jeffoc_99 Review of The Black Stork

The Black Stork (1917)

Who ever thought that eugenics could be so much frigging' fun?

[7/10 · 4 February 2005]

Should deformed and/or retarded and/or terminally ill babies be left to die without medical intervention or supervision, for the sake of purifying the White Man's Sacred Genetic Map? Should they be saved from a life of sexual ostracizing and silent-era slapstick retribution? Should non-Aryans be spared the horror of living in a WASPy pre-civil rights existence with a lot of ugly Caucasian actors in flat pancake makeup? Was Margaret Sanger truly a feminist pioneer or a Nazi sympathizer in flapper drag? Have you ever seen such an impressive array of real-life genetic mutants since before the 1932 release of Tod Browning's "Freaks" (even if the surviving print is shorn of 30 minutes)? Should this peculiar, maudlin, hokey, but undeniably disturbing forgotten "hygenic" classic be revived and discussed/vilified in the same way as D.W. Griffith's "Birth Of A Nation" continues to be almost a century later? You folks out there are welcome to Play God and Be The Judge Of That. That is, if you can actually find a copy. "The Black Stork," under the 1927 re-release title of "Are You Fit To Marry?" (I think that's it) is a true curio: a cinematic Black Mark (ho,ho,ho) on the legacy of the Wharton Brothers, pioneers in cheap celluloid entertainment produced on the poisoned shores of Cayuga Lake in Ithaca. For more information (and maybe even a copy, if it's legal), contact Terry Harbin....find his e-mail by visiting the IMDb review of "The Lottery Man" (1916), another Wharton winner featuring Oliver Hardy in drag, auctioned off as a white-slave lover to the (un)lucky winner.