A weird one to watch post the removal of ‘Roe V Wade’, ‘Tomorrows Children’ is a Health/Scare film revolving around a potential dystopic future in which women can be sterilized simply for being criminals or having a family tree containing faulty genes.

The film itself came about as a bit of a warning piece as World War 2 was gearing up as Nazi Germany had began to impose sterilization on criminals and people with disabilities as a form of eugenics. This docu-drama(?) is basically taking this initial awful law change to it’s most over the top dramatic conclusion.

Im not going to lie, at a time now where women in the US and the UK have to fight tooth and nail for the right to be sterilized, Its quite interesting to see a film that plays on the opposite scenario, in which women fight for their right NOT to be.

However, the film itself wasnt really my cup of tea, the script (following a young woman who wants to start a family being ruled unfit to breed because of poor genetics in her family tree and forced into Sterilization) could have had the potential to be a real emotional journey and a good philosophical piece. Unfortunately; this film was made during the hayes code. So instead the majority of the script is the woman dispairing over the choices of the court while several men run around repeatedly saying ‘This is lunacy! we’ve got to stop it!’ With the end result being a rushed happy ending with noting of consiquence gained or lost.

the pacing is sluggish, the tone is overly censored. Its a surface level film that doesnt really offer much past its initial text crawl as we spend 55+ minutes with bland and uninteresting one note characters who really dont get up to much.

In fact, the main reason I rated this one more than 1 star is because, for a health/scare film from the early 30’s. This one actually doesnt look to bad, theres some decent cine on show with some interesting lighting and shadowing across the runtime, sequences are nicely cut together with some interesting experimentaiton on crossfades at times. and the Direction shows a clear competency for film making at a time when it wasnt *quite* as common knowledge as you’d think.

It looks nice, but it’s surface level interpretation of the issue combined with a general atmosphere of ‘Whataboutary?’ just makes this thing fall flat. It’s great reference material if you ever want to show off visually the best elements of 30s health movies. But as something you’d actually consiously choose to sit and watch, you can do so much better quite honestly.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/tomorrows-children/