First of all, let me agree out of hand with "Showbizstuff", another reviewer, in adulation of Margaret O'Brien. O'Brien is a wonderful actress. Period. Regardless of her age, this wunderkind could have come out of the womb doing a scene from Shakespeare and it wouldn't surprise me at all. In film after film she can go from tears to grins to terror to tantrums, and make all of them totally convincing. She may have been a midget actress all along for all I know, because calling her a "child" actress and comparing her to Dimples Temple is totally unfair. O'Brien was a great actress, even when she was this high to a table top.
This is yet another vehicle for Margaret, and she makes the movie as always. But it just struck me as an incredibly strange theme for a war-era movie. In an age when we were fighting the Nazis (1943) here's a movie that shows American scientists doing a benign form of the horror the Nazi monsters did...experimentation with human beings. You can tell yourself that America didn't know, and you can tell yourself there's no connection with this innocent story of a baby raised from infancy to 6 years old by scientists in a lab and stories of Nazi brutalities against babies in the womb, their mothers and other small children (and adults). But the irony of the storyline set at the same time as these atrocities going on just put my teeth and stomach on edge and I couldn't get into the movie because of that right from the start. (And only gave it such a high rating because anything with Margaret O'Brien in it deserves that score for the acting alone, no matter how lame or creepy the premise.
The between-the-line messages are plentiful: since the child is from a less than desirable element...who else would give up their infant daughter unless there were questionable circumstances about her birth (the culture in which the movie is set seems to say)...that makes her suitable for experimentation. Being raised in a laboratory is preferable than being raised by her...racially...socially...???...inferior parents and she should be glad to have had that opportunity. "Foundlings" are (probably because of the above elements) de facto inferior to "wanted" babies and can be passed along to scientists for experimentation with no qualms or questions. All sad commentaries, along with the fact that such a plot was even thought of, that make it a queasy feeling, not a feel-good, movie for me.
This is yet another vehicle for Margaret, and she makes the movie as always. But it just struck me as an incredibly strange theme for a war-era movie. In an age when we were fighting the Nazis (1943) here's a movie that shows American scientists doing a benign form of the horror the Nazi monsters did...experimentation with human beings. You can tell yourself that America didn't know, and you can tell yourself there's no connection with this innocent story of a baby raised from infancy to 6 years old by scientists in a lab and stories of Nazi brutalities against babies in the womb, their mothers and other small children (and adults). But the irony of the storyline set at the same time as these atrocities going on just put my teeth and stomach on edge and I couldn't get into the movie because of that right from the start. (And only gave it such a high rating because anything with Margaret O'Brien in it deserves that score for the acting alone, no matter how lame or creepy the premise.
The between-the-line messages are plentiful: since the child is from a less than desirable element...who else would give up their infant daughter unless there were questionable circumstances about her birth (the culture in which the movie is set seems to say)...that makes her suitable for experimentation. Being raised in a laboratory is preferable than being raised by her...racially...socially...???...inferior parents and she should be glad to have had that opportunity. "Foundlings" are (probably because of the above elements) de facto inferior to "wanted" babies and can be passed along to scientists for experimentation with no qualms or questions. All sad commentaries, along with the fact that such a plot was even thought of, that make it a queasy feeling, not a feel-good, movie for me.