Monsieur Vincent

Seventeenth-century France. Vincent de Paul arrives as a country priest in a town in the middle of a plague. Doors are shut in his face; nobody trusts him. What he sees there changes him: poverty itself works like an epidemic, and the church is not looking at it. He goes to Paris and starts raising money at court and in the houses of the rich. He founds two orders, one for abandoned children and one for the sick and for prisoners. What he leaves behind at his death is an organisation. Maurice Cloche directs, with Pierre Fresnay as Vincent. A hundred and eleven minutes. Jean Anouilh was among the writers of the dialogue. In 1949 it received the Academy's honorary award for a foreign film, and it was also honoured at Venice.