Based on the contemporary drama by Karel Capek, and directed by the actor Hugo Haas, this film represents that time and its ideals, set in an imaginary country ruled by a war hungry dictator where a mysterious ‘white leprosy’ spreads. Only a scientist is able to create a cure to combat the epidemic, but he has strongly pacifist principles and he gives the dictator a condition: stop the war. Rather than helping him in his quest for peace, the people turn against the wise man; they kill him and disfigure his corpse.
Haas’s film was one “whose intentions went beyond each boundary of the cinematographic spectacle… A courageous work which would not have been fully appreciated when it first appeared on screen” (René Jeanne, Charles Ford, Histoire encyclopédique du cinéma, S.E.D.E., Paris 1953). His disconsolate conclusions reflected the downhearted mood of Capek,
who on the evening of Christmas Day 1938, while his country was in its last months of independence, died of a broken heart. The stage production of Skeleton on Horseback at the National Theatre had provoked attacks from the Berlin press, but Haas’s film gave rise to a German diplomatic intervention in the government in Prague, which resulted in the film being banned.

Ernesto G. Laura, Storia del cinema ceco- slovacco, in Il lm cecoslovacco, Edizioni dell’Ateneo, Roma 1960

In 1935 the threat of Nazi expansion could already be felt. The small countries bordering on Germany were extremely concerned and it was clear that world peace was at risk. This is the context in which Karel Čapek, the greatest Czech writer at the time, penned Bílá nemoc. According to the author the world can be divided into two parts, one half believing in human rights, democracy, peace and respect for human life, while the other opts for inhuman, idealised tyranny, hegemony and expansion, fêting violence and reducing mankind to the level of an object. In his film Haas plays the hero, Doctor Galén, who succeeds in finding a cure for the white plague. The stage production and the film were a serious warning about the risk of a Nazi invasion.

Luboš Bartošek, Le cinéma tchèque et slovaque, Ed. du Centre Pompidou, 1996