Charles Boyer gives one of his finest dramatic performances in this engrossing account of a Jesuit priest who questions the occurrence of a miracle in his seminary and encounters opposition from very high places. No sooner has Boyer convinced an agnostic doctor (Lyle Bettger) to make public the medical facts behind the mysterious cure of an aged priest, than a young woman (Barbara Rush) with a broken back but unbroken faith, precipitates a miracle that is far less explicable. “I wanted the picture to be very ironical,” Douglas Sirk has said, “...There is a miracle that is not a miracle, but because of it a lot of things happen to this little monastery, and then God says, ‘Now I'll send them a real miracle....'” Adapted by Emmet Lavery from his play, which opened on Broadway 50 years ago this year, the script is concerned with a number of themes dear to Sirk--not only with the absurd nature of faith, but with its relationship to the masses and to the individual believer (and doubter). This particular monastery is filled with unlikely priests--including the droll William Demarest and an all-too-human Leo G. Carroll.
“I have always been interested in religion,” Sirk says, “even though I haven't been to church for decades.... I see religion as...a pillar of this society, if a broken pillar...an ingredient of bygone charm--charm in the original sense of the word: sorcery.... God and gods and religious ideas reflect the social activities of the worshipper...The First Legion, relating religion and the absurd (the miracle) is to be understood in this way.” (in Jon Halliday's Sirk on Sirk)