A 1918 silent drama where love is forbidden and orphans are traded like stocks.
The first part is pathetic and shows Eleanor Hamlin (Edith Roberts) severing home ties with her grandparents to be "adopted" by a party of idle rich on the cooperative plan. The parties adopting her are single, and one of them, Beulah Page (Winifred Greenwood), has her own ideas on the subject of raising the young - these ideas absolutely precluding the main requisite, love.
Direction
Browning's grim fascination with societal freaks emerges.
Production
Surviving 47-minute fragment of presumed lost film.
Director
Tod Browning
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The 'cooperative adoption' concept reflects Progressive Era anxieties about institutional care versus scientific child-rearing.
Most of Tod Browning's silent output is lost; this surviving fragment was recovered from a Dutch archive in the 1990s.
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