Posted 1:54 PM by Gene

American movies didn’t wait for Angelina Jolie and Michael Moore to develop a social conscience. One of the sobering lessons of the new anthology from the National Film Preservation Foundation, “Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film 1900-1934,” is that the pictures of the early 20th century were in many ways more open to the social and political world: people struggle to make a living, fight against disadvantages and prejudices and are confronted with confounding moral choices on a daily basis.

Words like "social conscience" are bound at first to make a Paper or Re-CORD skimmer do a slow burn as he steels himself for the inevitable PINCHIAN punchline, but then we go on:

None of the work here — the third in the “Treasures From American Film Archives” series, which began in 2000 — reflects the eerie, almost complete disengagement from social reality reflected in a contemporary film like this summer’s hit comedy “Knocked Up.” There is no recourse to cute circumlocutions like “smashmortion” in “Where Are My Children?,” a 1916 feature in which a stodgy district attorney (Tyrone Power Sr.) discovers that his wife and her society friends have become addicted to easy abortions (they prefer reclining on sofas and devouring bonbons to rearing children), even as he prosecutes a doctor who has dared to distribute birth control literature among the poor. (“Where Are My Children?” was directed by Lois Weber, one of several female filmmakers who prospered in the early silent period.)

When the infantile hero of “Knocked Up” decides to reform and become a responsible parent, he manages to land a job, sign a lease on a fabulous apartment and conjure up roomfuls of furniture on credit — all during a single montage sequence. This despite being an undocumented alien (a Canadian!) with a drug habit but no college degree or work experience.

For all the ad-blurbists' idiot babbling, this piece makes painfully clear movies used to be far more adult than they are now, even as they've become adult in the porno sense only.