# WG sci-fi movie, or was I just hallucinating?



## chubsixtysix (Feb 20, 2016)

I'm driving myself nuts  searching for an old black and white weight gain sci-fi movie. Can anyone help me find it? Please.

I have no idea what the title was, but the plot was basically that all the men on earth became infertile due to plague or atomic bomb, and, the only way women could become pregnant was to be constantly fed and gain weight. Most of the action took place in a weight gain/feeding hospital/clinic. The doctors had to convince a reluctant woman to let them feed her. 

I swear. I remember watching it one rainy weekend afternoon in maybe 1971 or 1972 in upstate New York. It was my first FA memory and it's too bizarre for my little-kid brain to have dreamed up.

Anyone??


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## Mac5689 (Feb 21, 2016)

That sounds like an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Hour or something to do with Alfred Hitchcock.

If it is the Hitchcock episode, it was that all the men had been killed off by a man made disease, and the woman took over and made a class system of life where the women who were in the mother class were just able to have babies and had become fat.


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## chubsixtysix (Feb 22, 2016)

omg, THANK YOU!!!!

That is exactly it! Like I said, I was pretty little (6 or 7) when I saw it, so I guess an hour of Hitchcock qualified as a movie in my mind. With your excellent re-direction, it was easy for me to find that I am remembering season 3, episode 11 of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour, 1964, titled "Consider Her Ways."

The IMDB gives the following summary:

"Dr. Jane wakes to find herself in an obese body, having just given birth to her fourth baby, and is called "Mother Orchis" and "Mother 417" by an all-female medical staff. The other Mothers, all of whom are corpulent and much larger than their helpers, the Servitors, tell Jane that there are no men, their only responsibility is to give birth, and Mothers neither read nor write. Jane, however, remembers her past life as a physician and wife, so two policewomen try to arrest her for "reactionism." The Doctors refuse to surrender her, and send her to sick bay, then to Laura, the historian. Laura explains that all of the men died decades ago, when a Dr. Perrigan developed a virus to control the rat population, but the strain mutated, killing all male humans, but sparing females, who were immune. Now only women survive, and they are sorted at birth into four classes--Doctors, Mothers, Servitors, and Workers--and raised in learning centers. When Laura tells Jane that she will now receive an hypnotic treatment, a drug-induced amnesia to remove all of her memory, she becomes hysterical, and returns to her earlier world. She is in the office of Dr. Hellyer, her boss and the Chief of Staff at her hospital, who reminds her that she volunteered to test a new narcotic, Sonadrin, which apparently took her to the fantastic matriarchal world from which she just escaped. She discovers that Dr. Perrigan is a real biologist, who is working on a myxomatosis strain to exterminate brown rats. She meets Perrigan and tries to convince him to discontinue his project, but he refuses, so she shoots him, lights a fire using all of Perrigan's research notes, and burns down his laboratory. She is tried for murder, but refuses to plead insanity, and insists that her sacrifice is worthwhile, since she is saving humanity from a terrible future. Then her attorney, Max Wilding, tells her that Perrigan has a son, another Dr. Perrigan, who promises to complete his father's work." http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0394029/

One reviewer describes it in a way that jives a little better with my young impression:

The Most Bizarre Episode in the Entire Hitchcock TV Series?
8/10 | Keith Lucas | 27 Jul 2006
Warning: May contain partial spoilers!!!
"Consider Her Ways" begins bang in a nightmare state, with no warning or explanation beforehand: A woman (Barbara Barrie) awakens in a hospital maternity ward to find herself in a dystopian society she doesn't recognize. It's a quasi-totalitarian state in which an educated class of doctors and police oppress an illiterate class of servants and women whose sole function is to be "mothers"--to crank out babies that are taken away from them immediately and which the "mothers" never see. Though the "mothers" are to some extent coddled and pampered, they are also oppressed by being grotesquely overfed and kept under sedation. Adding to the strangeness of the society, all the members of both classes--oppressors and oppressed--appear to be women. There are no men anywhere. Our protagonist's attempts to convince others that she is not a "mother" but Dr. Jane Waterleigh, a physician herself with a husband but no children, are met with shock or disbelief--until she is taken to see Laura (Gladys Cooper), an elderly historian. Laura remembers her grandmother telling her about a society, long ago, that contained men.
Things are not as they appear to be in this Hitchcock episode, but what makes it more bizarre than most--and peculiarly memorable--is that the explanations don't even begin until 40 minutes in. For the first 40 minutes, the viewer is just dumped into an alternate reality, without preamble, and left to find his own way. The grotesquerie of the alternate reality brings "Consider Her Ways" closer in tone to one of the farther-out "Twilight Zone" episodes than to most of the Hitchcock series, but it's quite gripping, contains a neat (if unnecessary) extra twist at the end, and is very well acted by Barrie and Cooper, playing the only two characters who really matter."


Now all I need to do is find a copy of it somewhere to see how well I like it as an adult.

Thanks again! You have no idea how much this has been bugging me.


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## maltesefalcon (Feb 25, 2016)

You realize this is an allegory to a bee colony yes?


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## chubsixtysix (Feb 26, 2016)

> You realize this is an allegory to a bee colony?



Definite feedees as queen bees, yes. I quite like that... queen bee feedee.

Also ants, apparently. According to Wikipedia the "Consider Her Ways" title is "from Proverbs, Chapter 6, verse 6: "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise"."

Still, I think I like Queen Bee a bit better. Bees are cuter and they make honey.

ALSO, for all you wg story readers, there is a book. The Hitchcock episode was an adaptation of a 1956 science fiction novella by John Wyndham. It was published as part of a 1961 collection with some short stories called Consider Her Ways and Others (where it forms over a third of the book). I'm searching for this book, too, so if anyone can find it online, please post a link.


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## RVGleason (Feb 26, 2016)

Here's a link to the original story:

https://freeditorial.com/en/books/33534/downloadbook?format=.pdf


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## chubsixtysix (Feb 27, 2016)

and here is a link to the tv episode:
http://www.watchseries.li/link/1447820


So, wow. Erm. Yeah. Not quite how I remembered it. With the blow-up-doll fat suits and all, the written story holds up better to time than the Hitchcock episode. (Not to criticize Hitchcock. The episode was creepy and powerful and thought provoking; just limited by budget and technology and comparison to today's production possibilities.)

The story is chock full of feminist, fascist allegory. Kind of Le Femme 1984, so to speak. Really, a very interesting social commentary, but I think most of that was way over my little kid brain at the time.

The thing I found interesting at the time -- the kernel of kink that stayed with me so long -- was the idea that it was the job of these enormous, beautiful women to lie around being pampered and fed. It was the trays of food with ice cream, whipped cream and milk shakes that made their impression on me. It was a wondrous, inspiring thought then, and for me it's still pretty appealing. 

It would be a great starting point for a feeder au, but I think I'd like it better in a world that hadn't exterminated all men like rats. I'd be interested to know if anyone has any ideas on how to set up the premise without exterminating all the men?


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## missourifat (Mar 5, 2016)

This is one of those tv episodes or movies, that would benefit with modern special effects. 
One way of keeping the men in the story, would modify them , so they could mate only once, but it wouldn't kill them, since the story is modelled on the bee hive.


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