BLACK NARCISSUS’

BELL-RINGING NUN

The atmosphere in this film is everything,’ wrote Michael Powell of Black Narcissus. ‘Wind, the altitude, the beauty of the setting – it must be all under our control.’ It was never on the cards, then, for the director and his producing partner Emeric Pressburger to film their adaptation of Rumer Godden’s 1939 novel in India, the land where it had been set. No: this tale of English nuns struggling to set up a convent in the Himalayas would be shot almost wholly at Pinewood, on sets designed by Alfred Junge and with vast painted cycloramas providing the requisite mountain scenery.

Take this establishing shot of Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) ringing the noon bell at the palace of Mopu, a former royal residence that Sister Superior Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) has been tasked with transforming into a hospital and school. On the face of it, the bell sits precariously on the edge of a cliff, looking over a lush green valley hundreds of feet below. In reality, though, Byron was barely 10 feet above the ground, with Jack Cardiff’s Technicolor camera elevated another few feet higher.

Between Byron and the camera was positioned a pane of glass on which prolific matte artist Walter Percy Day – aided by his sons Arthur and Thomas and his stepson Peter Ellenshaw – had painted a gloriously verdant simulacrum of the Himalayan landscape, complete with rocky trail extending off into the distance. It’s a stunning trompe-l’oeil, one of many that Day created for Powell and Pressburger over an eight-year collaboration that spanned six of The Archers’ films. For this and many other achievements – Henry V, In Which We Serve and Things to Come among them – he was awarded an OBE in 1948.

Byron herself appeared in three other Powell and Pressburger productions (The Silver Fleet, A Matter of Life and Death and The Small Back Room) plus many more films besides. Yet it was the troubled Sister Ruth for which she would be remembered – an irony given how much she clashed with her director and sometime paramour during the making of the film. ‘Michael wanted me to overstate Sister Ruth’s madness, and I used to argue with him that the character didn’t know she was mad,’ the actor would admit later. ‘Deborah Kerr used to whisper to me, “Don’t argue with him. Just say, ‘Oh, what a marvellous idea!’ and then do exactly what you want to do…”’