With their distinctive black-and-white habits, nuns are amongst the most readily recognisable characters in the movies. Whatever the storyline, they come with their own symbolic shorthand. Considering the restrictions of their lifestyle, nuns can also be handily versatile, whether they are being devout or devious, playful or oppressive, caring or cruel. Join Cinema Paradiso on an excursion behind the convent walls.
Unlike the other major holidays, Easter has never really caught the attention of film-makers. There are plenty of cartoons for younger viewers featuring such favourites as Snoopy, Daffy Duck, Yogi, Peppa Pig, Dora the Explorer, the Smurfs and Paw Patrol, as well as stand-alones like Tim Hill's Hop (2011), Peter Ramsey's Rise of the Guardians 2012), Sean Olson's The Dog Who Saved Easter (2014) and Evan Tramel's Easter Bunny Adventure (2017). Of course, there are also gems like Charles Walters's teaming of Fred Astaire and Judy Garland in Easter Parade (1948), as well as such obligatory horrors as Chad Ferrin's Easter Bunny, Kill! Kill! (2006) and the Snygg Brothers's The Beaster Bunny (2014).
The New Testament account of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ has proved a more fruitful source of information, since such silent classics as D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916) and Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings (1927). Once upon a time, Nicholas Ray's King of Kings (1961) and George Stevens's The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) would have been staples in the Easter television schedule, along with such musicals as Norman Jewison's Jesus Christ Superstar and David Greene's Godspell (both 1973), as well as Franco Zeffirelli's compelling mini-series, Jesus of Nazareth (1977). But the emphasis has been on controversy since Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2003), while a novelty of approach has characterised Kevin Reynolds's Risen and Cyrus Nowrasteh's The Young Messiah (both 2016).
While there's much to inspire and admire here, there's not enough material for a full-length article. So, Cinema Paradiso's Paschal focus will just have to fall on nuns. However, given the nature of the feast, we shall hold back on so-called 'nunsploitation' pictures, in which the sisters are often subversive, lustful, sinister and downright dangerous. Be sure to make a date around Halloween, however, for a gorily in-depth survey.
Sisters of Mercy
As with most topics in screen history, the name of Georges Méliès crops up early in the proceedings. He featured white-robed nuns driving away some invading demons in The Devil in a Convent (aka The Sign of the Cross, 1899). But the best-known silent about nuns was Henry King's The White Sister (1923), an adaptation of a Francis Marion Crawford novel about a wealthy Italian woman who takes the veil when she believes her soldier lover has been killed. Helen Hayes and Clark Gable would inherit the roles played by Lillian Gish and Ronald Colman in Victor Fleming's 1933 sound remake.
During the story, Angela Chiaromonte spends time in a hospital run by nuns and the sisters are similarly depicted as angels of mercy in films as different as Anatole Litvak's Anastasia (1956), Alan Parker's Angela's Ashes (1999) and Bruno Dumont's Camille Claudel 1915 (2013). Audrey Hepburn earned an Oscar nomination for her performance as Sister Luke, who works in both an asylum and a mission hospital in the Belgian Congo in Fred Zinnemann's The Nun's Story (1959), which was adapted from a Kathryn Hulme novel that was inspired by the life of Marie Louise Habels.
Sister Germana (Sopia Loren) may only nurse in a small Italian town, but she has problems of her own in Alberto Lattuada's White Sister (1972), as the local communist chief, Annibale Pezzi (Adriano Celentano), is besotted with her and keeps inventing ailments to remain in her care. Tending to French prisoners in the Nazi camps in postwar Poland, Red Cross doctor Mathilde Beaulieu (Lou de Laâge) offers her help to the nuns who were raped by Red Army troops in Anne Fontaine's The Innocents (2016), a fact-based drama that co-starred Agata Kulesza as the Mother Abbess. She also played Wanda Gruz, the hard-drinking Communist apparatchik who takes her 18 year-old novitiate niece Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) on a life-changing journey of discovery in Pawel Pawlikowski's Ida (2013), a modern monochrome masterpiece that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.
Nursing was a regular duty for those nuns working in the missions. Among them was Mother Maria-Veronica (Rose Stradner), who assists Fr Francis Chisholm (Gregory Peck) in China in John M. Stahl's The Keys of the Kingdom (1944). The action takes place two years earlier in Brendan Maher's fact-based Sisters of War (2010), which chronicles the friendship that develops on New Britain (now Papua New Guinea) during the Japanese onslaught between Sister Berenice Twohill (Claire van der Boom) and army nurse Lorna Whyte (Sarah Snook).
Sisters Clara (Chloë Sevigny), Mary (Sandra Oh) and Hilde (Olympia Dukakis) minister to the Pondo tribe of South Africa's Wild Coast in Thom Fitzgerald's poignant AIDS drama, 3 Needles (2005), while the needy of an unnamed developing country get to witness a miracle in Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely (2007), as a nun (Britta Gartner) survives a parachuteless plunge from an aeroplane dropping supplies and inspires her sisters to demonstrate the same faith in the Lord. How very different from the image of the self-pleasuring nun in the same director's Julien Donkey-Boy (1999).
Convent and women's prison pictures are often linked by critics and nuns appear behind bars in a gaoling capacity in Alain Robbe-Grillet's Successive Slidings of Pleasure (1974) and Claude Chabrol's Story of Women (1988). But Sister Helen Prejean (Susan Sarandon) vehemently opposes the capital punishment being awaited by Matthew Poncelet (Sean Penn) on Death Row in the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Tim Robbins's Dead Man Walking (1995). Penn and Robbins were nominated for their efforts, while Sarandon won the Oscar for Best Actress for playing a crusading sister who is still opposing the death penalty in her eighties.
Having fled Iran, the young Marji (Chiara Mastroianni) is sent by her mother (Catherine Deneuve) to the French lycée in Vienna, only to be ejected from her lodgings for insulting one of the nuns running the hostel in Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's Oscar-nominated animation, Persepolis (2007). Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother (1999) had already taken the award for Best Foreign Film, which features Penélope Cruz as Rosa, a young nun at a shelter for abused sex workers who is HIV+ and expecting child by a transsexual named Lola (Toni Cantó).
In Ireland, asylums for such 'fallen women' operated as laundries and Peter Mullan exposes the cruelty of the regime run by Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan) in The Magdalene Sisters (2002), which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Having had her baby taken from her by the nuns as a teenager in 1952, Philomena Lee (Judi Dench) is helped to track down her son by journalist Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan) in Stephen Frears's Philomena (2013). The story moves to 1960 for Aislinn Clarke's The Devil's Doorway (2018), as the Mother Superior (Helena Bereen) at a laundry in a remote part of Ireland tries to hide from Vatican investigators Fr Thomas Riley (Lalor Roddy) and Fr John Thornton (Ciaran Flynn) that 16 year-old virgin, Kathleen (Lauren Coe), has been impregnated by a demon.
Numerous movie orphanages are run by nuns, as Cinema Paradiso users can see for themselves by renting such contrasting pictures as Henry Hathaway's noir, Kiss of Death (1947); Denis Dugan's comedy, Problem Child (1990); Tony Bill's romantic drama, Untamed Heart (1993); and John Curran's W. Somerset Maugham adaptation, The Painted Veil (2006). This year also saw the Merciful Sisters led by Vanessa Redgrave and Margaret Tyzack give Ida Spavento (Caroline Goodall) a decent start in life in Richard Claus's The Thief Lord. This adaptation of a Cornelia Funke novel largely takes place in Venice and Italy also provides the setting for Vincere (2009), Marco Bellocchio's biopic of Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), the first wife of dictator Benito Mussolini (Filippo Timi), whose son was declared an orphan and raised by nuns.
An orphanage also takes in Lucie Jurin (Jessie Pham) after she escapes from some abusive captors and befriends Anna Assaoui (Erika Scott) in Pascal Laugher's New French Extremity classic, Martyrs (2008). The roles passed to Ever Prishkulnik and Elyse Cole in Kevin and Michael Goetz's 2015 remake. But our primary focus on nun-run orphanages will fall on Serge Bourguignon's Sundays and Cybèle (1962) and Jared Hess's Nacho Libre (2006). The first won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, although its story of the friendship between combat-stressed veteran Pierre (Hardy Krüger) and the orphaned Cybèle (Patricia Gozzi) makes for disconcerting viewing. However, the relationship between Sister Encarnación (Ana de la Reguera) and Ignacio (Jack Black), the Oaxaca monastery cook who longs to become a wrestling luchador, is much more wholesome and can be enjoyed by the whole family.
The same can largely be said of the schools with nuns on the teaching staff in M. Night Shyamalan's Wide Awake (1988), Michael Hoffman's The Emperor's Club, Peter Care's The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (both 2002), Katherine Brooks's Loving Annabelle (2006) and Ellen Perry's Will (2011). This, however, three titles stand out, namely, Leo McCarey's The Bells of St Mary's (1945), Daisy von Scherler Mayer's Madeline (1998) and John Patrick Shanley's Doubt (2008).
The first sees Bing Crosby reprise the role of Fr Chuck O'Malley - for which he had won the Oscar for Best Actor in McCarey's Going My Way (1944) - and run smack into the immovable object that is Sister Mary Benedict (Ingrid Bergman), who has no intention of allowing the parish to close down her school. In the picture adopted from the delightful stories written by Ludwig Bemelmans, the beloved teacher is Miss Clara Clavel (Frances McDormand), who faces a fight with her orphaned pupil, Madeline (Hatty Jones), to prevent Lord Covington (Nigel Hawthorne) from closing down their Catholic boarding school in 1950s Paris. Based on a Pulitzer Prize and Tony-winning play, the last traps Sister James (Amy Adams) in the battle for minds and souls that ensues when Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Meryl Streep), the principal of the St Nicholas elementary school in mid-60s New York accuses parish priest Fr Brendan Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) of taking a suspiciously close interest in the institution's first black student, Donald Miller (Joseph Foster).
Behind the Convent Wall
Some of the best films about nuns have been actualities, with Inquiring Nuns (1968), Gerald Temaner and Gordon Quinn's fascinating vox pop record of seismically changing times, being followed by Pernille Rose Gronkjaer's The Monastery: Mr Vig and the Nun (2006), in which an 82 year-old bachelor has his life turned upside down by Sister Amvorsija after agreeing to donate his home to the Russian Orthodox Church. More revealing of the daily regiment, however, is Michael Whyte's No Greater Love (2009), which makes compelling use of unprecedented access to the Monastery of the Most Holy Trinity in Notting Hill to capture the rites and chores of the Discalced Order of Carmelite Nuns.
Several films have been made about historical nuns, most notably Saint Clare, who founded the Poor Clares order after joining the community founded by St Francis of Assisi. She has respectively been played opposite Nazario Gerardi, Bradford Dillman and Graham Faulkner by Arabella Lemaître in Roberto Rossellini's Francis, God's Jester (1950), Dolores Hart in Michael Curtiz's Francis of Assisi (1961) and Judi Bowker in Franco Zeffirelli's Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972). Intriguingly, after co-starring with Elvis Presley in Hal Kanter's Loving You (1957) and Michael Curtiz's King Creole (1958), Hart took her vows as Sister Dolores in 1970, with her story being told in Rebecca Camissa's documentary, God Is the Bigger Elvis (2011).
Ironically, one Elvis movie did involve nuns, with Mary Tyler Moore, Barbara McNair and Jane Elliot playing novices who work as social workers while preparing to take the veil in William A. Graham's Change of Habit (1969). Of course, the decade also saw Sally Field follow up her success in Gidget (1965-68) as Sister Bertrille in The Flying Nun (1967-70), while the chart success of 'Dominique' led to the making of two films about Belgian chanteuse, Sister Luc Gabriel, with Debbie Reynolds headlining Henry Koster's The Singing Nun (1966) and Cécile De France taking over the title role in Stijn Coninx's Sister Smile (2009).
The most famous singing nun, however, earned Julie Andrews an Oscar for her performance in Robert Wise's adaptation of the Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein classic, The Sound of Music (1965). She wasn't the first to play Maria Kutschera on screen, however, as Ruth Leuwerik had blazed the trail in Wolfgang Liebeneiner's The Trapp Family (1956) and The Trapp Family in America (1958). Containing songs like 'How Do You Solve a Probem Like Maria?' - which was sung by the Mother Abbess (Peggy Wood), Sister Berthe (Portia Nelson), Sister Sophia (Marni Nixon) and Sister Margaretta (Anna Lee) - the RCA Victor soundtrack album shifted over 20 million units and, in the UK, outsold any iconic Swinging Sixties rock band for three years, although The Beatles did manage to fight back in 1967 with Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which was filmed in the most bizarre manner by Michael Schultz in 1978, a decade after some of the tracks appeared in George Dunning's Yellow Submarine (1968).
Some of the most beautiful music of the Middle Ages was composed by St Hildegard of Bingen and it's a shame no UK distributor has seen fit to release Margarethe von Trotta's biopic, Vision (2009). An equally frustrating miss is Alain Cavalier's Thérèse (1986), which recalls the life of St Thérèse of Lisieux. Thankfully, the Oscar-winning performance of Jennifer Jones means that Cinema Paradiso users can draw inspiration on DVD or Blu-ray from Henry King's The Song of Bernadette (1943), which shows how the Virgin Mary appeared to Bernadette Soubirous in a small French town in 1858. Sylvie Testud excels as a woman confined to a wheelchair hoping for a miracle at the Pyreneean shrine in Jessica Hausner's Lourdes (2009), while the 1917 Marian visitation to children playing in a Portuguese meadow is recreated in John Brahm's The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima (1952) and Marco Pontecorvo's Fatima (2020).
More recently, Albanian Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu found her vocation in Kolkata after founding the Missionary of Charities in 1950. Her remarkable story is retold with Geraldine Chaplin in the title role in Kevin Connor's Mother Teresa (1997), while Juliet Stevenson took over for William Riead's Letters From Mother Teresa (2014), which examines her achievement, commitment and piety from the perspective of Vatican envoy, Fr Celeste van Exem (Max von Sydow). Sadly, however, one suspects it will take something close to divine intervention before anyone will release such fine nun-related titles as Robert Bresson's Les Anges du Péché (1943), Henry Koster's Come to the Stable (1949), Alberto Lattuada's Anna (1951), Philippe Agostini's Le Dialogue des Carmelites (1960), Ida Lupino's The Trouble With Angels (1966) and James Nelson's sequel, Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows (1968), which both starred the marvellous Rosalind Russell.
Until now, the majority of the films mentioned have dealt with Roman Catholic orders. But, in taking us to the convent of St Faith outside the Himalayan town of Mopu, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's Black Narcissus (1947) centres on the Servants of Mary, an Anglican congregation that grows increasingly short of Christian charity after the impassioned Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) becomes jealous of the friendship between Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) and Mr Dean (David Farrar), the agent of the general who has donated his palace for conversion into a hospital and school. Sister Mary Bonaventure also has to keep her eyes peeled in Douglas Sirk's Thunder on the Hill (1951), when flooding means that the police are obliged to spend the night in her Norfolk convent with convicted killer Valerie Carns (Ann Blyth).
The guests are of the more clandestine kind in Ralph Thomas's Conspiracy of Hearts (1960), a Second World War drama in which Mother Katherine (Lilli Palmer) is helped by Major Vittorio Spoletti (Ronald Lewis) to protect the Jewish children who have been smuggled out of an Italian internment camp by the partisans. Handyman Homer Smith is faced with a less perilous, but nonetheless onerous task when he is asked by Mother Maria (Lilia Skala) to build a chapel for her remote Arizona community in Ralph Nelson's Lilies of the Field (1963), which earned five Oscar nominations, including Best Actor for Sidney Poitier, who became the first African American to win the award.
Dispatched to a convent by her own mother to prevent a guilty secret from coming to light, Suzanne Simonin (Anna Karina) is treated markedly differently by mother superiors Madame de Moni (Micheline Presle) and Sister Sainte-Christine (Francine Bergé) in Jacques Rivette's adaptation of Denis Diderot's 18th-century novel, The Nun (1966). In Guillaume Nicloux's 2013 remake, Pauline Étienne plays Suzanne, while Françoise Lebrun and Louise Bourgoin assume the roles of Madame de Moni and Abbess Christine, alongside Isabelle Huppert, who adds a touch of sapphic malevolence as Abbess Saint Eutrope. Rivette would return to the cloisters in 2007 for another literary masterclass in The Duchess of Langeais, Honoré de Balzac's 1834 novel, in which former Napoleonic general Armand de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu) tracks his beloved, Antoinette de Langeais (Jeanne Balibar), to a convent in Majorca.
A nunnery provides the setting for the second tale told by Pier Paolo Pasolini in his take on Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron (1971), as the naughty nuns decide to sin with handsome gardener Masetto of Lamporecchio (Vincenzo Amato) under the mistaken impression that he can't speak, and, therefore, can't betray them. The same source informs the action in Jeff Baena's The Little Hours (2017), an anachronistic hark back to the Garfagnana of 1347, which focuses on the antics of sisters Alessandra (Alison Brie), Ginevra (Kate Micucci) and Fernanda (Aubrey Plaza), three nuns under the care of Father Tommasso (John C. Reilly) and the Mother Superior (Molly Shannon), as well as poor old Massetto (Dave Franco).
There are also high jinks aplenty at the convent of the Humiliated Redeemers, in which cabaret singer Yolanda (Cristina Sánchez Pascual) has taken refuge in Pedro Almodóvar's Dark Habits (1983), only to encounter the Mother Superior (Julieta Serrano), who has given new names to such eccentric charges as Sister Sewer Rat (Chus Lampreave), Sister Manure (Marisa Paredes) and Sister Damned (Carmen Maura). Having appalled her family by announcing her vocation, Joanna (Emily Beecham) also finds herself surrounded by such quirky characters as Sister Ignatious (Brenda Blethyn), Sister Kevin (Joanna Scanlan), Sister Hilda (Pauline McLynn) and Sister Gertrude (Rita Tushingham) in the suburban convent presided over by a psychotic prioress (Susannah York) in Jan Dunn's The Calling (2009), which could form a splendid triple bill with George Schaefer's In This House of Brede (1975) and Michael Lindsay-Hogg's Nasty Habits (1977), if they were only available.
The stunning scenery takes the eye as much as the temptations facing Brother Georgi (Theo Alexander) and a nameless nun with an injured hand (Tamila Koulieva) when they are brought together at the precariously perched Monastery of the Holy Trinity in Spiros Stathoulopoulos's Meteora (2012). From the sunshine of Central Greece, we retreat into the shadows of a convent in Quebec for Norman Jewison's Agnes of God (1985), as Mother Miriam Ruth (Anne Bancroft) strives to prevent court psychiatrist Martha Livingston (Jane Fonda) from discovering the truth about the dead baby in the cell of Sister Agnes Devereaux (Meg Tilly). Scripted by John Pielmeier from his own play, this intense thriller earned Oscar nominations for both Bancroft and Tilly, who also won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress.
A Vocation Is No Vacation
Sacrilegious imagery was all part of Luis Buñuel's approach to Surrealism and it would surprise few to see a young man (Pierre Batcheff) cycling along in a nun's habit in Un Chien andalou (1929), which was co-directed by the artist Salvador Dalí. However, Buñuel's disillusion with the Catholic Church would intensify over the years and he unleashed his most scathing attack in Viridiana (1961), in which the eponymous novice (Silvia Pinal) is prevented from taking her vows by her benefacting uncle, Don Jaime (Fernando Rey), who is struck by her similarity to his dead wife. Desperate to atone for her family's sins, Viridiana invites some beggars to live on the estate, only for them to take lascivious advantage before posing in a perverse pastiche of Leonardo Da Vinci's 'The Last Supper'.
Postulants who meet with misfortune before taking the veil also feature in František Vlácil's Czechoslovakian classic, Marketa Lazarová (1967), and Love & Savagery (2009). John N. Smith's account of the 1968 romance between a Canadian geologist and an Irish orphan. Buñuel would also depict Janenist nuns nailing one of their number to a cross in a chapel on the Way of St James in his denunciatory dissection of the faith, The Milky Way (1969), which later includes a scene in which the Virgin Mary (Edith Scob) takes the place of an errant nun who has flown her convent.
Another film-maker fond of taking pot shots at the Catholic establishment was Federico Fellini. In La strada (1954), he had Zampanò the strongman (Anthony Quinn) bully assistant Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina) into stealing silver from the nuns who had offered them hospitality. The waif takes comfort in the kindly remark about an itinerant lifestyle bringing one closer to God, but there's nothing uplifting about the fashion show in Fellini Roma (1972), which contains roller-skating priests and nuns whose habits are studded with blinking lights.
Shelter was also offered by some Buddhist nuns in Kenji Mizoguchi's The Life of Oharu (1952), only for Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka) to be expelled after being caught naked with a man demanding the repayment of a debt. Doña Ximena (Sophia Loren) is afforded a warmer welcome in Anthony Mann's 11th-century Spanish epic, El Cid (1961), as she is protected by the nuns who allow warlord Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (Charlton Heston) to see his daughters for the first time. Later on in the medieval era, 14 year-old Christine Carpenter (Natalie Morse) agrees to be walled into a cell adjoining the chapel in the Surrey village of Shere to devote her life to prayer in Chris Newby's striking monochrome debut, Anchoress (1993).
It's any port in a storm for Deborah Kerr and Joan Collins, however, as they wash up on Pacific islands during the Second World War in the respective company of Robert Mitchum and Richard Burton in John Huston's Heaven Knows, Mr Allison and Bob McNaught's Sea Wife (both 1957). However, while Sister Angela and Sister Therese make no attempt to hide their identity, novice Rosemary Brown (Patricia Roc) is forced to withhold the truth after being mistaken for a fifth columnist by the Nazis and interned in the grand hotel in Marneville in Frank Launder's gripping wartime drama, Two Thousand Women (1944).
Seeming to act like his conscience, nuns pop up wherever Dr Archie Bollen (George C. Scott) goes in Richard Lester's Petulia (1968), as they nurse in the San Francisco hospital where he works, take in the sights at Golden Gate Park and Alcatraz, and even go joyriding in an underground car park. Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) is also troubled by visions of nuns, as she relives her convent schooldays during discomfiting dreams in Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968). Dressed in her full habit, Aunt Helena (Irene Dailey) has an even more violent reaction to the presence of evil after visiting Kathy Lutz (Margot Kidder) in her new house in Stuart Rosenberg's The Amityville Horror (1979).
Clerical sleuth Donald Sutherland has to discover who keeps leaving black beads at the scenes of the crime during the killing spree of priests and nuns in Fred Walton's The Rosary Murders (1987), which includes Elmore Leonard among its screenwriters. However, there's no chance of the nameless nun cussingly played by a cameoing Amanda Plummer falling victim to anyone in Geoff Murphy's time-travelling saga, Freejack (1992), as she carries a rifle and is quick with a well-aimed karate kick. You also wouldn't want to mess with Nie Yinniang (Shu Qi) in Hou Hsiao-hsien's The Assassin (2015), as she has been trained to be a ninth-century Chinese killing machine by Jiaxin (Sheu Fang-yi), a nun with a ferocious contempt for corrupt government officials.
Accommodation rather than assassination is the name of the game for the nuns with whom Meryl Streep lodges in Jerry Zaks's Marvin's Room (1996) and those who provide a home for aspiring 17th-century Italian artist Artemisia Gentileschi (Valentina Cervi) in Agnès Merlet's engrossing biopic, Artemisia (1997), despite the fact the pope has made it a sin for women to paint naked male models or study at the academy. A lighter variation on the housekeeping theme is provided by the fish-faced Caretaker nuns of the planet Ahch-To in Rian Johnson's Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017).
A life-changing encounter between an actress and a praying stranger is just one of the mesmerising pleasures to be found in Eugène Green's The Portuguese Nun (2009), as French film star Julie (Leonor Baldaque) learns about love, life and faith from the unnamed sister (Ana Moreira) she finds praying in a Lisbon chapel while shooting an adaptation of Comte de Guilleragues's 1669 tome, Letters of a Portuguese Nun. Where else but Cinema Paradiso could you make a double bill of this contemplative masterpiece and Cristian Mungiu's Beyond the Hills (2012), which earned Cosmina Stratan and Cristina Flutur a share of the Best Actress prize at Cannes for their committed performances as Voichita and Alina, who have been friends since meeting at a children's home. But, while Alina hopes they can leave Romania and start a new life in Germany, Voichita takes her vows and struggles to convince her fellow sisters and their presiding priest that Alina's heart is in the right place.
Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert) proves that there can be life outside the convent for an ex-nun in Hal Hartley's Amateur (1994), as she makes a living writing pornography in New York, although she has to rely on magazines and videos for her ideas, as she is still a virgin. Chastity also remains important to Céline (Julie Sokolowski) in Bruno Dumont's Hadewijch (2009), even after her novitiate is cancelled by the mother superior (Brigitte Mayeux-Clergot) for her reckless displays of blind faith, and she drifts into the orbit of socially conscious Muslim siblings Yassine (Yassine Salim) and Nassir (Karl Sarafidis). The shame of having her vocation denied drives Maureen Coyle (Diana Scarwid) to the Bates Motel in Anthony Perkins's Psycho III (1986). But, rather than falling prey to Norman (Perkins), she mistakes 'Mother' for the Virgin Mary and believes a miracle has prevented her from committing suicide by slashing her wrists.
World-weary writer Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo) is dealing with a bereavement when he is sent to interview Sister Maria (Giusi Merli), a Mother Teresa-like 'saint', in a poignant episode in Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty (2013), which was seen by many as a post-millennial updating of Federico Fellini's masterwork, La dolce vita (1960). A meeting also gives novice Colleen Lunsford (Addison Timlin) pause for thought in Zach Clark's Little Sister (2016), as her mother superior (Barbara Crampton) at the Brooklyn convent where she throws herself into good works sends her home to help her soldier brother, Jacob (Keith Poulson), cope with the traumatic facial burns he received while fighting in Iraq.
Gone With the Wimple
Appearances can be deceptive where nuns are concerned, although force of habit prompts people to take women clad in black and white for holy souls. This can be dangerous, however, especially when the nun is armed with a hypodermic needle, as in the case of Diana Monti (Francine Berge) in Georges Franju's Judex (1963), a remake of Louis Feuillade's landmark 1916 serial that caused something of a stir in France, as Diana's disguise was discarded before a trapdoor plunge into the river to reveal her wearing a skintight catsuit. The eponymous character played by Shirley MacLaine proves to be just as resourceful, as she teams up with Civil War veteran Hogan (Clint Eastwood) to fight the French forces bolstering the Mexican monarchy in Don Siegel's Two Mules For Sister Sara (1970).
While the MacLaine slugs hooch and swears like a trooper, Leslie Caron is much more demure as Sister Mary in Jerry Hopper's Madron (1970). However, Richard Boone's cantankerous gunslinger takes some persuading to behave like a gentleman, as the pair journey to Santa Fe with some outlaws and an Apache raiding party on their tails. The tables are turned, in Michael Lehmann's Hudson Hawk (1991), however, as cracksman Eddie Hawkins (Bruce Willis) has no idea that his potential accomplice in the theft of some Leonardo Da Vinci treasures is actually Sister Anna Baragli (Andie MacDowell), an undercover operative with the Vatican's top-secret counter-intelligence agency. She also does a weird dolphin impression.
London crooks Brian Hope (Eric Idle) and Charlie McManus (Robbie Coltrane) have rival gangsters and some angry triad members on their heels in Jonathan Lynn's Nuns on the Run (1990). So, they seek sanctuary as Sisters Inviolata and Euphemia in the convent run by Sister Liz (Janet Suzman). Also needing a place to lie low after a mob hit, Reno lounge singer Deloris Van Cartier (Whoopi Goldberg) is billeted at St Katherine's Convent under the witness protection programme. The Reverend Mother (Maggie Smith) is less than charitable towards Sister Mary Clarence, but her musical talents leave such an impression on audiences that Emile Ardolino's Sister Act (1992) was followed by Bill Duke's Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (1993), which reunites Deloris with sisters Mary Lazarus (Mary Wickes), Mary Patrick (Kathy Najimy) and Mary Robert (Wendy Makkena) in a bid to save the St Francis Academy in San Francisco.
There was nothing to laugh at in May 2011 when a couple of thieves robbed a Chicago bank in precisely the manner depicted in Ben Affleck's The Town (2010), in which the Boston gang led by Doug MacRay (Affleck) executes a heist disguised as nuns. Jeremy Renner earned an Best Supporting Oscar nomination for his performance as sidekick Jem Coughlin, while Pete Postlethwaite received posthumous recognition in the same category at the BAFTAs for what turned out to be his final role, as Irish mobster, Fergie Colm. But comic nuns have raised plenty of chuckles down the years, most notably in the form of the Leaping Beryllians in Stanley Donen's Bedazzled (1967), the order to which the debonairly demonic George Spiggott (Peter Cook) sends Stanley Moon (Dudley Moore) after he wishes to spend time in isolation with heart's desire, Margaret Spencer (Eleanor Bron).
This sequence was spun off from a sketch in the BBC series, Not Only...But Also (1965-70), and Pete and Dud (as Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson) were later hired by three French nuns to find the relic of St Beryl's elbow in Paul Morrissey's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1978). Three sisters also show up at the Mad Hatter's tea party in Ringo Starr's Born to Boogie (1972), as Marc Bolan sings acoustic versions of 'Jeepster', 'Hot Love', 'Get It On' and 'The Slider' in the grounds of the same Tittenhurst Park estate where, the previous year, John Lennon and Yoko Ono had made the video for 'Imagine', which can be seen in Andrew Solt's documentary, Imagine: John Lennon (1988).
The song that Helen Reddy's nun sings to an ailing Linda Blair in Jack Smight's Airport 1975 (1974) is hilariously spoofed by Lorna Patterson and Jill Whelan in David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams's Airplane! (1980). The guitar the stewardess uses belongs to nun Maureen McGovern, who uses it for an impromptu rendition of Aretha Franklin's 'Respect' before she joins the queue to slap the hysterical Lee Bryant in the famous 'Get a Hold of Yourself' scene. In keeping with the disaster theme, McGovern just happened to have performed two disaster movie tunes, 'The Morning After' from Ronald Neame's The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and 'We May Never Love Like This Again' from John Guillermin's The Towering Inferno (1974).
There's another fleeting moment of parody in Michael Laughlin's Strange Behaviour (1981), as Nicole Anderson dresses as Sally Field's character in the hit sitcom, The Flying Nun. But the link between nuns and music is reinforced, as Jake (John Belushi) and Elwood (Dan Aykroyd) decide to get the band back together in John Landis's The Blues Brothers (1980) after they are informed by Sister Mary Stigmata (Kathleen Freeman) that the orphanage of St Helen of the Blessed Shroud in which they had been raised is about to be closed down. A grieving Elwood's solo visit to The Penguin sparks another quest in Landis's The Blues Brothers 2000 (1998), which took the Guinness World Record from its predecessor for the most cars in a movie pile-up (63).
Stand-up Steven Gold (Tom Hanks) dons a habit to croon a comic ditty in David Seltzer's Punchline (1988), while Charlotte Flax (Winona Ryder) sets her heart on taking the veil after she moves next door to a convent in 1960s Eastport with her Jewish mother, Rachel (Cher), and younger sister Kate (Christina Ricci) in Richard Benjamin's ever-enjoyable Mermaids (1990). At St Monica's Catholic high school, Mary Katherine Gallagher (Molly Shannon) is punished by the nuns when she's caught practicing kissing on a tree in Bruce McCulloch's Superstar (1999), which sees Will Ferrell doubling up as Mary Katherine's beau and Jesus.
Cameoing as a nun offering the hapless heroes of Kevin Smith's Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) a lift in her car, Carrie Fisher stands for no nonsense when Jay (Jason Mewes) mistakes the nature of the good book by which she lives her life. Sister Assumpta (Rosemary Henderson) proves an equally unrelenting taskmaster when Fathers Crilly (Dermot Morgan), McGuire (Ardal O''Hanlon) and Hackett (Frank Kelly) bring her back to Craggy Island (after an earlier appearance in 'And God Created Woman') to help them keep their Lenten observances in the 'Cigarettes and Alcohol and Rollerblading' episode of the peerless Irish sitcom, Father Ted (1995-98).
