The Black Stork
About The Black Stork
The film opens by tying crime and poverty to careless breeding. A doctor, played by Harry J. Haiselden as himself, refuses life-saving care to a severely disabled newborn and tells the mother God does not want the child to live. Other doctors object. The mother sees a vision of the child grown, unhappy, violent, and the father of disabled children. She agrees to let the baby die, and the picture ends with Jesus taking the infant’s soul while Haiselden watches.
Cast & crew
More about The Black Stork
Leopold Wharton directed. Haiselden, surgeon-in-chief at the German-American Hospital in Chicago, stars as himself. The story uses his refusal, in November 1915, to operate on Allan J. Bollinger, who died five days after birth. The title refers to a belief that black storks kill unhealthy hatchlings. After 1918 it was retitled Are You Fit to Marry?
Themes
Background
The Bollinger death in 1915 was already a national story before Wharton filmed it. The picture stayed in circulation, under a new title, for years after Haiselden’s death.
Making
Haiselden plays the doctor who withholds the operation, the role matching the decision he had defended in the newspapers after the Bollinger case.
Reviews
On first release it was called both badly made and morally offensive, even by people who had backed Haiselden’s refusal to operate.
Music
Silent.
Notes
- On 12 November 1915 Anna Bollinger gave birth at the German-American Hospital. Haiselden would not operate. Allan died on the night of 17 November. A coroner’s jury cleared Haiselden.
- The Chicago medical board later removed him from practice over his eugenics lectures and this film.
- Jane Fearnley, Allan Murnane, Hamilton Revelle, Elsie Esmond, Henry Bergman, and John Miltern are among the billed players.
- It was still being shown around the country in 1928, and under the later title in road shows as late as 1942.
- Haiselden died in Havana on 18 June 1919, of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Scenes
- Haiselden tells the mother God does not want the child to live.
- She sees the child grown, violent, with disabled children of his own.
- Jesus receives the infant while the doctor looks on.
