Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Transcendent!, 1 Jul 2007
This magnificent film of 1957 still shines in all its luminosity after 50 years. It reminds us of the heights to which Hollywood could rise in the old studio system, which invested its resources on quality: the actors, the director, the music, the costumes, and the splendid genuine locations, from the canals and bridges of Bruges and Antwerp to the sweeping expanse of the Congo river (The scenes at the leper colony, among many others, are fascinating.). "The Nun's Story" allows us to glimpse a slice of history of the 1930s, as it unfolds on two continents. It gives us a look back into a society, both sacred and secular, that World War II was to change irrevocably.
The superb performances of Audrey Hepburn, Peggy Ashcroft, Edith Evans, Mildred Natwick, and Peter Finch speak for themselves, and it would be superfluous of me to comment on them further.
I merely wonder how many of the hundreds of films now churned out in Hollywood every year (the millions of dollars spent making them; their celebrity actors; their special effects) will still shine as brightly as "The Nun's Story" 50 years from now?
Relatively few, I think!
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27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Powerful and unsentimental, 27 Feb 2007
Warner's beautifully restored DVD of The Nun's Story is a real surprise, avoiding the mawkish sentimentality that usually accompanied old Hollywood's approach to Catholicism with a sober, quiet unostentatious majesty and a mostly successful attempt to avoid cliché (there's no romance with Peter Finch's surgeon as you might expect). Fred Zinnemann, who now seems on the verge of being completely forgotten, constantly does things slightly differently - not just jump cutting from continent to continent, but avoiding convention in subtle ways. When Sister Luke departs for the Congo, not only is her departure handled in the bare minimum of shots but they're also not the ones you usually expect: no head on shots of the ship leaving for the open sea, but instead zooming out from a sideways view before cutting to the ship's wake. The visual economy never feels Spartan, but at the same time it fits the subject matter perfectly.
Audrey Hepburn too is something of a revelation. Too often an irritatingly kooky pixie clotheshorse, here she abandons many of her usual affectations that you either find charming or maddening to give the kind of sincere and grounded performance that was too rarely asked of her. It's a quietly powerful and surprisingly honest film that stands up to the test of time. Shame that for some reason Zinnemann gets Dean Jagger to voice one of the bit players as well, which briefly takes you out of the movie before a sudden act of unexpected violence shocks you back in, but there's little else to fault in it.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Obedience, 20 Dec 2008
This film could have been a great deal less than it is. Putting a young and glamorous film star into a nun's habit has on other occasions (e.g. Jennifer Jones in "The Song of Bernadette") produced some of the phoniest images ever projected onto a screen (or, for that matter, digitised). Fred Zinnemann is not interested in celluloid sainthood - but he does seem to be genuinely interested in exploring the motivations and pitfalls of a religious vocation, and portraying the timeless routines of community life in a European nunnery in the 1930s. Of course, Audrey Hepburn occupies the lense much of the time, but she herself is a lense through which we see much more than the affected piety and postures of what Hollywood usually mistakes for the transcendental. The supporting cast are uniformly strong. The script is restrained and the dialogue credible. The religious life is much changed since the days here depicted, but there is a univeral story at the heart of this film: the struggle between the will of an individual and the rule of a community - the freedom gained, but the tranquility lost, through disobedience.
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