The Big Whatsit

How refreshing it was to come across Black Narcissus during an afternoon spent laid on the couch nursing a poxy stomach bug. It’s considered by many to be Powell and Pressburger’s finest work, and I can see why. Though I would always bang the drum for The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, it was before I finally caught up with the tale of nuns surrendering - or nearly doing so - to their desires in a place of remote beauty.

On the surface, Black Narcissus has the slightest of premises. Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) is chosen to lead a small group of working nuns to a new hospital and school based high in the Himalayan mountains. For the most part, her team seems to be practically well met to the task in hand, but she’s also been lumbered with Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron), who from the beginning is a fish out of water within the order, sickly and deeply unhappy. The building they occupy used to be ‘The House of Woman,’ a harem for the local General, and they work in a garish setting with murals of erotic art plastered across the walls, hardly the austere surroundings their order would find appropriate. Helping them settle in is Mr Dean (David Farrar), their cynical local agent with a propensity for wearing not very much and riding around on a slightly comical little pony. The local villagers, whom the nuns are on a mission to serve, are simple folk, ever in thrall to their passions and described by Dean as fairly basic. And its passion that becomes the issue. Whether through the cool mountain air, the water or something even more primal, each Sister finds herself losing sense of her Godly purpose. Clodagh reminisces about a lost love, a broken relationship that led directly to her joining the order. Sister Philippa, charged with growing vegetables in the house’s mountainside gardens, instead plants lovely but useless flowers. And then there’s Sister Ruth, who starts to lose it entirely once she begins lusting after Dean…

It’s a story we’ve seen many times before. If it had been made in the 1980s, it would no doubt have been a Merchant-Ivory production, the familiar tale of repressed English colonials surrendering to their baser instincts in luscious foreign climes. And yet Black Narcissus turns out to be so much more than that. It works because of its univerally superb performances, a succession of intriguing minor characters, and Jack Cardiff’s unimpeachable cinematography. Yarmouth-born Cardiff won a deserved Oscar for his work on this movie, an exercise in perfect use of technicolour. Unbelievably, Black Narcissus was shot entirely in County Galway, West Sussex and Pinewood Studios, as far from the Himalayas as it’s possible to be, but it looks entirely authentic, from the sheer drop Clodagh looks down on atop the bell tower, to the forested village of the locals below. With its mountainous vistas, green valleys and clear blue skies, the matte paintings used are things of beauty. It’s impossible not to be sucked in, and that’s exactly what happens to the Servants of St Mary.

We’re told that an order of Brothers failed previously to set up a mission here, and what happens to the nuns tells us why. Dean is of course in little doubt that their efforts won’t last, and with credible speed the work they’re doing begins to unravel. Mostly we see events through the eyes of Clodagh, played wonderfully by Kerr who won a New York Film Critics Circle award for her work. Subtle and underplayed, the camera clearly loves her. So many fade outs linger on her eyes, burning in the dark as she recalls the events that turned her to God. At first outraged by Dean’s withering pronouncements on her mission, it gradually becomes clear that there is more than mutual dislike going on between them, and in a key moment she unburdens her emotional turmoil to him without surrendering herself.

It’s unfortunate that Sister Ruth is eavesdropping on this scene. Byron gets the scenery-chewing plum role and plays it to unhinged perfection. Her lingering looks at Dean’s bare chest are early hints of what’s to come, her pale angular face becoming all the more acute as she submits to murderous jealousy. Skinny, almost wraithlike, she devastatingly abandons the order, discarding her habit for a striking dress and applying blood red lipstick before Clodagh’s unbelieving face. Later, having been turned down by Dean, she returns to the house for the movie’s climactic scene, one of the scariest in movie history. It’s one that will stay with me for a very long time, a masterclass in fevered madness.

Considering the raw sexual undertones of the narrative, it’s a wonder that there’s barely a kiss shared on screen. The most explicit scenes are between the Young General (Sabu) and Kanchi (Jean Simmons), a wild young girl who stays with the order and sets her stall out to ensnare him from the start. Kanchi’s overtlflirtation is a reminder to the nuns of what they’re missing. In one moment, she’s beaten for her behaviour, and plays on the pain to trap the garishly dressed General. He has no chance. There are also wonderful performances by Eddie Whaley Jr as a young interpreter, teaching the locals to say the names of weapons in English, and Angu Ayah (May Hallatt), the nuns’ housekeeper who makes no secret of her desire for the place to become once more a house of women, which is more or less what it does.

Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian instructed us to run, not walk, to see this movie, and it only remains for me to find out quickly which DVD version is the best to own. Black Narcissus is an instant classic, an incredible achievement for a movie made in buttoned down 1947 and a lasting legacy to the genius of its makers.