Black Narcissus - Production

Production

Of the three principal Indian roles, only the Young General was played by an ethnic Indian; the roles of Kanchi and the Old General were performed by white actors in makeup. The role of Kanchi was a change indeed for 'the demure Miss Simmons.' Kanchi, 17, is described by Rumer Godden as "a basket of fruit, piled high and luscious and ready to eat. Though she looks shyly down, there is something steady and unabashed about her; the fruit is there to be eaten, she does not mean it to rot." On landing the part Simmons told her mother she had been given a part in which she had to have 'oomph'. 'The Indian extras were cast from workers at the docks in Rotherhithe.

The film was made primarily at Pinewood Studios, but some scenes were shot in Leonardslee Gardens, West Sussex, the home of an Indian army retiree which had appropriate trees and plants for the Indian setting. The film makes extensive use of matte paintings and large scale landscape paintings to suggest the mountainous environment of the Himalayas, (credited to W. Percy Day) as well as some scale models for motion shots of the convent. Powell said later, 'Our mountains were painted on glass. We decided to do the whole thing in the studio and that's the way we managed to maintain colour control to the very end. Sometimes in a film its theme or its colour are more important than the plot.'

For the costumes, Alfred Junge, the art director, had three main colour schemes. The nuns were always in the white habits that he designed from a medley of medieval types. These white robes of heavy material stressed the nuns' other-worldliness amid the exotic native surroundings. The chief native characters were robed in brilliant colours, particularly the General and his young nephew, in jewels and rich silks. Other native characters brought into the film merely as 'atmosphere' were clad in more sombre colours, with the usual native dress of the Nepalese, Bhutanese and Tibetan peoples toned down to prevent overloading the eye with brilliance.

According to Robert Horton, Powell set the climactic sequence, a murder attempt on the cliffs of the cloister, to a preexisting musical track, staging it as though it were a piece of visual choreography. Also, on a note of personal tension that existed behind-the-scenes, was the fact that Kerr was the director's ex-lover, and Byron his current one. "It was a situation not uncommon in show business, I was told", Powell later wrote, "but it was new to me".

The version of the film originally shown in the United States had scenes depicting flashbacks of Sister Clodagh's life before becoming a nun edited out at the behest of the Catholic Legion of Decency.