I dreaded seeing Johnny Belinda. A late-1940s weepie about a kindly doctor who teaches a deaf-mute girl how to communicate and then supports her after she's raped and gives birth... it seemed sure to be unbearable, one of those movies that serve more as a picture of what people thought was good at the time than a good movie. I was pleasantly surprised: it's a touching, moving film that takes its time and doesn't rely on strident melodramatics to tell its story.

The title character doesn't make his appearance until near the end of the film, so I'll address the rest of the cast first. Lew Ayres, looking a lot older and wiser than he looked in the great All Quiet on the Western Front, plays Dr. Robert Richardson, a kindly doctor who moves to a coastal Nova Scotia town to get away from unnamed problems. It's the kind of town where he's called out on a late-night emergency to deliver a cow, and where he's paid in trout-fishing privileges instead of cash.

On a visit to the farm of the taciturn Black McDonald (Charles Bickford), he meets and becomes interested in McDonald's daughter Belinda (Jane Wyman, Mrs. Ronald Reagan), a deaf-mute who serves as little more than a pack animal. People call her "dummy," and everybody thinks she's too stupid to learn anything. Especially critical is McDonald's sister Aggie (the great Agnes Moorehead), who cautions Robert to "stop puttin' those grrrand idears into her head" after he teaches the girl sign language and how to read lips. Her progress is amazing, and soon she's transformed from a dirty and overworked critter into a beautiful and vivacious young woman.

Wyman won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance, making her the first in a long line of actresses winning Oscars for not talking in sound films (Patty Duke won Supporting Actress for The Miracle Worker, and Holly Hunter won Best Actress for The Piano). She certainly does a good job: her expressive face, and especially her huge eyes, express a range of emotion that many actors can't achieve with words. I don't know whether it's Oscar caliber, but I haven't seen all of the other nominees from that category in 1948, so I can't tell if she was the best.

Belinda's transformation catches the eye of Locky McCormick (Stephen McNally), a local tough and ne'er-do-well who wants to marry Dr. Richardson's assistant Stella (Jan Stirling) because she's inherited a pile of money from a dead uncle. Locky's not averse to straying from his beloved, nor is he above raping Belinda when his pathetic entreaties—in a superbly creepy and well-done scene involving his attempts to play a violin for her—fail to win her over. She doesn't rat him out, and she seems to quickly recover from the attack, but soon enough there are signs that she's pregnant, a fact that Robert discovers when he takes her to a hearing specialist in the big city. Because Belinda won't name the man who attacked her, the townspeople quickly assume that Robert is the poltroon in question. Things get especially hairy when Locky realizes that the baby, named Johnny Belinda by his mother, is the product of his attack.

I expected a quaint, fearful film that would shrink from the very issues it wanted to address. The handling of the deaf-mute issue is a little kid-gloved, but the issues of rape and its aftermath are surprisingly daring. The actions taken by the townspeople "on behalf of" Belinda, whom they can't see as a human being, are especially grim, leading to the unexpectedly violent climax of the film. All is smoothly handled by jack-of-all trades director Jean Negulesco, who received his only Oscar nomination.

Speaking of Oscar nominations, this film almost set a record for futility. It garnered twelve nominations but only Wyman won. It was nominated for just about every category it could qualify for: Picture, Director, Actor (Ayres), Supporting Actor (Bickford), Supporting Actress (Moorehead), Screenplay (Irma von Cube and Allen Vincent), Cinematography (Ted McCord), Art Direction/Interior Decoration, Score, Sound Recording, and Editing. It lost Best Picture to Hamlet, which was indeed a better film, but the best film of the year was The Red Shoes.