The Great Heart (1938)

In 1936, a US naval vessel travels from Hawaii at the behest of King Leopold III of Belgium to repatriate the body of Jozef De Veuster (Father Damiaan). Why? Well fifty years earlier he befriended a local population of lepers on the Hawaiian island of Moloka'i where only the sick were permitted to live. With bodies strewn in what passed from the streets, he dealt with a dissolute community that openly - and correctly - blamed the white man for bringing the ghastly disease in the first place. His priestly duties see him take charge of their future and in but a decade, the place has become a home for Christianity, hope and even running water. Just how long, though, can he survive before he too succumbs to this disease? When it does arrive, this man uses the news to improve the lot for his people - supplies arriving from all over the world to make their lives better and to offer them hope and medication for the future. Carey Wilson narrates this story and Tom Neal portrays this missionary without any dialogue and that didn't quite work for me. It's an interesting story but I found that the limiting nature of the photography brought little to what would have been a better radio broadcast that allowed us to use more of our own imagination. Still, it's a story worth watching of an illness the treatment of which hadn't really advanced since the times of Ben Hur. (PS: Father Damiaan was canonised in 2009).