Black Narcissus - Critical Response

Critical Response

In The Great British Picture Show, the writer George Perry stated, "Archers films looked better than they were – the location photography in Technicolor by Jack Cardiff in Black Narcissus was a great deal better than the story and lifted the film above the threatening banality". In contrast, the critic Ian Christie wrote in the Radio Times in the 1980s that "unusually for a British film from the emotionally frozen forties the melodrama works so well it almost seems as if Powell and Pressburger survived the slings and barbs of contemporary criticism to find their ideal audience in the 1980s". Marina Warner, introducing the film on BBC2 (on a nun-themed film evening, with Thérèse), called it a masterpiece:

The suggestions continually hover on the brink of hyperbole. The film achieves its extraordinary impact by daring so much against all bounds of decorum, far in excess of realism. The crimson lipstick Sr. Ruth applies turns her into a kind of werewolf, the kittenish wiles of Jean Simmons also convey, in a different mode, a fantasy of female sexual appetite. The crazed and sometimes cruel flapping of Angu Ayah adds yet another flourish to the portrait of female hysteria. In this convent, this house of women, all the women are mad. Again and again Powell submits Sr. Clodagh to visitants from the world of chaos and passion she has foresworn in order to touch her, shake her, break her down. First and foremost David Farrar's Mr. Dean, all bare, hairy legs, insolence and roguish eyes, erupts into her convent, the spirit of maleness embodied. The holy father in the grounds issues a mute challenge to her faith. Luxury, desire, pleasure, humiliation all thrust in upon her in the forms of the young General with his emeralds and perfumes, and of Kanchi, the young Jean Simmons in dark panstick with a jewel in her nose, and Kathleen Byron's famous pent up, ravening portrayal of Sr. Ruth finally holds up a mirror of the abyss into which Sr. Clodagh too might fall, and indeed only just escapes in more ways than one. As in Clarissa, Samuel Richardson's classic novel about prolonged seduction and embattled virtue, Powell pits the chaste and steely Deborah Kerr against all these assailants and watches her thrash about with relish. While Lovelace had to rape Clarissa to achieve his end, Powell only has to show that Mr. Dean was right and Sr. Clodagh was mistaken. The ending of Black Narcissus vindicates the world against the cloister, libido against superego, male against female.

In Michael Powell's own view this was the most erotic film he ever made. "It is all done by suggestion, but eroticism is in every frame and image from beginning to end. It is a film full of wonderful performances and passion just below the surface, which finally, at the end of the film, erupts".