"She can't hear ya. She's deef-and dumb." This is how we are introduced to Belinda by the father who loves her; in the community at large, she is known simply as "the Dummy." Johnny Belinda is a classic melodrama of small-town hypocrisy, a poignant plea for tolerance using disability as a metaphor for difference. Yet it is also very much about a specific disability-deafness-and the wrong assumptions about people with hearing impairments that cause a community to cruelly isolate them. Stylistically, it takes an unusual twist for a melodrama in attempting to convey emotion visually rather than verbally. The film is set in a remote Nova Scotia fishing village; immediately, director Jean Negulesco cuts through the implied romanticism of the locale with a documentary sequence that locates the action in an economically troubled community. Though beautifully shot, what we are about to see is not likely to be pretty. Belinda (Jane Wyman in an Oscar-winning performance), the daughter of a reclusive mill owner (Charles Bickford), lives out her family's stark isolation in the extreme; without language, she is assumed to be lacking in intelligence and feelings as well. From an idealistic doctor (Lew Ayres), new to the village, she learns sign, speechreading and writing (with a rapidity reserved for the screen), and her family learns that she is a sensitive human being. When she is raped and impregnated by the local bad boy, she becomes vilified anew in this town without pity ("I could almost feel sorry for her-it's a good thing she can't think or feel"). This compelling and well-intentioned film nevertheless falls into a number of stereotypical impressions of deafness. Among them is the incorrect notion that to be deaf is to be silent. Wyman's tender portrayal of Belinda, even at film's end, borders on the feral. Thus the point-of-view and the condescension of the good Doctor Richardson (the stereotype of the nondisabled catalyst) is adopted by the film itself; finally, this is his story.