Amazon.com video review:
Appropriately enough for a picture named for a flower,
Black Narcissus exists in a color-drenched, hothouse
atmosphere. The setting is a nunnery in the Himalayas, where sister
Deborah Kerr has her hands full with an envious nun (the remarkable
Kathleen Byron) and a sardonic Englishman (David Farrar). Director
Michael Powell and screenwriter Emeric Pressburger, the team
responsible for the mid-forties masterpieces A Stairway to
Heaven and The
Red Shoes, decided to shoot Black Narcissus entirely in
the studio, so they could create their own controlled, slightly unreal
world. The choice paid off, as both art director Alfred Junge and
cinematographer Jack Cardiff won Oscars for their blazing Technicolor
work. The climactic sequence--a murder attempt on the cliffs of the
cloister--bears special attention, as Powell "set" the sequence to a
preexisting musical track, staging it as though it were a piece of
visual choreography. Adding a bit of behind-the-scenes tension to the
production was the fact that Kerr was the director's ex-mistress, and
Byron his current one. "It was a situation not uncommon in show
business, I was told," he later wrote, "but it was new to me."
--Robert Horton
