Plot
Mom and Dad tells the story of Joan Blake (June Carlson), a young girl who falls for the pilot Jack Griffin (Bob Lowell). After being sweet talked by Griffin, she has sex with him. The girl requests "hygiene books" from her mother Sarah Blake (Lois Austin); however, the mother refuses because the girl is not yet married. The girl later learns from her father Dan Blake (George Eldredge) that the pilot has died in a crash. She tears up a letter she had been writing to him, and lowers her head as the film fades into intermission.
The film resumes at the point when the girl discovers that her clothes no longer fit, sending her into a state of despair. She takes advice from her teacher, Carl Blackburn (Hardie Albright), who had previously been fired for teaching sex education. Blackburn blames her mother for the problem, and accuses her of "neglect the sacred duty of telling their children the real truth." Only then is the girl able to confront her mother.
The film then presents reels and charts that include graphic images of the female anatomy and footage of live births - one natural and one Caesarian. In some screenings, a second film was shown along with Mom and Dad, and contained images portraying syphilis and venereal disease. Mom and Dad is believed to have had a number of endings, although most typically concluded with the birth of the girl's child, sometimes stillborn and other times put up for adoption.
Read more about this topic: Mom And Dad
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)