in a sober, theatrical style, and the film’s moral lesson is stated openly rather than left to the story. The heroine’s decline takes her through a series of bad choices and quack treatments, which the film presents as a cautionary path. Modern viewers will notice how much of the film’s energy goes into moral instruction and how much into its sensational subject, which is the tension that defines the genre.
