Long regarded as “the most beautiful film ever shot in color,” Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s “Black Narcissus” remains a feast for the eyes, one unspoiled by the knowlege that most every dazzling image put on the screen was manipulated, faked and seamlessly folded in to a tale of nuns going a tad mad in the Himalayas.
If ever there was an exemplar of “the heightened reality of the cinema,” this film is it. The fourth film The Archers (their production company) shot in Technicolor, and filmed pretty much entirely on soundstages in the U.K. — and a famed British garden — Powell, Pressburger, production designer Alfred Junge and his matte painting team create an Indian highlands of the mind. This is a world of altitude and ancient people and places, of mysticism, flowers and peaks and pastel vistas — created by taking black and white photographs of the region and heightening the colors through chalk and paint.
Over 75 years since its release, the resulting film still dazzles.
It’s a grand showcase for screen legend Deborah Kerr, an English rose so suited to a nun’s habit that she donned one again a few years later for “Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison.” But it’s also the career highlight for macho baritone David Farrar, another gem on the resume of Flora Robson (“The Sea Hawk”) a great stepping stone for future star Jean Simmons and the most acclaimed film for the first Indian actor to make a great impact in the West — Sabu, star of The Archers’ “The Thief of Bagdad,” the first filmed version of “The Jungle Book” and “Arabian Nights.”
The English novelist Rumer Godden grew up in India and conjured up a remote setting for a classic clash of cultures — a palace, formerly a harem for a local potentate and decorated with erotic images of befitting the ruler’s “House of Women,” repurposed by a later leader as a convent for prim, reserved English Catholic nuns.
They’d teach the local children, run a medical dispensary and live among the “simple” and ancient natives. It isn’t just the altitude and foreignness of Mopu Palace that throws them. It’s the eroticism. The hunky Englishman Mr. (Farrar), agent and fixer for the old, one-eyed Indian general (Desmond Knight) who requested their mission predicts their failure. A previous monastery of monks in the same quarters didn’t last a full year.
“It’s no place for a nunnery!”
And Mr. Dean’s short-shorts, hairy-chested open shirts and almost as open leering at the first-time Sister Superior (Kerr) and her four nuns (Robson, Judith Furse, Jenny Laird and Kathleen Byron) are both an open temptation and open challenge to their declared aims.
They’ve barely arrived up, with the old general paying the natives to attend their school and seek aid from the dispensary, when a new problem is thrust upon them. A local teen Kanchi (Jean Simmons, bejeweled and in dark makeup) has not come of age, but is fully aware of the power she already has over men. She and the highly-strung, unstable and coquettish Sister Ruth (Byron) may prove to be the biggest challenges our new Sister Superior faces.
Well, they and the preening, handsome and curious son of the general (Sabu) who arrives at a school for children and insists that he be educated and instructed as well. That cologne he’s wearing, the one Kanchi swoons over?
“Black Narcissus,” or “Narcisse Noir,” a scent popular with British Army officers under the Raj.
Earthly temptation all around, problems concrete and abstract that only the smirking Mr. Dean seems to anticipate or be any help in solving, and at every turn, gloomy ledges with no guardrails foreshadowing doom — accidents, or an hysterical leap into the void.
“Remember, the superior of all is the servant of all,” is the only advice her own Mother Superior gave Sister Superior Clodagh.
In this post-war film, Powell and Pressburger found the perfect setting for a parable of the end of the British Empire. Cultures clash, and the British Catholic nuns — repressed oppressors who think the “childish” natives “all look alike” and “smell,” are the last to figure out they simply don’t belong here.
“It’s this wind,” isn’t the problem. No, it’s not “the water” that is hitting the nuns hard. Dean’s sneering “What would Christ have done?” challenges summon up what none of them are prepared to face.
Kerr figured out how a nun’s habit could add layers of understatement to a performance and used that covering to mask Sister Clodagh’s doubts, worries and rising panic. Flashbacks (not seen in the initital U.S. release, or in versions shown in the States for years) give us Clodagh’s back-story, a pretty young woman with great prospects for a monied marriage in Ireland. But something happened.
Everyone else here is a mystery, and the movie is the richer for it. Tragic traditions are explained, an old folk tale of “the prince and the beggar woman” is relived and everything quietly teeters toward the small scale disaster that we know is to come.
Kerr, later a six time Oscar nominee, would revisit this Englishwoman-in-Asia setting for the cloying “The King and I” and gain her greatest fame by shedding her “habit” and playing a cheating Army wife in “From Here to Eternity.”
Simmons’s later stardom would present her as a by-then-outdated version of Kerr, something she sent up when she was cast in “Guys and Dolls.”
Powell and Pressburger’s run of masterpieces would climax the very next year with “The Red Shoes.” And with the passage of time, their glorious mastery of the possibilities of the hyper-reality of Technicolor would only grow in stature and legend.
Many’s the epic I’ve watched in recent decades — “Heaven’s Gate” to “Out of Africa” to Powell-fan Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York,” “Kundun” and “Silence,” to “Horizon: An American Saga” — that made me think, “This isn’t nearly gorgeous enough to achieve ‘grandeur.'”
Powell and Pressburger set the sumptuous, over-saturated color bar so high so very long ago that one wonders if any film will ever best their very best.
Rating: TV-PG, adult themes
Cast: Deborah Kerr, David Farrar, Kathleen Byron, Sabu, Judith Furse, Jenny Laird, May Hallat, Eddie Whaley, Jr., Flora Robson and Simmons.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, based on a novel by Rumer Godden. A J. Arthur Rank release. on Tubi, other streamers
Running time: 1:41
Movie Nation 