Blu-ray Review A Few Words About A few words about...™ - The Nun's Story -- in Blu-ray (1 Viewer)

[roxy1927]

Andrews didn't speak cockney either. And what I've heard on both cast albums and on TV shows is no better than Hepburn's. I think Hepburn is wonderful throughout and when she first goes to Higgin's house is a masterful sequence from everyone concerned. She definitely deserved an Oscar nomination and I would have given it to her. Andrews should have got it the next year.
Just the influenza conversation is perfection. In the film Pygmalion comparatively it goes for nothing. Cukor, Beaton and the cast are all in peak form.
To bring it back to The Nun's Story
there is a you tube video on the actresses for the '59 Oscar. A number of sequences from this film are shown. I hadn't seen the film in years and I couldn't believe the beauty of Waxman's score. The vlog is run by this guy Fritz and he does throw a bit of shade at the film's colonial attitudes of the era. Though he does think it's a great film. Knowing now what we know of what happened in reality in the Belgian Congo might color what we think of those missionaries.

 

[Indy Guy]

Having never seen this film I was looking forward to seeing what would be a new Audrey Hepburn film to me. While the second half lived up to expectations, the long first half with Hepburn's detailed and painfull transformation into the cloistered sacrifices of a nun came across as a bizarre cult initiation rather than a joyous bond of love for Christianity.
I can't imagine such demands being made today for young girls wishing to dedicate their lives to God, but then I'm not Catholic so I wouldnt know.

 

[roxy1927]

I watched the film with my mother years ago. She was very Catholic with a great veneration for Mary and the daily saying of rosaries. She as well was taken aback by the first half of the film having no idea of the extreme almost military initiation of becoming a nun. She said it can't be like that today. How often to you even hear of nuns today let alone see them in any form of habit? I started parochial school pre Vatican ll when nuns still wore the long habits and long rosaries around their waists. They seemed like very unhappy people. As if they were not so much serving God but attempting to escape from unhappy lives and failing. To me today all religions are cults no matter their place in history. I admire this film as I said because it is so unsparing for its time and if it were made today would audiences even have the patience for it? Maybe but I do not know.

 

[Douglas R]

Having never seen this film I was looking forward to seeing what would be a new Audrey Hepburn film to me. While the second half lived up to expectations, the long first half with Hepburn's detailed and painfull transformation into the cloistered sacrifices of a nun came across as a bizarre cult initiation rather than a joyous bond of love for Christianity.
I can't imagine such demands being made today for young girls wishing to dedicate their lives to God, but then I'm not Catholic so I wouldnt know.

It was the opposite for me because it was that first half of the film with Hepburn training to become a nun which I found more interesting and emotionally involving than the second half.