The Keys of the Kingdom

The Keys of the Kingdom (1944) is a Hollywood epic drama you can watch online on iFILM. Gregory Peck — in one of his earliest major screen roles — plays Father Francis Chisholm, a Scottish Catholic priest whose life spans five decades of failure, stubborn faith and unlikely grace.

Chisholm is not the church's favourite. He gets passed over for promotion while his boyhood friend rises through the hierarchy. Then he's sent to the remote Chek-Kay district of inland China to build a mission where almost nobody wants one. He encounters disease, poverty and a civil war that puts his small compound directly between two armed factions. What holds him there is harder to articulate than conviction. The film, based on A.J. Cronin's 1941 novel, takes its 137 minutes to try to find the words.

Peck's Academy Award nomination for Best Actor came from this role, and the performance justifies it: there's a quietness in how he plays the character's setbacks that most young actors would have overworked. Thomas Mitchell, Edmund Gwenn and Vincent Price round out a strong cast. Watch The Keys of the Kingdom (1944) online on iFILM.