I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

It's 1917 Storyville, New Orleans. Illiterate willful twelve year old Violet (Brooke Shields)'s mother Hattie (Susan Sarandon) gives birth to a boy. They work in a high class brothel run by drug addict Nell. Ernest J. Bellocq (Keith Carradine) pays to take up residence photographing mostly Hattie. Nell puts Violet's virginity up for auction to her customers. Violet is eager to join the business but the actual act is painful. Violet starts to work as a prostitute. Hattie marries a customer and moves to St. Louis without Violet. After getting a corporal punishment, Violet runs away and moves in with Bellocq starting a sexual relationship.Violet's gleeful willing participation in her own degradation is compelling and infuriating. The most engaging scene is the auction. It is creepy with these entranced old men. That scene should be the climax. The movie cannot get any more creepy although it does try. Bellocq is all too quick to sleep with Violet. The movie meanders in the second half. It's all very sad. Brooke Shields is exceedingly young and the movie fits the definition of child porn. There is definitely some artistic merits but I don't know if it justifies pushing open the envelop.

Someone had to make the definitive choice for this twelve year old child.. and Hollywood has made lots of these kinds of choices before and since. Take a hundred sets of parents and how many would choose to have their child exploited in such a way. Sure you can say she has gone on to have a somewhat questionable 'career,' but at what cost, to those many having seen this film and pushed their offspring towards a very difficult and dangerous direction. This is not a great film in any meaningful way, and not at all worth the societal cost. There's an obligation for all of us to consider the 'ultimate cost'.. and once we choose to ignore that expense we are subject to whatever messy result comes about.

After seeing Eva Ionesco in Roman Polanski's 'The Tenant', and then digging a little deeper into the facts of her life, I remembered I had the DVD of 'Pretty Baby', which was partly inspired by her story, even if another story (that of photographer E.J. Bellocq and the prostitutes of Storyville, New Orleans) was obviously at least an equally big inspiration. Louis Malle begins the portrayal of this Storyville slowly and with care; we enter a whorehouse and get to know its inhabitants as human beings trying to get by in their day to day. The prostitutes, the pianist, the madam, the bouncer, the customers and... the children. It doesn't matter how careful you'll go about telling a story like this, it wíll have its impact. Then the story proceeds, and young Violet's initiation becomes a fact. Malle finds a balance between telling the facts as straight up as possible and showing a world that is filled with hopes, loves and other human follies and reveries against all odds.The nudity of Brooke Shields feels rather natural, but we all know that sort of thing doesn't fly anymore - and with good reason. The acting is pretty good, especially Keith Carradine's, but Shields' job is truly commendable. The story is just about satisfactory, but it sort of meanders without really digging deep into certain dramatic aspects - maybe that is actually the charm of it.A good 7 out of 10.

This now infamous film, directed by Louis Malle, is without a doubt one that may shock and disturb many who view it. Even more so now than by the 1978 social standards when it was released. However, those who will not succumb to the possible knee-jerk and reactionary "puritanical outrage" that some of the imagery might invoke and can understand how it significantly contributes to the story itself, will come to witness an interesting and beautifully toned glimpse into the final days of legal prostitution within the red light district of pre 1920s New Orleans.A young Brooke Shields delivers a convincing, yet subtle and sincere performance as Violet, the underage prostitute whom the story centers around. Keith Carradine's loose portrayal of famed Louisiana photographer E. J. Bellocq (who was an actual photographer of the time that captured images of the prostitutes in this particular district) was an excellent incorporation into the storyline and adds a certain sense of credibility to the film, in relation to it being set within the particular era.The additional acting talents of Susan Sarandon and Antonio Fargas also do well in bringing this tale, based on the true accounts of a young New Orleans prostitute who worked in the actual Storyville district, to life.It's so authentic in it's "flavor" in fact that it won the "Technical Grand Prize" at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival.This sad and true to life film guides us through not only a more primitive time in American history; one when many children (not only those subject to lives of prostitution) failed to even have the option of any childhood at all, but through the eyes of innocence and all the love and beauty and memories that those eyes found even within what many would only see as the most unforgivable of environments for innocence, or even hope.It's through THOSE eyes one must look to see the true beauty and love that went into the crafting of this historically memorable film.