Summary
A chiaroscuro parable of sainthood soured by lucre, When Dawn Came drags its messiah-in-overalls, Dr. John Brandon, from the candle-smoke hovels of the city’s bowels to the blinding sodium glare of easy wealth, then plunges him into opium-tinged desolation among cactus and psalm-chants. One midnight collision—Norma Ashley’s polished roadster kissing a child’s ribs—ignites a chain reaction: the healer’s Hippocratic coat is swapped for a silk waistcoat stitched by her fiancé, the suave Dr. Thurston. Coins clink, champagne fizzes, yet laughter behind velvet drapes slices deeper than lancets. One scalding instant of humiliation and Brandon’s knuckles paint the drawing-room crimson; Norma’s throat bears the violet signature of his despair. Ruin trails him like incense: laudanum, rot-gut whiskey, rail-yard ash, until a sun-cracked mission town offers splintered pews and a blind girl, Mary Harrison, whose unseeing eyes pour out unearned absolution. In a makeshift operating theatre scented with sagebrush and candle wax, Brandon opens her lids to first light; simultaneously his own vision, long occluded by arrogance, flickers alive. Norma reappears, a ghost of ambition in Parisian tweed, but the prodigal merely closes the door on the gilded past, choosing the hush of dawn and a woman who once saw him without sight.
Synopsis
Dr. John Brandon, who cares for charity patients in the slums, is thrown together with writer Norma Ashley when her car strikes a boy whom Brandon treats. Under Norma's influence, and against the wishes of his friend Father Farrell, Brandon leaves the slums and becomes the partner of Dr. Thurston, who, unknown to Brandon, is Norma's fiance. Now prosperous, Brandon flies into a rage when he hears Thurston and Norma ridiculing him, and proceeds to beat Thurston and choke Norma to within an inch of her life. Taking to alcohol and drugs in his grief, Brandon becomes a derelict and goes out West to a mission town, where his loud proclamations of atheism provoke the wrath of a saloon crowd, from which his old friend Farrell rescues him. Farrell, now working in the Western parish, gradually restores the faith of Brandon, who falls in love with Mary Harrison, a blind girl who prays continually for her sight. Brandon performs an operation on Mary's eyes and her sight returns. Norma, who has found Brandon in the parish town, cannot persuade him to return to the city or to leave Mary, who accepts Brandon's love.
Review Excerpt
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There are silents that whisper, and there are silents that roar; When Dawn Came arrives somewhere between a cathedral bell and a slap, its intertitles flickering like magnesium flares over a battlefield of conscience. Viewing it today—through the brittle mask of a 1970s MoMA print—feels akin to stumbling upon a lost Caravaggio in a pawn shop: the pigments bruised, but the chiaroscuro still capable of scalding retinas.
Mrs. Hugh E. Dierker’s screenplay, once dismissed in Motion Picture Classic ..."
