MOVIETIME: Bell, Buck and Wendell (1958)

by: chill

Sun Jan 04, 2009 at 01:28:58 AM MST


Since gorging on sweet delicacies and Adderall over the holiday season I have been in a funk and have been watching a lot of old movies. I thought I'd try some pocket reviews to snap out. Bear with me:

Bell, Buck and Wendell (1958)
Emma Buck is just your average, modern-day mother possessed of a mental age of 8 with a record of prostitution and immorality. But one day a handsome Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, walks into her life and declares it is in the interest of the state to have her daughter Carrie forcibly sterilized.

Emma decides she wants him--especially when he declares: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." She mistakes this for flirting. So, Emma casts a musky spell of love over Justice Holmes. She, in turn, falls in love with him but in doing so she loses her powers, and both she and her daughter are legally declared "feeble-minded" and "promiscuous."

In the end, Emma is rebuffed and her daughter Carrie forcibly sterilized. In a twist, it turns out that Carrie Buck was not "promiscuous" at all, but had actually been raped by the nephew of her adoptive mother.

I give a 4 out 5: ♦♦♦♦◊

chill :: MOVIETIME: Bell, Buck and Wendell (1958)
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ha (3.00 / 1)
it's always sooo hilarious to make fun of eugenics. Holocaust jokes anyone?


By 1958 it was only eugenics by proxy (0.00 / 0)
in that, every woman of a certain class was to be bred after Kim Novak.

[ Parent ]
Ironically... (0.00 / 0)
The father of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr that you speak of was one of the earliest proponents of anti-bacterial STERILIZATION in medicine...

see bellow the excerpt from... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...

"In 1843, Holmes published The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever which argued that puerperal fever, a deadly disease of women giving birth, was frequently carried from patient to patient by physicians and nurses.[9] A few years later, Ignaz Semmelweis would reach similar conclusions in Vienna, where his introduction of prophylaxis (handwashing in chlorine solution before assisting at delivery) would lower the puerperal mortality rate considerably. Holmes, seeing more clearly than Semmelweis that something like microbial action must be involved-his famous essay was an uncanny anticipation of Pasteur's discovery of the germ theory of disease later in the century-was altogether more radical. A physician in whose practice even one case of puerperal fever had occurred, wrote Holmes, had a moral obligation to purify his instruments, burn the clothing he had worn while assisting in the fatal delivery, and cease obstetric practice for a period of at least six months."


   
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