Review - Tomorrow's Children

 
December 18, 2021
 
Tomorrow’s Children – U.S., 1934
 

Wallace Thurman’s Tomorrow’s Children is a movie without a spine. It is a film that purports to be an exploration of the morality of sterilization, and, to its credit, there are a number of impassioned debates about the practice. However, images always trump emotional appeal, and it seems awfully hard to make the case that you’re against something when your visuals depict the worst possible examples as its supposed victims. Even Dr. Brooks (nicely played by Donald Douglas), the hero of the film, says the death of a newborn is a blessing in disguise. The deceased’s mother, you see, would have been poor, and her siblings would have been “feeble-minded” and physically challenged. You know what they say about friends like these.
 
The film begins with a newspaper headline heralding Hitler’s endorsement of sterilization for the “unfit.” Around 400,000 “undesirables” would go on to be sterilized from 1933 – 1945, an act now recognized as a form of genocide. However, before you say the film is putting American supporters of eugenics and sterilization in the same camp as a mass murderer, remember that the film was made in 1934, and it is doubtful that its creators had any hint of the horror that Hitler and negative eugenics would inflict. And eugenics has plenty of supporters on this side of the Atlantic. The newspaper could just as easily have been referencing a quote by Theodore Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, or John D. Rockefeller Jr.
 
We’re then privy to the rather forced conversations of three diverse groups on – you guessed it – sterilization. First, two government officials seem open to the practice, then a women’s group seems to be opposed, but admits the need for more information. Only an Irish-American priest stands firmly in opposition, arguing that it is an affront to religion, a sentiment that matches the imagery used in the film’s opening credits - sunlight breaking through a series of dark clouds. We are then transported into a hospital where, once again, sterilization is the topic of the day. Interestingly, most of the voices from the medical profession are in favor of the practice, partly due to their apparent disgust of their less economically advantaged patients. Again, with friends like these…
 
Consider this. The film’s idea of an unbiased look at the topic is to focus viewers on a poor family with children either in jail, infirmed, or mentally-challenged. This is the family whose dead newborn is spoken of so callously, and the deceased’s parents are either too greedy or indifferent to care about her. Later, we see a parade of those the state intends to put under the knife, and there’re hardly people designed to sway public opinion against the procedure. There’s a criminal who’s offered a shorter sentence in exchange for consenting to the operation; a violent, lecherous young man who, just before his court hearing, rips off the clothes of his nurse; and a man who stares into space and appears to not know what planet he’s on. Hardly anyone raises an objection to their sterilization, but mention it in relation to a healthy, hard-working seventeen-year-old girl, and that’s another situation entirely.
 
The young lady in question is Alice Mason (Diane Sinclair), daughter of the aforementioned couple with the “problematic” genes. She is presented as the outlier, the good apple in a batch of otherwise bad ones. She supports the family financially, has a decent hardworking boyfriend (Carlyle Moore Jr.) who wants to marry her, and is genuinely sweet. She returns home one night to find two strangers in her home, both government employees, and is informed that her parents have given their consent for the entire family to be sterilized. Alice quietly gives them the slip and goes on the lam. Eventually, she’ll turn to Dr. Brooks for assistance.
 
The film has a number of interesting moments. A scene in which a pro-sterilization judge callously denies the appeals of patient after patient is well done, showing how stacked the deck is against those who cannot afford the best legal representation. There’s also a pleasant scene in which Dr. Brooks visits the Mason family, and the way he speaks establishes the care and concern he has for children whose only fault is that they inherited defective genes. Also, the scenes involving Alice and her boyfriend successfully establish how deeply their bond goes and draw us to their side. There are also a number of scenes in which we get a good sense of the coldness with which those enforcing sterilization laws interact with those whose hopes of a family they wish to squash.
 
Had Tomorrow’s Children focused exclusively on Ms. Mason’s plight, it would have been a much stronger film, addressing questions of whether someone entirely healthy on the outside should be punished for what may exist on the inside. Instead, it tries to play both sides, showing the “problems” that sterilization can solve, while seeming arguing that it is only really a crime when someone nice and attractive becomes its target. Dr. Brooks, the supposed voice of enlightenment, goes from staunchly opposing sterilization to only really put up a fight when Alice is at risk, a fact that makes his stance against the practice one of convenience rather than true conviction. After all, if something is morally and ethically wrong, it is wrong in all cases, not just the ones that can easily elicit sympathy.
 
Instead, we get a cop-out final act that removes all pretense of the filmmaker’s intent. This is not a film about the consequences of sterilization or a serious exploration of the pros and cons of its implementation. Instead, it is a film that uses the topic to punch down at a population unable to fight back, and its hero, despite his sermonizing and his action-film inspired mad dash to save Alice’s womanhood, is ultimately a champion of one. In the end, we are meant to rejoice: the pretty girl can have her baby, and society is rid of tomorrow’s problems. We can go home happy, right? (on DVD and Blu-ray from Kino)
 
2 and a half stars