Birthright (1951)
** (out of 4)
Chicken farmer John Lloyd (Boyce Brown) grows tired of his wife and her parents constantly yelling at him and putting him down. He decides to go to town and cool off with some beers but he ends up at the home of a waitress. The next morning John goes back to his wife to live out a perfect life but what he doesn't know is that the waitress had syphilis.
BIRTHRIGHT followed in the footsteps of MOM AND DAD and various other exploitation pictures that were sold to the public as educational pictures but looking back on them now we can see that they were just using that to show "shocking" footage and use frank situations without getting in trouble. Time has also shown that these movies were incredibly popular and made quite a bit of money for their producers who usually did these movies for dimes.
This one here is a pretty bad movie. The acting is laughable. The dialogue is even worse. The entire way the story is presented is rather stupid. The plot is also a mess as they pretty much have every scene run a minute and there's nothing that really connects anything as the film just tries to get the basic points of the film on screen. If we're going to be honest about this movie then there's no question that it's a horrible one. Yet, if you're a fan of these types of movies then you know their technical quality doesn't always reflect the entertainment value.
The entertainment value here is quite high because the story is just so stupid that you can't help but laugh at this poor chicken farm and his "chicken hunting" that gets him into trouble. The movie clocks in at just 51-minutes but half-way through we're given an animated warning sequence on the dangers of syphilis. Then, in the controversial moment, we see an actual live birth of a baby whose mother has the disease. Seeing an actual vagina and an actual birth in 1951 tells you how the producers tries to get people in. Not only that but we get graphic images of what syphilis can do, which is another way this exploitation film worked.
BIRTHRIGHT certainly isn't a good movie. However, as an exploitation film it works and it certainly keeps you entertained throughout its short running time.
