Wanted: A Baby

In 'Wanted: A Baby' (1919), the silver screen becomes a laboratory for a quixotic social experiment helmed by the irrepressible William Parsons. Bill, a man whose bachelorhood is portrayed not as a deficit but as a vibrant, albeit chaotic, badge of freedom, enters into a high-stakes wager that transcends mere financial gain. He bets his pride on a radical premise: that a single man can navigate the labyrinthine complexities of infant care with the same—if not superior—dexterity as a woman. The narrative unfurls as a frantic series of domestic skirmishes, where the protagonist’s hubris meets the visceral, unscripted reality of a baby's needs. Tom Bret’s direction captures the escalating absurdity of Bill’s plight, transforming a simple nursery into a battlefield of gender roles and slapstick ingenuity. It is a vivid, early cinematic exploration of the ‘new man’ archetype, struggling to reconcile the rugged individualism of the pre-war era with the burgeoning domestic pressures of a modernizing society.