The First Legion

Plot

Fr. John Fulton, a Jesuit instructor in a seminary school, feels he has lost his vocation. A talk with his friend Fr. Marc Arnoux is no help. But on the night he plans to leave the seminary (and the Order) his old teacher Fr. Jose Sierra miraculously gets up and walks, to tell him to stay. The young, wheelchair-bound neighbor Terry Gilmartin regains hope a similar miracle might allow her to walk; her physician, Dr. Peter Morrell, the same one who attended Fr. Sierra, and who is in love with Terry, confesses that he had engineered Sierra's miraculous recovery, to Fr. Arnoux, but refuses his advice to tell the truth. The Jesuit seminary rector orders Fr. Arnoux to plead the validity of the miracle before the Vatican, in Rome. When his highly respected subordinate refuses, the rector dies of a heart attack. At that point Dr. Morrell admits his deception, in particular to Terry, who goes to the seminary chapel and, miraculously, gets out of her wheelchair, at the moment she prays for Dr. Morrell.

Cast

Restoration

The film was restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, with funding provided by The Louis B. Mayer Foundation and The Carl David Memorial Fund for Film Preservation; the restoration was publicly screened in March 2015.