District attorney Richard Walton, a believer in eugenics, grieves because his wife is childless and takes pride in the child of his sister, who contracted a eugenic marriage. When Dr. Malfit is convicted for sending a book through the mail that advocates birth control, Walton supports him. Lillian, the Walton's housekeeper's daughter, is seduced by Mrs. Walton's visiting brother. She dies during an abortion performed by Malfit and Walton prosecutes. Walton then discovers Malfit's account book and finds out the many times that his wife and her friends have had abortions.
"District attorney Richard Walton, a believer in eugenics, grieves because his wife is childless and takes pride in the child of his sister, who contracted a eugenic marriage. When Dr. Malfit is convicted for sending a book through the mail that advocates birth control, Walton supports him. Lillian, the Walton's housekeeper's daughter, is seduced by Mrs. Walton's visiting brother. She dies during an abortion performed by Malfit and Walton prosecutes. Walton then discovers Malfit's account book and finds out the many times that his wife and her friends have had abortions."@en
""The souls of unborn children behind the 'Portals of Eternity' are of three groups: the army of 'Chance Children;' the morally or physically [defective] 'Unwanted Souls;' and the fine, strong souls that only are sent forth on prayer. District Attorney Richard Walton, a believer in eugenics, grieves because his wife is childless and takes pride in the child of his sister, who contracted a eugenic marriage. When a doctor is convicted for sending a book through the mail that advocates birth control, Walton supports him. After Walton's wife, a social butterfly, takes her friend Mrs. Brandt to Dr. Malfit for an abortion, Mrs. Brandt is again able to attend house parties. Lillian, the Walton's housekeeper's daughter, is seduced by Mrs. Walton's visiting brother. She dies during an abortion performed by Malfit, and Walton prosecutes. Sentenced to fifteen years, Malfit throws his account book at Walton, who then discovers the many times that his wife and her friends have had abortions. Walton calls his wife a murderess and imagines their home with children. Mrs. Walton, now repentant, tries to bring about conception, but learns that she can never bear children. ... According to a [Motion picture world] review, the trial of a physician in the film for sending a book through the mails that advocated birth control was 'plainly indicative of' the Margaret Sanger case of 1915, in which she was indicted for sending pleas for birth control through the mails"--AFI catalog, 1910-1920. "Lois Weber's pro-birth control, anti-abortion drama Where are my children? reveals, perhaps more fully than any other surviving film, how the first Hollywood features could engage issues that became completely forbidden throughout the next half century of mainstream American filmmaking. The title is drawn from the question asked in anguish near the end of the five-reel film by its lead, a district attorney, after he learns of the many abortions that his wife and her wealthy friends have undergone secretly. At its release in April, 1916, the film faced controversy, but just enough to make it a box-office smash. A Brooklyn district attorney brought suit against the film's distributor, and it was rejected for showing in Pennsylvania, where a member of the state's Board of Censors called it 'unspeakably vile ... a mess of filth.' But it opened to turn-away crowds in Manhattan and Boston, and the National Board of Review eventually approved it for showing to adult audiences across the country. In Sydney, Australia, 100,000 saw the film in two weeks, and it grossed a then-huge $3 million worldwide. A Los Angeles times reviewer suggested archly, 'Whenever I see an announcement which reads "Positively no children under sixteen years of age admitted," ... this sign is about all that is needed to guarantee that three-fourths of women in the town and many men of fifty and over will go to see what it is about.' Lois Weber was at the time the highest-salaried director in the new Hollywood studio system, working at the relatively independent and feisty Universal Pictures, which then employed at least three other female producer-directors. Among the nine other feature-length films Weber directed for release by Universal in 1916 (eight of which she also wrote) were The people vs. John Doe (about capital punishment), Hop, the Devil's brew (about opium smuggling and addiction), and Shoes (about child labor). 'I'll never be convinced that the general public does not want serious entertainment rather than frivolous, ' Weber said, and for several years she keenly balanced social engagement with entertainment. 'We're all in business to make money, ' she conceded, but 'you can pander to the whim of hte moment; or you can build with an eye to the future.' She recognized the value of controversy, and her earliest surviving feature, The hypocrites (1914), a heavily moralistic tale punctuated by a female nude symbolizing 'the naked truth, ' is itself not without some hypocrisy. She grew frustrated with carping by reform groups over the way their issues ended up onscreen. Shortly after the release of Where are my children? she responded to those who wanted more in it about birth control and less about abortion: 'The Birth Control League would have all the emphasis on the first part. ... The propagandist who recognizes the moving picture as a powerful means of putting out a creed, never seems to have any conception of the fact that an idea has to come to terms with the dramatic. ... Very few propagandists can think in pictures, and they would have us put out a picture that no one in the world but the people already interested in a subject would ever go to see!' Weber credited her husband, Phillips Smalley, as collaborator on most of her films, but increasingly she took the lead. She was still predicting in the early 1920s that 'the frothy picture is doomed, ' but Hollywood, and audiences, grew to disagree. Where are my children? contrasts two doctors: a slimy society physician whose practice seems to consist primarily of abortions and a sympathetic toiler among the poor who is brought to trial by the district attorney for his book Birth control. As Moving picture world noticed in its review, 'The trial of a physician is plainly indicative of the Margaret Sanger case.' Sanger had essentially invented the term 'birth control' and been indicted in 1914 under postal obscenity laws for mailing issues of her journal The woman rebel. Her husband was convicted in 1915 for distributing her guide to home contraception, Family limitation, and she was jailed briefly in 1916, just before the release of Where are my children? (The following year, Sanger appeared in her own film production, also titled Birth control, and Weber wrote, directed and starred as a Sanger-like woman jailed for distributing birth control literature in The hand that rocks the cradle; both films are now lost.) Abortion, less in the headlines, had been criminalized in the United States only in the second half of the nineteenth century, and even the Catholic Church didn't condemn it until 1869. It was previously allowed until 'quickening, ' around the fourth month of pregnancy. Prosecutions after the turn of the century generally only targeted physicians unskillful enough to kill a patient, as in the case of Where are my children?'s Dr. Malfit, whose name might itself have been a warning to patients. The New York dramatic mirror was not alone in finding Where are my children? 'confusing to some extent' because 'its two big subjects' appeared in conflict. What evidently unites the film's pro-birth control and anti-abortion stances is the pseudoscience of eugenics, or 'the self-direction of human evolution, ' as its proponents encapsulated this variety of social Darwinism first formulated by Charles Darwin's cousin, Sir Francis Galton, who coined the term from the Greek for 'good' (eu) and 'birth' (gen). The film's district attorney, Richard Walton, is introduced as 'a great believer in eugenics.' (He is played by stage star Tyrone Power (1869-1931)). Early in the film an intertitle also tells us that 'Walton's sister had contracted an eugenic marriage and her first child was a source of great interest.' This suggests that the couple had had their two families' genetic histories investigated and been cleared for producing superior offspring before agreeing to marriage. Negative eugenics, which had the goal of limiting what the film calls the 'ill-born, ' is also given illustration in the flashbacks introduced by the birth-control advocate, Dr. Homer, during courtroom testimony about his 'work among the poor' in 'the slums.' Unsurprisingly, considering its barely disguised racism, eugenics came to be welcomed in the 1930s by Nazi doctors, but at the time of Where are my children? it was more popularly respectable, if often mocked in such (now-lost) eugenics films as A disciple of Nietzsche (1915) and Eugenics versus love (1914). In worrying over declining birth rates among the affluent, there was, Moving picture world noticed, something 'quite Rooseveltian' about Where are my children? Ex-president Theodore Roosevelt had argued in 1911 that 'the American stock is being cursed with the curse of sterility, and it is earning the curse, because the sterility is willful.' He saved his particular 'contempt for the woman who shirks her primal and most essential duty ... for the wife who refuses to be a mother.' In Where are my children?, Mrs. Walton is introduced reclining, munching chocolates, and cuddling her dogs in place of unborn children, who will eerily materialize in the film's astonishing final shot. (She is played by Tyrone Power's wife, Helen Riaume; in real life they had children, including future Hollywood star Tyrone Power, Jr. (1913-58) and Anne Power (1915-99), who plays the 'eugenic' infant here.) Mrs. Walton parties in high fashion with what an intertitle calls her 'social butterfly' friends, and her yawn at the abortionist's office suggests easy familiarity with the place. The New York dramatic mirror also spoke in Rooseveltian terms when it characterized the film as 'a strong preachment against race suicide.' Variety complained that the wordy opening titles, added at a late stage by Universal, concerning whether or not to bring one's children to the film, were absurdly contradictory: 'You pays your price and you takes your pick. ... Minors should or shouldn't be permitted to see this film.' Another commentator was amused by the 'inconsistent sign' on his neighborhood theater marquee: 'Where are my children? Children not admitted'"--Treasures III brochure notes by Scott Simmon."@en
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