Soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and other social organs of coordinated charity are necessary expressions of mercy in an enlightened society today — a social advance linked directly to the visionary achievements of the 17th-century priest and philanthropic social reformer St. Vincent de Paul, played by Pierre Fresnay in Cloche’s luminous film, which won a special Academy Award in 1949. From his unwanted ministrations in an impoverished village gripped by fear of plague to his advocacy on behalf of convicts sentenced to grueling galley slave labor, the film highlights Vincent’s challenge to his world to a higher standard of mercy while persuasively cataloging various reasons most of us, now as then, fail to respond mercifully to poverty, sickness, or any kind of suffering: fear, fatalism, limited perspective, self-absorption, tribalisms of various kinds, and so on. — Steven D. Greydanus (2016)
Directed by: Maurice Cloche
Produced by: Viscount George de la Grandiere André Halley des Fontaines André Lejard Georges Maurer
Written by: Jean Anouilh Jean Bernard-Luc
Music by: Jean-Jacques Grünenwald Jean Dalve
Cinematography by: Claude Renoir
Editing by: Jean Feyte
Release Date: 1947
Running Time: 111
Language: French
Arts & Faith Lists:
2016 Top 25 Films on Mercy — #1
2020 Top 100 — #25