Word: nuns
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...general public is given a long (149-minute) look into the never-never land behind convent walls in the film version of Kathryn Hulme's best seller, The Nun's Story, now showing at the Metropolitan. To this reviewer the film appears as the most reverent and sensitive interpretation of Roman Catholic convent life yet given movie-goers. It towers above those stereotyped Roman Catholic nuns and priests perpetuated in Going My Way and Come to the Stable. It would be no surprise if Audrey Hepburn, who plays Sister Luke, and director Fred Zinnemann were given Academy Awards for their...
...movie is bound to evoke interest and curiosity. The public will ever have a curiosity as to what goes on behind convent walls. The life of a nun will forever be a mystery to most; and this film gives a sensitive and dignified interpretation. For those unfamiliar with Roman Catholic ritual, many of the ceremonies will appear impressive. To those unfamiliar with religious life, much of the metamorphosis from girl of the world to cloistered nun will appear distasteful. Perhaps there is negative emphasis here. Convent life appears as a series of "cannots" and a continual warfare against human nature...
...Nun's Story. Audrey Hepburn, as a Roman Catholic nun who decides that it is love of self rather than love of God that has driven her to-and from-her calling, is too antiseptic in her performance, but the story is a natural and the camera work almost dazingly beautiful...
...Nun's Story (Fred Zinnemann; Warner), inspired by Kathryn Hulme's bestselling novel, is one of Hollywood's rare attempts to make a serious study of the religious life...
Visually, The Nun's Story is almost dazingly beautiful. The colors are rich and sensuous, the light innocent and cool; and when light and color play together on the medieval stones of Bruges or Brussels, the screen glows like an awakened frame of old Vermeer. Dramatically, the film has been admirably conceived and impressively executed. Religiously, it is rather shallow. There is merit in the picture's painstaking effort to convey the physical reality of convent life, but somewhere the spiritual reality is lost. The radiant pageant of devotion ravishes the senses, but it does not touch...