The Last Child Brought a One-Child Policy Dystopia to Life Nearly a Decade Early
From 1969 to 1975, ABC put out weekly films. They functioned as TV pilots, testing grounds for up-and-coming filmmakers, and places for new and old stars to shine. Every month, Chloe Walker revisits one of these movies. This is Movie of the Week (of the Month).
Nine years before China introduced their One-Child Policy, an ABC Movie of the Week imagined what it could look like.
In 1971’s The Last Child, “somewhere in the not too distant future,” two rules have been enforced throughout America: only one child is allowed per family, and those over 65 are not allowed life-preserving medication. The tyrannical Population Control agency, headed by Agent Barstow (Ed Asner), is responsible for implementing both laws.
Karen (Janet Margolin) and Alan (Michael Cole) did have a daughter, who died soon after she was born. Population Control have decreed that in such circumstances, the cut-off allowed for having another child is for the first to have lived no longer than ten days. Their daughter made it 15. So, when Karen gets pregnant again, the two become fugitives, with their sole help coming from retired 72-year-old Senator Quincy George (Van Heflin).
Watching today, it does cross your mind how easily The Last Child could be co-opted as propaganda for the pro-life movement—there’s even a prophetic allusion to the favorite fallacious Trumpian talking point of “post-birth abortions.” And yet, throughout The Last Child, the dystopia lies not so much in the baby of it all, but in the way this government gets so closely entwined in the most private, personal areas of its citizens’ lives.
From the moment in the first scene where a police officer asks a woman with a small child in tow, “Could you open your coat?” (she has a baby bump, and is immediately hauled away), the invasiveness of their intrusion is rendered with a claustrophobic, itchy tangibility, like hot breath down the back of your neck. It’s beside the point that this government wants to enforce abortions rather than ban them; the lack of agency, the intrusion of a huge faceless entity into the most intimate facet of your being, is the true horror at the core of the movie.
Besides its eerie prescience, what’s so impressive about The Last Child is how it conveys this nightmare world with little more than two rules and a lot of gray rooms. The screenplay, by Peter S. Fischer (who would go on to co-create Murder, She Wrote with Richard Levinson and William Link) nicely balances specificity with the acknowledgment of the power of leaving the audience to fill in the gaps; though we hear details, such as things not being quite so bad in Canada and that domestic car production has been halted, we’re still left to imagine just what it was that made the world this way. The stifling bureaucracy, the depiction of the only communal spaces left being overcrowded subway stations and endless dingy offices, does as much to add to the dystopia as the hints of a horrible near-past event.
Cole and Margolin are fine, if not particularly memorable, as the couple at the center of the movie. The headline turn here comes courtesy of the Oscar-winning Heflin. A familiar craggy face during the Golden Age of Hollywood, Heflin starred opposite a host of legends (Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, Alain Delon, Gene Kelly…) over many years, never quite reaching that status himself, despite extraordinary ability; few others were as deft and textured while portraying basic decency. The Last Child would prove to be his last performance—he died three months before the MOTW first aired.
Although he was only 62 when he shot his final movie, he looked a decade older. That made him perfect for the role as the ailing senator, who depends on illicit insulin deliveries to survive in a world where anyone above 65 is solely meant to be provided palliative care. Determined to use the days he has left to do all the good he can, he puts the remainder of his life on the line for this young couple he’s just met.
What would seem like an extreme act of altruism for some, felt natural in the hands of a Heflin character. Rather than the couple he’s aiding, it’s Heflin who fills the role of the movie’s hero; he’s given a far greater history and interior life. He’s no bland saint, but a man with a proud track record of fighting the good fight, who is frustrated that the government he once served now considers him obsolete. Alan and Karen give him a chance to be of use again, and in the process, feel good about himself once more—it’s a generous act, yet not entirely selfless.
“You damned old fool and your illusions of longevity!” Quincy chides himself, as he accidentally breaks his last vial of insulin. Knowing Heflin would be dead before the film made it to air gives an extra potency to the senator’s facing of the abyss. Here, character and actor are very much in conversation. As such, though the narrative is primarily concerned with the desperate attempt to bring a new life into the world, there’s also the unmistakable air of elegy hanging heavy over the action. The Last Child is the ABC MOTW at its most existentialist, with all the main characters preoccupied by the meaning of a life, its beginning and its end, and what it means to live a good one.
We’ve talked a lot about old Hollywood actors turning up in ABC MOTWs, and how it was all too often perceived purely as a place where dignity would go to die. The Last Child shows that the opposite could also be true: This unlikeliest of platforms could provide the stars of old a chance to leave the stage a hero.
Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can read her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Podcast Review, and Paste.