The Birth of a Baby

1938 film by Al Christie

The Birth of a Baby is a 1938 American educational film about childbearing.^[1][2][3][4] It was directed by famed Canadian producer of silent shorts Al Christie.^[5] The film stars Eleanore King, Richard Gordon, Ruth Matteson, and Josephine Dunn. The film's original negative was lost in the Fox vault fire of 1937.^[6]

Cast

• Eleanore King as Mary Burgess
• Richard Gordon as Dr. Wilson
• Ruth Matteson as Julia Norton
• Josephine Dunn as Mrs. Bromley
• William Post Jr. as John Burgess
• Frederica Going as Mrs. Perry
• Helen Hawley as Mrs. Burgess
• Kathleen Comegys as Mrs. Wilson
• Robert Ober as Mr. Case
• Edith Gresham as Mrs. Case
• Walter Gilbert as Mr. Perry

Censorship

The film featured scenes of actual childbirth and this caused issues for the Hays Office. The filmmakers tried to get around the need for a Seal of Approval from the Hays Office by appealing directly to local and state censorship boards for approval to show the film in mainstream theaters.^[7][8] The film was banned in New York State in 1939 by a court ruling that scenes of childbirth were too indecent for public entertainment.^[8]

References

1. "The Birth of a Baby (1938)". Turner Classic Movies. Retrieved December 15, 2015.
2. Sartain, Geraldine (November 1938). "The Cinema Explodes the Stork Myth". The Journal of Educational Sociology. 12 (3): 142–146. doi:10.2307/2261881. JSTOR 2261881.
3. "Regent Theatre To Show "The Birth of a Baby"". The Ottawa Journal. Ottawa, Canada. June 9, 1942. p. 15. Retrieved December 15, 2015 – via Newspapers.com.
4. Ooten, Melissa (2014). Race, Gender, and Film Censorship in Virginia, 1922–1965. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books. pp. 153–155. ISBN 9780739190296. OCLC 892878763. Retrieved December 15, 2015.
5. The AFI Catalog of Feature Films:..The Birth of a Baby Retrieved November 20, 2016
6. "'Life' banned for "Birth of a Baby" pictures". Motion Picture Herald. 131 (3): 18. April 16, 1938. Archived from the original on April 27, 2016. Retrieved July 9, 2020.
7. Strassfeld, Benjamin (2013-08-18). "A Difficult Delivery: Debating the Function of the Screen and Educational Cinema through The Birth of a Baby (1938)". The Velvet Light Trap. 72 (1): 44–57. doi:10.7560/VLT7205. ISSN 1542-4251. S2CID 191794984.
8. Kirby, David A. (September 2017). "Regulating cinematic stories about reproduction: pregnancy, childbirth, abortion and movie censorship in the US, 1930–1958". The British Journal for the History of Science. 50 (3): 451–472. doi:10.1017/S0007087417000814. ISSN 0007-0874. PMID 28923130.

External links

• The Birth of a Baby at IMDb
• Synopsis at AllMovie