Black Narcissus

Powell and Pressburger have treated the usual 1940s subject matter – which ought to have had a moral lesson and ended in Christian triumph – into a psychological thriller. The film has amazing lighting, beautiful technicolor, and some wonderful performances, particularly by Flora Robson and Deborah Kerr. The third act really is thrillingly exciting, an astounding thing for me to be saying about a movie about nuns, if you think about it.  

Black Narcissus seems like it's going to do something akin to The Inn of the Sixth Happiness or Come to the Stable but the film takes a deliciously, sickly weird turn, and that makes it very enjoyable.

And while we're talking about very weird turns this movie takes, normally Sabu would be the chief sexual force in a film like this, but instead it is David Farrar who appears as a sexual object throughout the movie. He shows up with a shirt half opened about mid-way through the picture, and then he shows up completely shirtless for an extended period of time. He's even shirtless on the poster! This is a very steamy Powell/Pressburger movie.