The performances by the principle actors-- Jane Wyman as deaf mute Belinda, Charles Bickford as her father, and Lew Ayres as the doctor-- are flawless, and the writing of their characters raises this film above the level of melodrama-- or, rather, almost does.
"JOHNNY BELINDA" is based on a true and tragic story that took place in on Prince Edward Island, back before the automobile. The movie (and the original stage play) radically fictionalizes one episode in the life of Lydia Dingwell-- rape and subsequent pregnancy--using it to make points about morality. The screenplay ends well before the rest of Lydia's story is told: she died in poverty, and is buried in an unmarked grave near a lot of other Dingwells in a cemetery in Bay Fortune, PEI.
Those details do not matter to the film, of course, which is fiction. No such harsh reality flavors the screenplay, but an understanding of hardship does. It is expressed, unfortunately, only by those three characters. All the rest of cast -- even Agnes Moorehead as Belinda's spinster aunt-- are reduced to playing stereotypes of the shallowest order.
I want to forgive it, because the movie was not an easy one to get through Hollywood's rose-colored lenses. No doubt the writers had to wrap the story of rape and murder in the most simplistic black-and- white terms possible, and the most pious. At one point, Wyman actually delivers the entire Lord's Prayer in sign language, surrounded by mourners, at her father's deathbed. Even her Oscar-winning performance could not lift that prolonged scene above the level of tedium.
Such compromises, of course, inevitably compromise the overall quality of the film. What could have been a great movie-- it rises to greatness because of Wyman in particular, and elements of the screenplay-- is more like an historic artifact of Hollywood as it struggles out of the censorship of the Hayes era. But "Johnny Belinda" is only step in the right direction-- a baby step following a rape.
"JOHNNY BELINDA" is based on a true and tragic story that took place in on Prince Edward Island, back before the automobile. The movie (and the original stage play) radically fictionalizes one episode in the life of Lydia Dingwell-- rape and subsequent pregnancy--using it to make points about morality. The screenplay ends well before the rest of Lydia's story is told: she died in poverty, and is buried in an unmarked grave near a lot of other Dingwells in a cemetery in Bay Fortune, PEI.
Those details do not matter to the film, of course, which is fiction. No such harsh reality flavors the screenplay, but an understanding of hardship does. It is expressed, unfortunately, only by those three characters. All the rest of cast -- even Agnes Moorehead as Belinda's spinster aunt-- are reduced to playing stereotypes of the shallowest order.
I want to forgive it, because the movie was not an easy one to get through Hollywood's rose-colored lenses. No doubt the writers had to wrap the story of rape and murder in the most simplistic black-and- white terms possible, and the most pious. At one point, Wyman actually delivers the entire Lord's Prayer in sign language, surrounded by mourners, at her father's deathbed. Even her Oscar-winning performance could not lift that prolonged scene above the level of tedium.
Such compromises, of course, inevitably compromise the overall quality of the film. What could have been a great movie-- it rises to greatness because of Wyman in particular, and elements of the screenplay-- is more like an historic artifact of Hollywood as it struggles out of the censorship of the Hayes era. But "Johnny Belinda" is only step in the right direction-- a baby step following a rape.