When Dawn Came

Lee Shumway is a brilliant young doctor. His practice is in the slums, and he has a specialty as an eye surgeon that is well exercised. One day, novelist Kathleen Kirkham is driving through the slums, looking for new subjects for her books. She knocks down a child, who would have died, save for Shumway's expertise. She persuades her fiancee, William Conklin, to take him on in his society practice. Shumway, enamored of the lady goes along. But her lack of interest in him and a guilty conscience leads him to drink. Eventually he leaves. Unlike other drunk doctors, he stops well short of the South Seas. Instead, he winds up at San Juan Capistrano, where blind girl Colleen Moore intrigues him. His old parish priest, James Barrows, urges him to find G*d and his profession again, but Shumway has turned atheist. To top it off, Miss Kirkham drives up, looking for novelty for her novels, and finds Shumway.

The performances are pretty good for 1920, and certainly the shots of the Mission are quite lovely. While the story of faith was less compelling to me than it would have been to a contemporary audience, it's good to see Miss Moore with her hair unbobbed. Shumway is also pretty good. By the 1930s he would be reduced to secondary roles in B westerns and uncredited bits in A movies.

Despite some bubbling in the copy I looked at, it was in pretty good shape, and the translation of the Dutch titles -- it was another movie rediscovered at the Eye Museum -- is excellent.