White Disease

This top work of art by actor and director Hugo Haas is a film adaptation of an allegorical play by Karel Čapek, which he had mastered as a then 36-year-old artist already on the theatre stage. As a screenwriter and director, Haas fulfilled a humanistic concept that in 1937 strongly resonated in a Europe engulfed by Nazi aggression. In the allegorical narrative, Haas plays the accomplished physician Galén, who discovers a cure for a disease known as "the white sickness". But he refuses to reveal the cure to the malicious Marshal (Zdeněk Štěpánek), who is waging a war of conquest on a neighbouring country... Unlike Čapek's novel, the film adaptation has a happy ending, connected to the figure of an ally of Galén's country – Dr. Martin (Jaroslav Průcha). Moreover, Haas's contemporary finale further emphasises the moral responsibility and redemptive role of intellectuals during dramatic, historic times.