Excellent, a Must See

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Belgium, 1930. Audrey Hepburn, daughter of a famous surgeon (Jagger), joins a convent, undergoes a rigorous training in humiliation, becomes a star pupil at the school for tropical medicine, is sent to what was then called the Belgian Congo where she becomes an indispensable surgical assistant, has an emotional but strictly Platonic brush with the demanding and non-believing doctor (Finch), is sent back to Belgium against her wishes, and resigns from the order.Several scenes seemed especially instructive. First, the whole business of going through boot camp at the nunnery was an excellent example of initiation rituals as they're found around the world. I won't go into details but being given a new name is a common feature of these rites of passage. Gabrielle van der Mal becomes Sister Luke. In our society we have confirmation names, Hebrew names, and nicknames given during service in the Marine Corps.Second, Hepburn is doing first rate work at the school for tropical medicine. She's intelligent, a nurse, and the daughter of a surgeon. But she's breaking some of the rules as well. She doesn't show enough HUMILIATION, so her superior asks her to fail the final exam as evidence that she's rid herself of the sin of false pride. Let's put it this way -- she's supposed to deprive the community of a skilled nurse with a specialty in tropical medicine to prove her subordination to the church.As capitalism developed, is it any wonder that Reformed Churches arose? The sociologist Max Weber made a convincing argument that it was the overthrow of Catholicism, with its vows of poverty and its denunciation of usury, that made capitalism possible. Not that one cause the other, but that they were concordant in their values. If Catholicism taught that being poor was a virtue, Protestantism taught that industry, thrift, and community work was in the service of God.That's a short and incomplete description of my point but please don't argue with me about it. I know what I'm talking about. I've been poor all my life.This is an exceptional movie in many ways. Audrey Hepburn is quite good as Sister Luke. She was always beautiful in a fey way, never sexy, and it fits the role perfectly because you hardly see anything except her facial features, and they're very expressive. She does a fine job.Peter Finch is good too but it's a common role -- the roguish male who challenges the suppressed female to come out of her shell. Viz., Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine in "Suspicion." Franz Waxman's score is carefully done. In a scene in which an almost unrecognizably young Coleen Dewhurst, as a madwoman, attacks Hepburn, the score is anything but bombastic, only plucked strings. Elsewhere the score is modest and appropriate to the occasion. We hear "ora pro nobis" which, when I was a kid at mass, I always heard as "O, Ropra, No Bis," because, not having had Latin, I couldn't identify junctures.Something has to be said about the cast too. What a lot of winners, including Dame Peggy Ashcroft who went from the wife of the suspicious farmer in "The 39 Steps" to the elderly Mrs. Moore in David Lean's "A Passage to India." And the art direction and set dressing. Nothing was every so clean as the nunnery through which Hepburn passes. Every surface is polished, immaculate, so to speak. Every piece of cloth is spotless and freshly pressed. The barracks in MY boot camp were never so clean.Aside from its rather obvious display of the cultish aspects of belonging to an order, it's a fine film, very tastefully directed by Fred Zinnemann -- so tasteful in fact that it's almost impossible to imagine its being made in today's Hollywood.

Gabrielle van der Mal, the daughter of a famous surgeon, enters a convent in Brussels with the aim of eventually becoming a nursing sister in the Congo, at that time (the 1930s) still a Belgian colony. The film follows her progress as a postulant and a novice until she takes her vows and eventually achieves her ambition of working in the Congo. She is happy for a time but eventually has to return to Belgium shortly before the outbreak of war. When the country is invaded by the Nazis, Gabrielle is faced with a crisis of conscience. (As a nun she is known as Sister Luke, but for ease of reference I will call her "Gabrielle" throughout). During the 1950s, Hollywood was generally very respectful when it came to religion, but around 1960 it began to take more a critical look at some aspects of the subject; two examples are "Elmer Gantry", whose main character is a dishonest evangelist, and "Inherit the Wind", a fictionalised account of a real-life case in which a Tennessee schoolteacher was put on trial for teaching his class about Darwin's theory of evolution. "The Nun's Story" is a slightly earlier example of the same phenomenon, although its critique of the Catholic Church, or at least of the conservative form of Catholicism exemplified by the unnamed Order to which Sister Luke belongs, is a subtle one, relying upon neither the standard Protestant arguments against Catholicism nor the standard atheist arguments against Christianity. Gabrielle's Order places a very high premium upon "obedience", and her struggles with this concept are a constant theme throughout the movie. Even before she enters the Order her father, who has misgivings about her becoming a nun, says, referring to the three vows she will have to take, "I can see you poor, I can see you chaste but I cannot see you obedient". Her close friend Simone decides that the religious life is not for her and leaves without taking her vows. A similar theme is taken up by Dr Fortunati, the surgeon with whom Gabrielle works in the Congo. Although an unbeliever, Fortunati has a keen insight into the Catholic mind and realises that Gabrielle, who has a compassionate nature and excellent medical knowledge, has what it takes to make a great nurse, but lacks what it takes to make a nun. Indeed, in her heart Gabrielle realises this herself, although her Mother Superior tries to assure her that her spiritual struggles will become easier with the passing of time. Unfortunately for her, they do not. For the Order "obedience" means obedience to one's superiors and to the Church hierarchy. For Gabrielle it means obedience to one's own conscience, and it is this disagreement which lies at the root of her two spiritual crises. The first comes when she defies an order that she should deliberately fail an examination in tropical medicine, something the Mother Superior has ordered her to do in order to demonstrate humility and to ease the tension which has grown up between her and another nun. The second comes during the war when Gabrielle believes that the church authorities are being too even-handed between the suffering people of Belgium and their Nazi oppressors, who have murdered her father. "We should not obey the gods if we did not believe them to be just" said the Ancient Greek philosophers, and the argument remains good even if one substitutes "God" for "the gods". Morality cannot be based upon authority, even Divine authority, because obedience to God is dependent upon our believing Him to be good. We can only attribute goodness to God if we have a conception of "goodness" which is quite independent of the idea of obedience to a higher power, there being no power higher than God. The film is therefore a critique of those forms of religion which place authority above reason and conscience and an exploration of a complex philosophical subject. Had I been the producer I would not necessarily have chosen Audrey Hepburn as the leading lady for a film on such an ambitious subject. In 1959 Hepburn was best known for romantic comedies like "Sabrina", "Roman Holiday" and "Funny Face". Her previous attempts to tackle more serious subjects, as in the so-so "War and Peace" and the rather odd "Green Mansions" had not always been successful. Yet had I turned her down I would have been completely wrong to have done so. This is one of her greatest performances and the one in which she first showed triumphantly that she could be as good in drama as in comedy. Another very fine performance comes from Peter Finch as Fortunati. Fred Zinnemann shows his directorial skills in the contrasts between the Belgian scenes and the Congolese ones. The scenes set in Belgium are, if not drab, certainly austere, dominated by browns, greys, black and white, with the action nearly all taking place indoors and a powerful sense of constraint and restriction. In the Congo, by contrast, there is a much greater sense of life and freedom, with more vivid colours and a more equal balance between interior and exterior settings. The very look of the film would tell you, even if the dialogue did not, that this is where Gabrielle is happiest.Zinnemann is one of my favourite directors, largely because he made what I consider to be two of the greatest films ever, "High Noon" and "A Man for All Seasons", two other movies which take as their theme obedience to one's conscience. Some of his other films are not far behind these in terms of quality, and among these I would class "From Here to Eternity" and "The Nun's Story". 9/10

After years of reading about this movie, I finally saw The Nun's Story on Netflix disc with my mom who claimed to have seen it before but as the picture went on, she remembered none of it. So she ended up being as fascinated by what was going on in it as I was and told me some pertinent facts about the Catholic faith during some of the movie. Fred Zinnemann made a beautiful but also at times, intense, drama about a young woman's choice in joining the convent and the sacrifices she had to take in doing so. Audrey Hepburn conveys just the right amount of restraint and emotional feeling in her role of becoming Sister Luke having to abandon her earlier identity of Gabrielle. And Franz Waxman does quite a swelling score during most of the picture though the ending scene is all the greater with no score at all. So on that note, The Nun's Story is highly recommended.

The Nun's Story (1959)I knew I would enjoy at least Audrey Hepburn, and she's fabulous. But the movie came on as a Christmas Day feature and I worried that it would have too many religious overtones. Then as the credits rolled I saw it was directed by Fred Zinnemann. Zinnemann? I wondered what would draw him to this kind of story. My expectations tripled.I was not disappointed. This is a measured but never slow movie. It's totally beautiful, it handles the sanctity of the convent with respect, never tipping into sappy adoration. Hepburn is what you want from her, lively and independent, and this is a natural conflict in a world of discipline and loss of independence. And it's also an evolving, changing story with a couple of major twists as it goes. By the end you see very much why Zinnemann wanted to do this and I can't tell you that. See for yourself.The conflict between self and community, between having your own opinion about something and being forced to follow a larger set of rules that might not always be best, is the core of the film. When do you rebel? When do you submit? And if you have agreed beforehand to devote your life to submission, do circumstances allow an exception? A total change of heart?If you think this sounds boring it is not. You might give Hepburn the biggest credit here--she's a natural and you are nothing but sympathetic--but the directing the cinematography are huge, as well. Behind the camera is Franz Planar, who did such trifles as "Holiday" and "Letter from an Unknown Woman" as well as two Audrey Hepburn movies "Roman Holiday" and "Breakfast at Tiffany's." If you have seen any of these (or all) you'll know how really perfectly they are filmed, with the camera in service to the story.The story, by the say, in "The Nun's Story" is very much the point, even beyond the moral. When does a young woman leave a loving and comfortable home and join a convent, face a loss of self and freedom, and yet still feel useful to the world? Hepburn's character (who changes names, in part of the effort to leave the past behind), wants to go to Africa to serve the needy. How this is thwarted--or not--you'll see, but you really root for her. You see her brush against her principles in every way. And you see a larger principle arise--do the right thing. And she does. It's beautiful. It ought to make you cry. It will easily engage and move you.