Kathleen Byron sheds her habit and defiantly dons makeup in front of fellow sister Deborah Kerr in Powell & Pressburger’s breathtaking BLACK NARCISSUS.


Mr. Dean’s masculine charms are not lost on Sister Clodagh, he is found to be especially sexually attractive by the unstable Sister Ruth. Although Dean gives nei- ther nun encouragement, Sister Ruth becomes irrationally jealous of what she perceives as his ex- cessive attention to Sister Clodagh. Eventually, Sister Ruth announces to Mr. Dean her plan to abandon her vows and leave St. Faith. His subsequent rejec- tion of her results in her having a nervous breakdown, an event that, inevitably, prompts the film’s final catastrophe. A subplot, as if in counterpoint to the severe re- pression that is unhinging the mental and emotional stability of the nuns of St. Faith, concerns the growing infatuation the Young General (Sabu)—heir to


the throne of the local state—has for a beautiful young girl, Kanchi (Jean Simmons), of dubious morals. The film’s title refers to a special perfume that the Young General has sent to him from England.


While Deborah Kerr is the film’s nominal leading actress, her performance is largely over- shadowed by that of Kathleen Byron as Sister Ruth. Byron— possessed of a face both beauti- ful and disturbing, like that of a perverse Madonna—simply dominates the film. Her slow descent into madness is sig- naled both by her pathological jealousy of Sister Clodagh and her growing sexual hysteria: when Dean finally and callously rejects her, she faints dead away. Thus, the underlying assumptions of


the film are firmly Freudian, and drive BLACK NARCISSUS in the same way that Freudian theory would drive Powell’s horror film PEEPING TOM. Indeed, without the fundamental principle of sexual repression, Sister Ruth’s growing madness would be incoherent.


ITV’s presentation of the film is simply outstanding—most certainly the HD presentation does justice to the marvelous color cinematography of Jack Cardiff, whose work on BLACK NARCISSUS is generally re- garded as some of the finest work ever done in Technicolor. Perhaps the achievement is even more remarkable consid- ering that nothing in the film was shot on location, but rather at Pinewood Studios (Cardiff


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