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This is the "inspiring true story of Edna Gladney, who devoted her life to
finding homes for unwanted infants." Edna has to deal with the suicide of her
foster sister and the death of her son and does this by establishing the Texas
Children's Home and Aid Society" which matches kids with adoptive families. It
was nominated for Best Picture which it lost, but did manage to win for "its
magnificent Technicolor interior decoration." 1941, 99 minutes, VHS
Here's a movie that's signed onto the pro-orphan agenda that certain special
interests groups continuously push in this country. It's one of those do-gooder
fairy tales where stuff like suicides and dead kids occur at convenient
intervals just so that our heroine can be inspired to new heights of
self-sacrifice while the audience is inspired to new depths of self-loathing
for ever firing up a movie about a woman who crusades to have Texas' law about
illegitimate kids having to be identified as such on birth certificates and
marriage licenses changed. Naturally, this is all presented as some sort of
discrimination and the folks from the good families that oppose any legislation
that would essentially legalize slutty behavior are depicted as narrow-minded
meanies who don't like kids. In fact, star Greer Garson practically sneers at
them when they say that the changes she demands would cause an outbreak of teen
pregnancy. Of course Greer has been dead for several years now so she doesn't
have to pay all those taxes to support all the little bastards (Try and pass a
law against me saying that Greer!) that us working fools with high moral
character and self control that goes beyond that of a common dog have to.
Really then,
one could look upon this film as an entry into the "end of the world" genre of
film since this little lady from Wisconsin pretty much sets in motion
everything that eventually became the undoing of this country only fifty years
later.  Supposedly all this Texas orphan stuff is based on a true story. See, there
was this woman down in Texas named Edna Gladney who was married to a guy who ran
a flour mill and she got all mixed up in trying to help out the orphans down
there and reforming the system. You're probably thinking two things: Thank
God I'm not an orphan and thank God I don't live in Texas. That's what I was
thinking for a good portion of the movie. You know what they say about Texas -
only two things come from there: steers and illegitimate bastard kids!
Seriously though, I'm sure that if you were an orphan and lived in Texas, this
Edna broad was the cat's meow. It's just that her life story isn't something
us normal people would ever want to watch a movie about. Now if she were some
sort of time travelling cyborg or hobbit on a quest or something then she might
merit a look see. Hollywood, even way back in the forties when people still
smoked casually on screen and black characters were usually porters, butlers,
and maids (you get all three in this movie, demonstrating what a liberal
forward thinking film it was) who shout stuff like "Deuces wild!" and "I'll
take you're bag, suh!" knew that they would have to make Edna's tale a bit more
sexy for the moviegoing public. (I also managed to find a picture of the real
Edna and I can report that when they signed up Greer for the role they
decided to make Edna a little more sexy as well because I think we all can tell
that Greer sure wasn't no
Susan B. Anthony in the looks department!) This Hollywoodization of Edna's
story meant that we needed to have Edna actually have some
motivation for why she turned all do-gooder and stuff, because we all know that
no one does that without some kind of past haunting them and forcing them
onward out of a misplaced sense of survivor's guilt. Things get off to a creaky start when we meet Edna and her idyllic existence in
Wisconsin. She has a sister named Charlotte who is actually a foundling (which
sounds like some type of orphaned deer) and they are both planning to be
married simultaneously. Shortly before the wedding though Edna meets Sam
Gladney down at the bank and he gets fresh with her by telling her that he is
going to marry her even though she is engaged to someone else and he is just
visiting from Texas. Sam is played by Walter Pidgeon and this movie marks the
first of eight pairings between him and Greer (see also Mrs. Parkington). He's
playing a fairly easygoing chap in this one, but was hampered by a lack of a
mustache that alternately made me think I was watching Mr. Bean or Lon Chaney,
Jr. I'll own up to the fact that I admired this guy's nads for
being so forthright with this dame even while her real fiancee was standing
right in front of them, but if you tried to pull any of this crap in real life
you'd probably be escorted from the premises by the local constable, at least
after every male related to the bride and groom had caved your head in with
their champagne bottles. Somehow or other he manages to weasel his way into
her heart and writes to her from Texas and comes back six months later to marry
her. Charlotte is also going to be married (I thought she was getting married
six months ago!) but there's a hitch to getting hitched when the parents of her
fiancee find out that she doesn't know who her daddy is. While that would be
something most of us would be glad of, back at the turn of the century this was
pretty much like having herpes or being French, because the next thing I know,
Charlotte is hauling ass off to her room to kill herself. Don't mourn for
Charlotte though because eventually her death would spur Edna to reform Texas'
laws against foundlings or something. This is certainly more than she would
have ever accomplished had she not offed herself.  This episode merely plants the seed from which these blossoms in the dust would
grow (ohhh, I hate myself so much!) because she and Sam go ahead and get
married, move down to Texas and start their own family. They have a son, a
prissy little thing in short pants and you immediately start to salivate since
you know he's marked for death (it's a rule of the universe that the only time
anyone has any interest in orphans and stuff like that is when their real kid
croaks and they can't have any more) and you're practically licking your lips
like the big bad wolf when granny takes him out for a ride in a horse drawn
carriage. Kids and horses in these movies mix about as well as pregnant chicks
and staircases. It only takes about twenty seconds for people to start
screaming and for a little kid-sized corpse to be Fed Exed back to the house.
Fast forward a few years and Edna is trying to cover the emptiness of her life
(when she had the first kid, the doctor said she would never be able to have
another due to the requirements of the plot) by hosting elaborate parties and
boozing it up. (It's a
lot cheaper to starve yourself and engage in self mutilation, but probably not
as cinematic, but I figure that Hollywood will make my life a lot more sexy
once they film it. Maybe give me a brother who died in the Nam or have me
engaging in pointless pit fighting contests in the far east to deal with the
pain of whatever problem they'll have me eventually crusading about.) Sam is
disturbed that his wife now sucks so he has their doctor drop off an kid
at their house for the night (What a cool husband!) to try and shake her out
it, but she just gets pissed. In a moment that shows some of the problems this
movie suffers from, the very next scene has Edna running a day care center!
There are some pretty choppy transitions in this one. Stuff just sort of
happens for no reason other than there were certain points they wanted to make
and
sometimes there were incidents that occurred that didn't even exist to set up
anything at all. (I'm thinking of a pretty lame and barely touched upon
blackmail
angle in particular.) Sam manages to die at an opportune moment as far as Edna's crusade goes. As he
literally lies on his death bed, he reveals that someone has purchased his new
grain processing method which should provide some cash for Edna and her little
brats. Then he pleads with her to hold him in her arms and he up and dies.
Classic death scene ripped right from such great dramas along the lines of General
Hospital or old movies from the forties. It was a nice moment of levity in an
otherwise deadly serious, socially overbearing film that trotted these kids out
periodically as tools to get Edna over as a patron saint of orphans with fever
and bad legs. When a woman shows up at her orphanage in the same situation as
Charlotte, right down to her suicidal ideations, she immediately heads down to
Austin or the Alamo or wherever these cowboys have their government and demands
the law be changed so that new birth certificates will be printed up. If I was
in charge, I would have said "sure thing Toots, but you're going to be the one
typing up five million birth certificates. Hope you packed an IBM Selectric in
there along with your moral outrage." She gets her own way and the movie ends
triumphantly with her giving away the one child she really loves more than all
the rest and continuing her orphanage even though she had her moment of doubt
and wanted to chuck it all for a normal life. Hey lady! Get down from there!
There ain't room enough on that cross for both you and Jesus! This is one of
those one dimensional glowing biographies of someone that Hollywood probably
patted itself on the back for making. As such, it's historical importance is
minimal and its entertainment value is nil. Garson and Pigeon do show us the
makings of why they would appear in seven other pictures together as their
scenes with one another are solid enough, but he goes and croaks and she gets
caught up
in being a tireless martyr and is there anything more tiresome than that? I
suppose I should be glad that the movie stopped when it did and didn't detail
the real-life Edna's efforts to get Texas' inheritance laws changed for adopted
kids. Bundle this one up in a blanket and drop it on the doorstep of your
local church in the middle of the night and just pretend it all was a bad case
of indigestion.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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