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But Sister Ruth Is Ill...

4/16/2015

Black Narcissus, Great Villain Blogathon

Winner of Two Academy Awards in 1948: Best Cinematography and Best Art Direction

This will scare you after you see the movie.

Black Narcissus (1947)

In short, Black Narcissus is a film about a handful of Anglican nuns who open a mission school and clinic in a remote Himalayan village, so yes, it is exactly what you'd expect: a technologically masterful erotic thriller.

Deborah Kerr plays Sister Clodagh, a moderately arrogant thirty-something nun, who is sent by her mother superior to lead a new mission in an empty palace set high in the mountains of Darjeeling. The palace was once home to a bygone General's extra women; indeed, the walls are decorated with images of beautiful bathing girls in various poses and stages of dress. The heir to this palace, the current General, tried to establish a school and dispensary the year before by installing a band of monks, but they only lasted five months. It is a windy place, full of ghosts after all, and no one thought to paint over the pictures.

Sister Clodagh is given four women of the order to take with her: Sister Briony (Judith Furse), a sturdy, no-nonsense nun; Sister "Honey" (Jenny Laird), a happy, glass-ever-half-full kind of gal; Sister Phillipa (Flora Robson), the landscaping nun; and finally Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron), a sharp-edged, unhappy woman who is prone to illness and complaining, because a trip to the Himalayas 'round about monsoon season might be just the thing to perk her up.

The troupe is met on location (more on this later) by the General's British agent, Mr. Dean (David Farrar), a handsome, dissolute rogue with wavy hair and a manly swagger, who dresses in short-sleeved cotton shirts (all unbuttoned), a battered alpine hat, and high-waisted, Magnum, P.I. man-shorts. He is both helpful and discomfiting to Sisters Clodagh and Ruth (if for different reasons) and he makes no secret about Mopu not being a good fit for them. He tells the nuns the locals are like children who don't know from modern medicine, so the nuns better not try to help any of them if they get really sick, because if one of 'em dies, they'll all think the magic is bad.

Dean rides a Shetland pony, so he should know.

As the girls settle in, the raw, earthy beauty of their surroundings seeps in, upending each of them in different, but profound ways. In spite of the "clear air" and ceaseless wind, they get the clinic and school up and running. Sister Clodagh develops a collegial tolerance of Mr. Dean, Sister Briony remains sturdy, and Sister Honey remains cheerful. Poor Sister Phillipa, who spends much of her time outdoors, seems so easily distracted and Sister Ruth, when she isn't carping about the stupidity and smell of the children, seems to brighten a bit whenever she sees Mr. Dean. Dean helps with the plumbing and whatnot, and even hands them a disturbingly beautiful girl of seventeen (the gorgeous, walnut-tinted Jean Simmons) who has been hanging around Dean's doorstep to keep her out of trouble, if you know what I mean.

Enter the Young General (Sabu), the nephew of the Old General, who has been called from his studies in London to take his place in Mopu. Sister Clodagh reluctantly agrees that he can study with the girls for the time being. She's not such a bad egg, really, as we learn from flashbacks to her time as a flaming red-headed lass in Ireland before she took the veil and had a handsome boyfriend. She's not the only nun to be remembering things from the Before Time: poor Sister Phillipa couldn't resist planting flowers where the practical vegetables ought to be and is very distressed about it, and Sister Ruth, getting paler and more angular by the day is clearly pining for Mr. Dean and his Shetland pony ways.

Then one day, a villager brings in her feverish, dying baby. Sister Briony sends the woman home, knowing the baby will die, but Sister Honey secretly gives the mother medicine, which doesn't work. The next day, after the baby dies, no one comes to clinic or school and the nuns suddenly find it dangerous to venture outside their garden. The Young General has run off that same night with Jean Simmons, and Sister Ruth is about to open that mysterious package she received from Calcutta. Left with her troubling thoughts and "that something in the atmosphere that makes everything seem exaggerated," Sister Clodagh finds herself in for a rough evening.

An evening I won't spoil with too much detail, but suffice it to say that Sister Ruth has been harboring a deep hatred of Sister Clodagh, whom she sees as a rival for Mr. Dean's affections. After a disappointing encounter with Mr. Dean, Sister Ruth emerges feverish and mad, wanting nothing more than to terrorize Sister Clodagh for the remaining minutes of the picture, which she does, magnificently.

I can count the number of times on one hand when one person actually touches another in this picture, but so much is suggested through color, sound, atmosphere, and those rich, intimate close-ups, that you'd swear you'd seen Everything, All of It. Perhaps the greatest illusion of all is the fact that the entire film was shot in the studio, using models and hand-painted, black-and-white photographic mattes. The only thing authentically Indian about Black Narcissus is Sabu and the plants used in some of the exteriors.

During the filming of this picture. Kathleen Byron and director Michael Powell frequently argued about how to play Ruth. Powell envisioned Ruth as a crazed, hysterical monster, whereas Byron wanted to play Ruth...oh what's the word...human, as though her actions might be motivated by sincere inexperience and regretted decisions. You can judge who won that argument in the scene where Ruth goes to Dean's quarters. Their disagreement was complicated by the fact that Byron and Powell were having an affair at the time, and that Ruth's principal rival was being played by the director's recent ex-lover, Deborah Kerr. So maybe the villain of this film isn't so much Sister Ruth, whose frustrated passion drove her to madness, but how frightening women's sexuality can be...at least to men.

It certainly was villainous by the standards of the Catholic League of Decency, who thought the picture obscene on account of the nuns succumbing to various forms of sensuality. The film was not allowed to be released in the United States until those nuns were turned into Anglicans. As scary (and trope-y) the voracious, crazed, needy female monster in movies is, give me Black Narcissus over Basic Instinct or Fatal Attraction any day.

However you feel about nuns, the Raj, or what a player Michael Powell turned out to be, Black Narcissus is a hot work of art from beginning to end -- and Kathleen Byron is terrifying.

This post is my contribution to The Great Villain Blogathon, hosted by Speakeasy, Shadows & Satin, and Silver Screenings.

Please take a moment to read about the other dastards, creeps, and nogoodniks you love to hate.

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Birthday of the Week: Wendy Hiller

8/12/2014

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Dame Wendy Margaret Hiller: August 15, 1912 - May 14, 2003

Weird Little Clip

"Not Bloody Likely, I'm Going in a Taxi"

The first actress to use "bloody" in a British film, Wendy Hiller was primarily a stage actress performing modern roles to great acclaim in London's West End and on Broadway. She attracted the attention of George Bernard Shaw in the early 1930s and became one of his favorite actresses of the time. Shaw cast her in revival productions of his plays, Pygmalion, Major Barbara, and Saint Joan during that period, and insisted she play the part of Eliza in the film production of Pygmalion in 1938. That role would earn Hiller the first of several Academy Award nominations.

There is quite a nice biography of her on IMDb that I won't even try to paraphrase; you should just read it. Instead, I will reminisce, because I first became aware of Wendy Hiller that magical year of my movie memory, 1974, when anthology and nostalgic ensemble pictures seemed all the rage. She played the wizened old Princess Dragomiroff in Murder on the Orient Express, and I remember being instantly drawn to her overbite and twinkling eyes, thinking this is probably SOMEbody. I'm sure she'll correct me, but I recall that my sister told me at the time that Wendy Hiller had played the original Eliza Doolittle in the movie that became the musical, My Fair Lady and (probably) that she was Shaw's favorite actress -- because my sister was that kind of 11-year-old -- but we'd never seen her in any other picture.

Not until Separate Tables turned up on The Movie Loft (Channel 38) or something some years later, and it clicked: wow, Wendy Hiller was somebody. But British movies seldom turned up on television then and I didn't get to see her early work until decades later. Thankfully, now you can access most of her films streaming or on DVD. If you are so inclined to roll back the years on Princess Dragomiroff, I recommend the wonderful Powell & Pressburger film, I Know Where I'm Going, a peculiar, beautifully acted romance set in the Hebrides with lots of wind and sea and rocks and my pal, Roger Livesey.

Wendy Hiller was a tremendous actress and by all accounts, a down-to-earth, untheatrical, generous professional. She was married to British playwright Ronald Gow for nearly sixty years until his death in 1993. Hiller retired from acting that same year and spent her remaining days at her home in Buckinghamshire, where she died on May 14, 2003 of natural causes at the age of 90.

Favorite Five

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Snuff Is Enough

1/17/2014

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Don't let any hipster cineaste talk you into this one.

Peeping Tom (1960)

I'm not sure why I decided to look at this film again; didn't care for it the first time I saw it years ago, but thought maybe I was missing something. And since it is Moira Shearer's birthday today, I thought I'd give it another try.

Turns out I was right the first time and am not at all on board with the recentish, mystifying opinion (imdb, Roger Ebert, Martin Scorsese) that the film was unjustly trashed when it came out and is, in fact, another masterpiece about the nature of film by Michael Powell. It's just not.

I've decided to put most of the blame on Carl (Karlheinz) Boehm, the actor playing the homicidal weirdo. I get what the film is supposed to do -- challenge the audience to confront its own voyeurism by watching this thoroughly damaged cameraman murder women with a knife fixed to the end of the tripod holding the camera that is filming the murder. But what girl in post-war London wouldn't run far, far away from a blond guy with a camera and trench coat who talks like Peter Lorre (but really really slowly) and doesn't blink?

Mark Lewis, the killer Peeping Tom, is a shy, freaky young man who lives in and lets rooms in his childhood home, where his "scientist" father conducted psychosexual experiments on him and documented it all on film for posterity. Mark, all (well not all) grown up, films everything all the time — including the occasional hooker he's in the middle of murdering — and develops the footage in his rooms. Mark is befriended by one of his boarders, Helen (Anna Massey), a young children's book writer. Helen's blind and drunk mother (Maxine Audley), not being able to see, just knows there is something reaaaaallly wrong with Mark, because she hears him watching films night after night in his room (and the blind are magic). Mark has murdered (and filmed) a stand-in (Moira Shearer) at the movie studio he works in and Helen's mother confronts him while he's replaying the movie. Yet he doesn't kill her; there's no fun in filming someone who can't appreciate that you're murdering them at the time. She suggests he get some help.

Eventually, Helen also sees the movie (one of the best sequences, actually: Anna Massey reacting to what she's watching) and is surprised by Mark who admits what he is and what he's done. Blah blah, father tortured him, blah, police bang on door, blah, he kills himself with his own camera/weapon, blah blah.

Apart from a few really nicely framed scenes in Powell's trademark hyper-saturated color, this film isn't very good. Even otherwise fine actors come off cartoony or wooden. Most of the action is accompanied by the plink-plonk of some musician's idea of what "nuts" sounds like on a piano, which doesn't help at all.

Ah well. Happy birthday, anyway, lovely Moira Shearer. Maybe this would have been better as a musical, like Tales of Hoffman.

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