Film Comment: The Greatest Gift

     In The Greatest Gift (1942), Bartholomew, a juggler (Edmund Gwenn) who is traveling to a fair in which he is to perform, becomes sick and is taken and nursed back to health by a group of kindly monks at a remote monastery.

     The monks are busy making gifts for an upcoming ceremony to honor the Virgin Mary.  The destitute juggler wants to participate in the offerings to the Virgin but the only things of value he possesses are his juggling pins, which are ridiculed as totally unacceptable by two of the fathers (Hans Conried and Lumsden Hare).  Bartholomew decides to give Mary a different gift.

     Protestants will be bothered by the Mary worship and the ending of this film is truly hokey, but it makes a valid point.  What God wants is not our things; what He wants is us.