Lois Weber was one of the best-known directors of the first decade of the 20th Century, but her didactic, class-conscious and social-issue oriented films fell quickly out of fashion in the jazz age and few of her several hundred films have even survived. One that was reconstructed and preserved by The Library of Congress, Where Are My Children?, 1916, was recently shown on Turner Classic Movies.
In Where Are My Children? a district attorney is prosecuting a doctor for distributing pamphlets about birth control to the poor, after the doctor has seen starvation and abuse in the slums. Meanwhile the DA's wife has had two abortions with a Dr. Malfit, feeling that the children her husband wants would only interfere with her life as a "social butterfly." She regularly refers her society friends to Dr. Malfit and even refers her n'er-do-well brother to Malfit when her brother becomes involved with a maid who becomes pregnant. Dr. Malfit bungles the maid's abortion and the maid dies, though not before telling her mother about the brother and Dr. Malfit. The DA does not know about his wife's involvement and prosecutes Malfit for murder, finding out about his wife and her friends from Malfit's subpoenaed records. The DA's wife cannot now have children and so the couple spends their last years together, sad and lonely, visited by their children that were never born (Weber was fond of double exposures).
Yes, the film seems dated and even a little creepy but is full of passion and vivid portrayals (Tyrone Power Sr. and Helen Rieume play the DA and his wife). Weber is very careful about the issue of abortion: the film is not necessarily for it or against it but rather sees it a privilege of the wealthy and the upper classes who deny even rudimentary birth control to the poor. Weber shows the outdoors and "the wind in the trees," with nature compared to the artificial lives of the upper classes.
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