THAT MAN IS PREGNANT! (1972)
aka The Broad Coalition
Article 5230 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-16-2016
Directed by Simon Nuchterm
Featuring William Reilly, Anita Morris, Sloane Shelton
Country: USA
What it is: Pregnant man comedy

A cop’s girlfriend becomes involved with a women’s liberation group, and it complicates his life. When he’s sent to infiltrate the home of the women’s lib group, he becomes an experimental subject for one of the residents…

This is the third comedy I’ve seen about a pregnant man for this series. Personally, I’m surprised there are so many. Sure, it does have a few comic possibilities, but I think a single episode of a thirty-minute TV sitcom would be enough to exhaust them; I don’t think the concept has enough going for it to fill a single movie, much less three. Maybe that’s why the pregnancy angle doesn’t come into play in the movie until it’s almost two-thirds over; up to that point, it’s mostly peppered with scenes with the cop and his girlfriend, the cop and his fellow cops, and the girlfriend and her friends in the feminist organization. I’m not surprised at the feminist angle in the movie; after all, the whole concept of a pregnant man seems like a feminist dream designed to cause a man to understand what a woman goes through. However, I’d hardly call this a feminist movie; the members of the women’s lib organization are portrayed to these eyes as buffoons, and the lesson they intended to teach is largely there to be exploded. I do somewhat admire (from a distance) the style of the movie, as it feels as if much of the dialogue is improvised in a Robert Altman style; unfortunately, it doesn’t do it very well and the end result is a mixture of the obvious and the merely odd. I wonder how many more of these movies I’m destined to see.