White Banners is a 1938 Warner Bros. drama film directed by Edmund Goulding and starring Claude Rains, Fay Bainter, Jackie Cooper, Bonita Granville, Henry O'Neill, and Kay Johnson.
On a dreary, cold, and snowy day in a small town in 1919 Indiana, peddler Hannah Parmalee (Bainter) appears at the door of a kind couple, Paul Ward (Rains) and his wife, Marcia (Johnson), selling apple peelers.
Mr. Ward, a science teacher by day, is an inventor by night attempting to create something that will provide sufficient money for Marcia, their teenaged daughter Sally (Granville) and their new baby, to have some luxuries in life.
Another crisis arises, however, when wealthy Chicago businessman Thomas Bradford (James Stephenson) arrives to discuss financing of Ward's invention.
Hannah reveals to Ward that Peter Trimble is her son who she was forced to give up all those years ago because he was born out of wedlock.