- dir. POWELL & PRESSBURGER
- year. 1947
- country. UK
- run-time. 100 mins
- rating. U
£5.00 (£3.50 conc.)
Doors 15:30 - Film 16:00
The last in our small season of four movies celebrating the collaboration of Powell and Pressburger films progressing from B&W to full glorious technicolour, to be shown as Sunday Matinees during March and April, with a traditional Sunday Tea, sandwiches, home made cakes and a refreshing cup of tea (or coffee).
BLACK NARCISSUS
Cast: Deborah Kerr (Sister Clodagh), Kathleen Byron (Sister Ruth), David Farrar (Mr Dean), Sabu (The Young General Dilip Rai), Flora Robson (Sister Philippa)
A group of Anglo-Catholic nuns open a school and a hospital in a remote Himalayan community. As they face a series of obstacles from the villagers and a hostile environment, tensions begin to grow.
Powell and Pressburger's delirious melodrama is one of the most erotic films ever to emerge from British cinema, let alone in the repressed 1940s - it was released just two years after David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945), with its more typically 'British' story of desire denied.
Starting from a controversial novel by Rumer Godden - an Englishwoman living long-term in India - Powell and Pressburger fashioned a taut melodrama of unusually fierce passions and barely contained erotic tension. Although the script never directly challenged the strict standards of the censors, it hardly needs saying that the repressed desires of nuns was not a common - or safe - subject for a British film in 1947.