Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (1947)

The gulf between the Archers’ visual imagination and their lack of touch with actors is undiminished here but the effect of the discrepancy is extraordinary.  Based on a novel by Rumer Godden (Powell and Pressburger did the adaptation), Black Narcissus is about some nuns who set up a school and hospital in the Himalayas, and the efflorescence of hysterical (in both senses of the word) tensions within the group.  Their enterprise is, of course, doomed to failure:  the film would have a lot more surprise if the nuns converted the locals to Christianity and coped with the geography.  We’re told at the start that they’re trying to succeed where a monastic order has already tried and failed.  The expeditionary force is an offshoot from an Anglican order based in Darjeeling.  The Mother Superior there (Nancy Roberts) tells Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr), the leader of the project, that she’s too young for this kind of responsibility and we can see from the arrogant glint in Sister’s Clodagh’s eye and her poised smile that she needs taking down a peg or two.

The colouring of Jack Cardiff’s photography and the production design by Alfred Junge are truly breathtaking (they both won Oscars for their work).  They make the settings lushly super-exotic and the sculpted whiteness of the nuns’ figures is beautifully contrasted with the exultant vibrancy of their surroundings.  The trompe l’oeil is quite remarkable.  According to Wikipedia:

‘The film was made primarily at Pinewood Studios, but some scenes were shot in Leonardslee Gardens, West Sussex, the home of an Indian army retiree which had appropriate trees and plants for the Indian setting. The film makes extensive use of matte paintings and large scale landscape paintings to suggest the mountainous environment of the Himalayas, as well as some scale models for motion shots of the convent. Powell said later, “Our mountains were painted on glass. We decided to do the whole thing in the studio and that’s the way we managed to maintain colour control to the very end. Sometimes in a film its theme or its colour are more important than the plot.” ‘

The look of the film, the garishness of the story, the broad, melodramatic conception of the characters, and the intensely stiff (or stiffly intense) performances are an unarguably bizarre combination.  The whole thing seems mad – and real admirers of Powell and Pressburger would, I’m sure, claim that this is just what they were aiming for:  that they wanted people to experience the film as if it was taking place within, and expressing, the febrile, dislocated collective psyche of the nuns.   Yet the acting style – the clipped accents, the obvious facial reactions – is incongruous with the other elements of Black Narcissus:  I don’t believe that incongruity is intentional but it heightens the disorienting effect of the piece (at the same time as making it laughable).   Although Deborah Kerr is the lead, the standout performance in the picture – and the epitome of its crackpot carnality – is from Kathleen Byron as the glamorously deranged Sister Ruth.  We can see immediately that this maniac-in-waiting doesn’t belong in a habit and wimple.    Once Ruth has admitted that she’s consumed with desire for Dean (David Farrar), the district agent whose brusque masculinity, shorts and increasingly exposed chest hair drive the nuns wild, she changes into civvies – a wine-coloured dress and red shoes (yet) – and applies brilliantly scarlet lipstick.  Kathleen Byron looks spectacularly, ideally beautiful but the idea is so tawdry and her presence still so cultured that she’s ridiculous too.

In their big verbal set-to (the fish before the meat of their physical confrontation on the edge of a mountain), Sister Ruth accuses Sister Clodagh of herself being infatuated with Dean.  We already know by this stage that Clodagh has a sensual past:  she keeps having flashbacks to a teenage romance in her native Ireland – with a young man (Shaun Noble) so dull and snotty that it’s no surprise Clodagh took the veil.   The tonal contrasts between the alabaster, habited figure and the auburn-haired Irish girl in her sky-blue party dress are the most effective thing in Deborah Kerr’s performance.   As so often, she’s capable but mechanical:  she overstates the character’s private reactions to overheard remarks and, when Sister Clodagh is experiencing warring emotions, Deborah Kerr’s face presents them one at a time, as if we were meant to tick them off.   Flora Robson as the troubled Sister Philippa, who finds her spirituality dwarfed and overpowered by the scale and mystery of her new surroundings, is more convincingly complex; and David Farrar, although the role of Dean is remarkably obvious, gets across a sense not just of the man’s physical relaxedness but of his emotional exasperation too.   The other nuns are played by Judith Furse (pretty good) and Jenny Laird (bonkers).  Except for Esmond Knight as the silent wise man (an ex-soldier) who keeps a looking-into-eternity vigil on the margins of the convent, the Indian characters are ludicrous, whether they’re ethnically the genuine article or white actors in make-up.  Sabu is startlingly camp as an Anglophile princeling who comes to the nuns for his education.  In the film’s one visual failure, the Archers manage to make Jean Simmons look tacky, as well as act clumsily, as a lower caste dancing girl.    The film takes its name from a perfume the Sabu character buys from the Army & Navy store in London.

18 October 2010