Summary
Mist curls above a kirkyard where thistle-heads shiver like tuning forks: here, in a Fife hamlet compressed between salt wind and heather, Adam Harden—schoolmaster, psalm-chanter, unlicensed thaumaturge—presides over chalk-scented classrooms by day and candle-lit laying-on of hands by night. His son David, a shepherd who talks to sheep in Gaelic lullabies, loves Peggy Laughlin, ward of Sir Kent MacGregor, laird of a mouldering baronial pile where suits of armour sweat rust. MacGregor, bankrupt in soul if not in rents, schemes to weld Peggy to nobility; George Kyle—failed sawbones, nostrum-peddler, human foxglove—arrives with Meg Harper, a housekeeper whose smile could scour pots, claiming to be the lost heir of Lady Murrell, lately defunct beneath a marble effigy of weeping cherubs. Love, illness, incarceration and a final bolt of folk-magic ensue: Peggy wilts into a fever that smells of crushed laurel; doctors in tweed and terror shrug; Adam and David, clapped in the village tolbooth for vagrancy, are dragged beneath the baroque ceiling of the laird’s hall where candle stubs drip like slow verdicts. One touch—part father, part priest, part uncredentialed physician—and colour returns to Peggy’s cheeks the way sunrise re-invents stained glass. The impostors are unmasked; handcuffs clink against the same stone that once echoed with covenanting psalms; MacGregor, stripped of hubris, offers his niece not to title but to tenderness. The film ends on a cliffpath: sheep bells, gulls, two silhouettes merging into the Atlantic’s indigo roar—an image so fragile you fear it might dissolve between frames.
Synopsis
In an old Scottish village near Edinburgh, the schoolteacher, Adam Harden, is a lovable character, a faith healer who keeps people happy and well. His shepherd son David is in love with Peggy Laughlin, the niece of the town's man of wealth, Sir Kent MacGregor, who wishes her to marry a member of the nobility. Schemers George Kyle, an unsuccessful doctor, and his housekeeper, Meg Harper, try to bring about this marriage to benefit themselves by pretending that Kyle is the missing nephew of the deceased Lady Murrell. Peggy is in love with David, however, and falls ill as she is about to marry Kyle. Doctors cannot seem to restore her to health. Relenting, MacGregor has the faith healer Adam and his son David released from jail where he had them placed, and Adam cures Peggy. The schemers, Kyle and Meg, are found out and arrested, and MacGregor is now only too glad to give Peggy in marriage to David.
Review Excerpt
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There are films that arrive like stamped letters from a vanished continent, ink faded yet perfume stubbornly intact. Faith, a 1920 American one-reel wonder shot on location in grey-granite Scotland, is such a missive—its envelope postmarked Edinburgh but its soul addressed to anyone who still believes cinema can be incantation rather than commodity.
Watch how cinematographer Fred Herzog (later eclipsed by his German namesake) lets the camera linger on a hawthorn hedge at dawn: every droplet be..."
