A Film Canon

Johnny Belinda eccentrically condenses melodramatic female disempowerment into the figure of Belinda (Jane Wyman), a deaf-mute raised by her father (Charles Bickford) and aunt (Agnes Moorhead), in the remote Nova Scotian town of Cape Breton, and poised between the arrival of a beneficent doctor (Lew Ayres) and a local personification of rape (Stephen McNally). Although this makes for a fairly predictable, occasionally implausible narrative, it does give rise to a series of memorably nuanced performances - particularly from Wyman herself, who manages to imbue Belinda with both the naive vulnerability of a newborn foal, and an ambiguous depth that makes the doctor's project of socialisation and education particularly transformative, as well as redeeming the saccharine connotations of his role, around which the narrative implausibilities tend to gather. Similarly, cinematographer Ted McCord manages to imbue the Nova Scotian landscape (actually northern California) with the stark, threatening reminder that its beauty is the mere flipside of the insularity responsible for Belinda's crisis, encapsulated in the tragedy enacted on the cliff adjoining her farm, as well as the disorienting beauty of the Nova Scotian accent itself.