Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Black Narcissus

In this series, we choose our favorite single image from a pre-determined movie. It can be because it's the most beautiful, resonant, telling or unusual. It can be deemed the "best shot" for any reason really, beauty being in the eye of the beholder.

Today... nuns in the Himalayas in Black Narcissus (1947). I had never seen Black Narcissus before this week and that sort of virginity is sacrilege. Lose it if you haven't. Watch this film.

The movie tells the story of a new convent in the Himalayas. Sister Clodagh is the superior. She's played by Deborah Kerr, who is absolutely deserving here of one of her other Best Actress noms. Her Mother Superior, who doesn't think she's ready, gives her a ragtag team of nuns to take with her into the mountains. They're character-pegged so quickly it's like Clodagh is Snow White and these are her Seven Four Dwarves: Sister Briony "you'll need her for her strength" (a shot of a large woman lifting a large pitcher), Sister Philippa "for the garden" (a shot of a nun examining a tomato), Sister Honey "she's popular and you'll need to be popular" (a shot of a nun giggling, delighted that the other nuns are swarming) and Sister Ruth (a shot of an empty seat). A pause before the confession, "yes, she's a problem." Tell it like it is Mother Superior. If Black Narcissus were made today, they'd each have their own character poster to collect. Everyone would want Sister Ruth's because she's a problem. Boy, is she a problem.

Once the sisters have hit the Himalayas they struggle with adapting to the strange culture and social attitudes. It's not just the altitude. It doesn't help that their strongest ally is the tall dark and handsome Mr Dean (David Farrar) -- there's one particular amusing shot of this hairy man, shirtless, in a sea of white habits -- who reminds Clodagh and Ruth of other lives they could have led.

I don't want to spoil the movie but let's just say that things don't go as well as Clodagh had hoped and everyone starts to unravel. Nobody is ever exactly forthcoming about what they're feeling but the actresses and the color are evocative enough to externalize these interior ruptures. I love this shot late in the movie when Clodagh is frightened.


You can see how expressively cinematographer Jack Cardiff has lit the chapel (he won an Oscar for this film) but it also reminds us that it's a highly vertical film. Everything from candles to Mr. Dean to the architecture and mountains is tall and thin, thrusting upward or downward. In this shot Clodagh has seen a frightening red figure above. The red light is spilling downward turning the chapel pink, spoiling Clodagh's (blue) cool. She's worried. And she should be.

But here's my choice for Best Shot.


This image, about a half hour into the film, ends the first flashback to Clodagh's life before the nunnery. Now, dissolves aren't revolutionary and flashbacks are often used to contrast past with present. But the brilliance here is that the choice is so thematically resonant, so unsettlingly inexact and so emotionally spot on. In a movie made today they'd probably morph the images during the dissolve and they'd lose the dissonance. This dissolve is not just the past contrasted with present, it's identity versus identity. The more familiar sight of this gorgeous colorful actress playing a woman in love dissolves very slowly back into this colorless austere nun she's become who doesn't even seem to love god that much. Here's the brilliant kick: the dialogue (from the flashback) during this deliberately extended dissolve goes like so...

"I don't want to go away. I want to stay here like this for the rest of my life."

It sounds like the truth but it looks exactly like a lie.

Now the woman she once was is starting to bleed back into her current pent up self. Sister Clodagh is losing control.

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The Convent of the Holy 'Hit Me' Order
Check out these amazing participating articles. There's so much to say about this film. I didn't even have space to talk about one of the dirtiest images I've ever seen in a 1940s film in which Jean Simmons al... well, see the movie!

• Antagony & Ecstasy Father Brayton rejects his vows.
  
• Serious Film Father Cusumano stops the bleeding.
• Brown Okinawa Father Paolo blossoms in the spring.
• Against the Hype Father Colin sees Sister Clodagh's soul.
  
• Rope of Silicon Father Brad warned us of the sins of the flesh a whole year ago.
  

 Other Films in This Series

• Angels in America (2003)
• X-Men (2000)
• Showgirls (1995)
• Bring It On (2000)
• A Face in the Crowd (1957)
• Pandora's Box (1929)
• Se7en (1995) 
• Requiem for a Dream (2000)

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Save Me Elmer Gantry, Save Me!

Fifty years ago today, Elmer Gantry (Burt Lancaster) started preaching to moviegoers. He started howling "Repent! Repent!" and multiple beautiful women started moaning "Save me! Save me!" to paraphrase a line from the satiric 1960 Best Picture nominee.


Elmer Gantry, a Richard Brooks adaptation of the novel by Sinclair Lewis, introduces us to a drunk womanizing salesman and churchgoing Christian who finds his calling when he decides to combine the two, hawking old timey religion with Sister Sharon (Jean Simmons), a revivalist. She's been making quite a name for herself converting the common folk wherever she pitches her tent. It goes without saying that once Elmer spots her, he also pitches his.

Once Sharon and Elmer have joined forces, there's no stopping them. They develop a perfect good cop/bad cop salvation routine: Elmer provides the sweaty fire and shouty brimstone and Sharon swoops in later to offer the soothing sotto voce God is Love denouement. (How anyone hears her quiet words in a huge tent with all the shouting and live musical accompaniment is a mystery the film never explains.) Sharon resists Elmer's sexual swagger at first but eventually succumbs like all the other women.

Of course, if you want your sweaty god-fearing rants to be charming and your aggressive "Repents!" to actually convert women into horny disciples, you'd better look quite a lot like Burt Lancaster, one of the manliest of film stars.


In fact, I suspect how one feels about Elmer Gantry the movie would be closely tied to how one feels about Lancaster as an actor/star. It neatly boils down to which of these two arguments you agree with.

1. A Doubter. Bill, Sharon's manager, doesn't trust Elmer. "Everything about you is offensive," he says to the new revivalist star. "You're a crude vulgar show off. And your vocabulary belongs in an outhouse."
2. True Believer. Sharon herself, finds him disarming and charming. "You're so outrageous! I think I like you. You're amusing and you smell like a real man."
   

So which side of the argument do you fall on with this sweaty, loud, extremely physical actor? I'd like to know but, for myself, I'm agnostic. I can't choose a side. I fall in and out of love with Lancaster but I like him best when he's dialing it back a little to assess how well Elmer is performing his (usually successful) seductions OR when he can't control his impulses at all and just lets Elmer carry on like a mad men. It's the inbetween stuff that's hard for me to take. It's in those moments when he's merely laughing too loud, smiling too big, or talking too much that he's a crude vulgar show off to me ... unless he's so outrageous that he's amusing. It's then that I think I like him.

Being a loud show off or playing one successfully is a great way to win an Oscar, which Lancaster did for this preacher man star turn. Another great way to win an Oscar is to show up in a movie that's well under way and breathe new bracing life into it (See Frances McDormand in Fargo and Renée Zellweger in Cold Mountain for polar opposite examples of the same trick.) I had never seen Elmer Gantry before and I was shocked that Shirley Jones, who won for playing Lulu the hooker, doesn't even show up until almost exactly the halfway mark. It's a two and a half hour movie! Lulu's revenge plot (Elmer has skeletons, y'see) derails Gantry's burgeoning success until Lulu reveals that heart of gold. She's a hooker so you know she has one. It's the movies!

Lulu's schizo back and forth between loving and hating Elmer and her strange waffling between Christianity and sacrilege (in one scene she'll make a dirty joke about God, in the next she'll talk about the Bible with a beatific look on her face) is perfectly in keeping with the movie's indecision about whether to join true believers or mock them.

The movie actually starts with a too-careful disclaimer, suggesting that it's not going to have much satirical bite. Hollywood loves to play to as many demographics as it can which means that satire is not their strong suit. I'm not sure what the political/religious climate was like in 1960 when the film premiered but it was a hit. The film can't seem to make up its mind (at all) as to whether or not these preachers are hypocritical con artists or benevolent spiritual leaders. The only gospel Elmer Gantry seems truly comfortable selling is the gospel of showmanship.

And that, dear reader, it sells well. Lancaster's sermons still play like gangbusters in 2010. They even feel timeless. It was impossible not to see today's politician/preachers in his antics. Sarah Palin's winking 'lamestream media' anti-intellectualism was instantly recognizable in one pointed private moment between Elmer and a reporter (an excellent Arthur Kennedy) which plays out in a public forum.

"I admit I'm not smart like some of them -- some of them smartalecky professors, wiseguy writers and agitators. I don't know the first thing about philosophy, psychology, ideology or any other ology. But I know this. With Christ you're saved. And without him you're lost.

And how do I know there's a merciful god? Because I've seen the devil plenty o times.

Lancaster's sizzle in the sermon scenes has the unfortunate effect of making Sister Sharon seem like a dud in the charisma department. It's hard to suspend disbelief that she is the bankable person on their joint ticket. Could that be why the arguably miscast Jean Simmons was denied an Oscar nomination despite the Academy's love for the film?

The movie's finale is weirdly botched, opting for something like holy sentiment mixed with you-get-what-you-deserve moralizing while also trying to take one last dig at the salvation through donation con game. There are so many competing agendas and you cannot serve both God and Mammon (Matthew 6:24). B-

<-- Lancaster and Taylor with their Oscars in April 1961.

Since it's a muddled effort, is it sacrilegious to suggest that Elmer Gantry really deserves a remake? It's totally topical. Perhaps the novel needs a new set of filmmaker eyes on it. No matter, I suppose. We'll have to make do with a Paul Thomas Anderson double feature starring huckster preachers Paul Dano (There Will Be Blood) and Philip Seymour Hoffman (Untitled).

Have you seen Elmer Gantry?
I'd love to hear other perspectives on it.
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