I had heard a little about Black Narcissus, namely that is it something of an erotically-charged movie set in India and featuring a group of English nuns. Granted, it’s from 1947, so there’s probably more implied eroticism than anything else. Likewise, given it’s from 1947, I somehow suspected that many if not most of the cast would not be Indians. I was actually right about that as the lone Indian I could pick out was Sabu as a local prince. So yes, there’s some brownface.
That said, I was somewhat surprised to learn the movie was actually shot in England, a factoid dropped at the beginning of the movie from the TCM host segment. Yeah, a lot of this movie looks like it was shot indoors with matte paintings, but they’re actually very impressive matte paintings. What about the movie itself though?
Young nun Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) has just been given a new assignment. Her order, the Sisters of Mary, are setting up a school/hospital in an abandoned fort in the Indian Himalayas. She’s to take four other nuns with her. The older Sister Phillipa (Fiona Robson) will do the gardening and produce their vegetables. Sister Briony (Judith Furse) will work in the infirmary. Tenderhearted Sister Honey (Jenny Laird) will teach lace-making to young girls. And Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) will teach the younger children lessons. Sister Ruth, at least, may be on probation as someone who seems to be a little emotionally unstable and may not stay with the order anyway. Clodagh will be the youngest sister superior in the order’s history, and the new mission is sure to be a challenge. Sure, the local prince known as the Old General (Esmond Knight) seems welcoming, and his nephew the “Young General” (Sabu) wants to take lessons there for himself, but other locals seem less welcoming and the general agent for the British government Mr. Dean (David Farrar) seems to think the nuns will not fair any better than the monks who tried to set up shop at the same location before and ended up leaving after a few months.
Dean may be right. Though he has a very condescending attitude towards the locals, there’s something about this location that seems to be getting to the different nuns, particularly Clodagh who keeps remembering a failed romance she was involved in before taking her vows. However, the passions the nuns are feeling are not always of an erotic nature: Sister Philllipa, for one, finds herself planting flowers instead of vegetables. Sister Honey is just really attached to the local children. But Sister Ruth finds herself feeling an intense attraction for Mr. Dean, and Sister Ruth wasn’t the most emotionally stable person to begin with. Can these women control themselves or will this spot get to them as it has to everyone else that has tried to settle there?
Let me just say first that my general knowledge of Indian culture is pretty sparse. As a result, I won’t even pretend to know if the depiction here is all that accurate, but my guess is probably not. That said, I don’t know that the local culture is really the point. The point is more that the nuns find themselves losing control of themselves, something that makes sticking to their vows a lot harder. While that is obvious in all of the nuns, it is especially obvious in Byron’s Sister Ruth, someone who looks like she’s going a bit crazy even before she does anything drastic and starts talking back. Byron is a real scene-stealer here, someone who grows more and more unhinged as she sets her sights on Dean, and Dean seems like a real asshole half the time even as he is the only white man in the area.
But given the idea of an erotic location, I was a bit surprised to see that it was not a tropical paradise. Located atop a mountain, the climate instead seems cold with a perpetual wind blowing at all times. And while the movie certainly wasn’t filmed on location (or even outdoors I would wager), it was still visually impressive with the technicolor photography and some rather impressive matte paintings, particularly for the sheer cliff next to the mission’s belltower. And brownface aside, I thought every actor gave a solid performance. Could the high mountains really have that effect on people? Well, it may not matter so much as the basic idea is the nuns never should have been there to begin with, and that is where everything went wrong for them.
Grade: A-
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