The Bastard Life

Part 2 of a 3-part series on Adoption in American Film
by Marley Greiner maddogmarley@worldnet.att.net

            While the birthmother experience in film is easily defined, it is more difficult to find a clear bastard experience or identity.  While the bastard may be a staple of melodrama, and bastardy a popular topic in respect to the turmoil his or her untimely arrival may engender, the bastard is rarely the object of the film. Bastards may symbolize a crisis in culture or the economy or even stand for the hope of the future, but in practical terms they are poor players, their destiny formed by social forces beyond their knowledge or control.  Though they lead an exterior life, bastards often have no noticeable internal life.  They serve instead is the symbol of other people’s desires, fantasies and experience, and seldom act as fully realized characters. 

Bastards often have no known roots.  They are independent and self- reliant.  Bastards usually don't think about their origins, and biological parents usually do not intrude, except to cause trouble. Bastards, even while quite young, are subject to the frivolous, thoughtless or the criminal desires of others. Bastards sometimes serve as Betty Jean Lifton's “ghost child” (Penny Serenade , 1941) or something totally different than they were meant to be (The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers, 1946).  They are ephemeral—sort of floating around waiting to attach themselves to something or someone—or someone is waiting to attach themselves to them. By virtue of their lack of ties, especially if they are young, they are easily used and abused by authority figures (Broken Blossoms, 1919) or even peers who mark them out as “different.”—especially if they are an  inconvenience or a "mistake" (The Big City, 1948, Batman Returns, 1992).  Bastards are clever, possessing endless wit and energy with which they either please for their own gain (Kim, 1950) or simply survive, as in children's classics such as Cinderella and Oliver Twist, or in melodramas like Broken Blossoms and Mommie Dearest (1981).

Bastards in film may be categorized into several types, as seen below. Bastards tend to crossbreed, of course, and they usually show up in more than one category.  A talented and clever bastard, for instance, can still be an imperiled bastard.

Imperiled Bastards:  The most important imperiled bastard film is D. W. Griffith's tragic classic Broken Blossoms with its critique of racism, child abuse, and masculinity; a film that still shocks and moves audiences today.  Imperiled bastards show up regularly in less profound narratives: fairytales and classic children’s stories such as Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Oliver Twist, Kidnapped, Treasure Island, Cinderella, Snow White, Bambi, and Dumbo. They are standard characters in Depression-era films such as Wild Boys on the Road (1933), Dead End (1937), Boys Town, and contemporary gangster films such as Gloria (1980, 1998) and The Cleaner (1994), in which a precocious 12-year old, orphaned by a psycho DEA agent, is befriended by a professional assassin who reluctantly teaches her his trade.

 

Clever and Talent Bastards: Like the Imperiled Bastard, Clever and Talented Bastards frequently populate children’s literature and film.  While bastards such as Huck Finn and Jim Hawkins are traditional favorites,(Treasure Island has been made 11 times since 1912),  Shirley Temple is probably the most prolific bastard with at least 15 orphan-films to her credit. One clever bastard that is greatly overlooked is Kim with Dean Stockwell’s delightful and intelligent portrayal of the Kipling character, full of bastardly wile and wit.  Born into British privilege, but reared as a homeless native boy, Kim is intelligent, loyal, has an uncanny ability to turn a rupee—and is the prefect candidate for British intelligence and espionage.

 

Super Glue Bastards:  Super Glue Bastards are one of the prime characterizations of bastardy, and represent the ideal state of affairs for those who look to bastards for strength and the values of the bourgeois family.  Their origins, paternity, or other adoption issues are barely ever discussed by those who benefit from the bastard’s presence, i.e., the adoptive family. 

“Happy adoption films” such as Pollyanna (1920, 1960), Room for One More (1952), and nearly any Shirley Temple or Margaret O’Brien film, are examples of how the bastard’s mere presence creates community, friendship and family.  In fact, in the gloppy yet sometimes touching Penny Serenade, when social worker Beulah Bondi offers to give new parents Cary Grant and Irene Dunn the family history of their new baby girl, they refuse it outright with Grant proclaiming, “Since she’s willing to take a chance on us, we’re willing to take a chance on her”, as he runs out the door with her.

Shirley Temple, (also a Clever and Talented Bastard) is bastard who brings hope of a better system through her charm and talent. Shirley is repeatedly adopted by single men, old men, mean old women, soldiers, Mounties, and troupes of entertainers, and brings happiness to even the most disagreeable misanthropic character.  In Bright Eyes (1934) she is the object of a custody battle between an aviator and the crotchety uncle of the snooty couple she lives with. In Captain January (1936), she is adopted by a lighthouse keeper, and in Poor Little Rich Girl (1936) and Little Miss Broadway (1938) she is adopted by radio entertainers, and an agent with an entourage of boarding house show people respectively.

One of the more interesting films of this type is the post-war patriotic film The Big City starring Margaret O’Brien as the foundling Midge who is abandoned as a baby in a stairwell and found simultaneously by Robert Preston, a Protestant settlement house minister; Danny Thomas, a Jewish cantor; and George Murphy, an Irish Catholic cop.  Since all three want to adopt her, the judge decides that all three should have custody.  As she grows up Midge is teased by classmates who call her “just a mistake” and ridicule her because she’s got three fathers and no mother.  Believing that she’s in the way when two of her fathers fall in love with her teacher, she goes to the judge and tells him she wants to be sent to an orphanage.  Midge is what holds the three men together, and in the end, they settle their differences. In the final scene, with Midge sitting on a three-legged stool, they join together and sing “America the Beautiful.”  --blatant in its symbolism and near Rockwellian in its post-war ideology of brotherhood

 

Bad Bastards:  These most entertaining bastards often offend the more politically correct of the adoptee rights movement. In The Bad Seed (1956) charmingly icky Rhoda, when she’s not busy giving out baskets of hugs, knocks off kids and adults who annoy her as easily as other kids stomp on anthills. In that curious menage, Interview with the Vampire (1994), Claudia, created by Louis and Lestat, and reared as their daughter, turns into a blood-thirsty toddler, to the horror of her doting fathers.  While Bad Bastards are usually campy fun, even the most perverse liberal finds Michael in Natural Enemy (1997) hard to take.  Michael’s reunion begins when he bankrupts his birthfather, sleeps with his birthmother, then kills them both. He moves on to his birth mother’s home where he poisons her tea, causing her to miscarry, runs her husband’s business into the ground, murders a professional searcher, sodomizes his half-brother in a hot tub, kills his birthmother’s husband, and finally attempts to rape and kill his birthmother, only to be killed by her in self defense.  Dr.David Kirshner (of "Adopted Child Syndrome" fame) served as an adviser on this film, although he claims the script he was given was substantially different from the final cut.

 

Romantic Bastards include Lawrence Olivier’s legendary Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1939) and Audrey Hepburn in Daddy Longlegs (1955). Special Needs Bastards can be found in the form of a space alien baby in Enemy Mine ( 1985)  and the manimals  created by Marlon Brando in The Island of Dr.Moreau (1996). 

 

The Bastard Revealed:

While in real life the subject of one’s bastardy may be of great consequence, as we’ve seen, to average film bastards—the happy ones who keep the family together—it seems to mean very little.  In a few cases, however, the realization of one’s own bastardy can be a traumatic experience. The origins of Matt Masters's (John Wayne) obsession with the father who deserted his mother, his recent  return, and the influence the birth secret has on their mountain community forms the plot of Shepherd of the Hills (1941).  Cal Trask (James Dean) in East of Eden wrestles throughout the film over his questionable paternity and his role as the bad son.  In The Restless Years (1958) Melinda Grant (Sandra Dee) suffers humiliation and guilt over her illegitimacy.  In Peyton Place, Allison MacKenzie (Diane Varsi) has gone through life believing that her father died when she was two years old.  While she doesn’t remember him, each morning she kisses a picture of the man she thinks is her father. Her mother Constance (Lana Turner), the self-sufficient Fallen Woman, fights to keep her shame and secret from Allison and the good society of Peyton Place by nagging Allison about boys and proper behavior.  After a Fourth of July incident, however, when a snoopy, malicious neighbor informs Constance incorrectly that Allison was seen skinny dipping with geeky mama’s boy Norman Page, Constance blows up and tells Allison the truth about her parentage and accuses her of being “just like your father.”  As a result of the confrontation and the devastating effect that her bastardy has on her, a devastated Allison leaves for New York where she gets a go-fer job at a publishing house and pursues her writing career.  (In Return to Peyton Place, Allison, acting out her Bad Seed, has an affair with a married publisher).  Watching with a bastard eye, one wonders if Allison, after the shock has worn off, is more disturbed about the lifetime of lies fed to her by her mother rather than the actual fact of her bastardy. 

            If Allison thinks she has problems, she should meet Mary Hagen (Shirley Temple), the ultimate bastard gangster.   That Hagan Girl (1947), which was supposed to be Temple’s breakout film, is considered horrible by even the most diehard Shirley Temple fans and often appears in “Worst Film” lists.  It may fall into MST status simply because two great American icons, Shirley Temple and Ronald Reagan appeared together and dropped an egg the size of Seattle with it.  Yet, That Hagan Girl should hold an interest for those studying bastard films if for no other reason than the gourmet menu of adoptee dysfunctions it offers:  primal wound, identity and abandonment issues, shame, adoption lies, Bad Seedism, and possible Genetic Sexual Attraction.

             Mary Hagen, aka Mary Bates, lives in a small Ohio town where she agonizes over her illegitimacy and is shunned by most of the townsfolk.  All through her childhood she has heard stories that she’s the bastard product of a “demented heiress and a local war hero,” Tom Bates (Ronald Reagan.)  “Who am I?  Please tell me the truth,” Mary begs.  “How can you be somebody if you’re nobody to begin with?” Her foster mother dies, and then a boy attacks her in a corridor and causes a brawl since, as an adoptee, Mary must be fast.  Instead of the principal disciplining the boy, she goes to the school board, complains about Mary’s “kind” and gets Mary expelled. Upset, Mary runs away to Chicago and, when returned by the police, she finds herself the object of school gossip, especially in the locker room.  When a friendly teacher casts her as the lead in Romeo and Juliet, students are so hostile that she’s removed from the play.  Somewhere in this mess, putative father Tom Bates, now a lawyer, returns to town and falls in love with Mary (even though he’s reportedly her father) after he rescues her when she throws herself in the river.  Bates eventually informs her that she is not his daughter (a question that he could have cleared up years ago and didn’t) and, in what might be a little adoption-crazy Hollywood inside joke, tells her that she came from  orphanage in Evansville, Illinois (home of The Cradle—adoption agency to the stars).

Ronald Reagan detested That Hagen Girl and made repeated attempts to be released from his contract, complaining about the mock incest plot.  Reaction to the film was so bad at the sneak preview, in fact, that he was able to get his last line “I love you” excised from the final release.  Reagan wrote later, “Before release the line was edited out of the picture, leaving us with a kind of oddball finish in which we climbed on a train—Shirley carrying a bouquet—and left town. You are left to guess as to whether we are married, just traveling together, or did I adopt her?”