Black Narcissus Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Born Deborah Jane Kerr-Trimmer, Sept 26, 1921 in Helensburgh, Scotland, Kerr was a ballet dancer, who had her first significant screen roles under the genius of the British cinema, Michael Powell. She was filmed and cut out of Contraband (1940), but then turned up in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death aka Stairway to Heaven) and then most memorably as the lonely and tempest-tossed nun in Black Narcissus (1947). Kerr's air of what Kingsley Amis termed "dignance" was essential to her 46-year long career, epitomized in respectable stuff like Separate Tables. In America, Kerr's hidden torridness was brought out when she played the adulterous Karen in From Here to Eternity, in which she explores a Hawaiian black sand beach with Burt Lancaster. The film earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress of 1953.

It was a comeback after a long stretch at MGM starring in costume dramas and epics. Later, she danced with Yul Brynner in The King and I, had a very sub-rosa affair with a student vaguely accused of unmanliness in Tea and Sympathy (1956): "When you speak of this, and you will speak of this, please--be kind". She held her own in the minor Cary Grant comedy The Grass is Greener, in which Grant and Robert Mitchum are rivals for her affections. In the 1960s, as the studio system frayed and fell apart she had more drastic roles: the proper woman melting in the Mexican heat and humid tropical prose of Tennessee Williams in Night of the Iguana, and a brief topless scene with Lancaster again in The Gypsy Moths (1969), and eventually had a turn as a Bond girl--of sorts--in Casino Royale (1967). Appearing with long-time co-star David Niven, Kerr turned on one of the richest stage-Scots accents ever. In the early 1980s she appeared in several small scale TV productions; because of Parkinson's disease she had not acted since 1986. But she appeared -- as David Thomson reminds us -- on the 1994 Oscars, to get the honorary award to make up for six bridesmaid appearances on the Oscars. Strange, none of the nominations was for perhaps her hardest work in The Innocents (1960). Kerr died Oct 16 at her home in Suffolk. She was 86.

A couple of weeks ago, A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis of the Times wrote a couple of pieces on the relationship between movies and the Internet. Manohla's was the featherweight of the two, humorously recounting her struggles to find a movie download site to her liking. Scott's was more substantial, positing a time in the near future when movie fanatics will have access to a "virtual cinematheque" where "before too long the entire surviving history of movies will be open for browsing and sampling at the click of a mouse for a few PayPal dollars." I think it's an entirely logical premise. If in 1978, when I was born, you would have said to someone that the movies released that year could one day be played by inserting a little round disc into a home computer, the person you were talking to would have looked at you like you were crazy. Then they would have asked "What's this 'home computer' thing you refer to, by the way?" So if we can travel that far in 28 years, you're telling me that in the next 28 years, Paramount and Fox can't figure out a way to get their library of films from the 30s and 40s onto the Web, which will likely be by then a more important avenue of distribution than the video store? That's flatly absurd.

I've been reading some counterpoints to the argument on the Web, and I've yet to find a credible argument against the "virtual cinemateque." One of them, by film historian Kristin Thompson, is downright illogical. Thompson misuses Scott's phrase 'surviving history of movies' to set up a strawman argument, claiming that when Scott speaks of movies, he's including teaching films, porn, ads and, I guess, home movies as well. What planet is she on? He's clearly talking about movie-movies -- the kind of movies that he or I or any other reasonable film fan might be interested in downloading. As for the more substantial argument -- that the studios have no financial incentive in digitizing even an obscure movie-movie from the 1930s -- to that I say, what was the financial incentive in putting the 1947 film Black Narcissus on DVD, which I bought last week? Was Universal Pictures being besieged on a weekly basis by fans of director Michael Powell, demanding an end to the injustice of not having Black Narcissus on DVD? I think not. It seems like we've been over this ground many times. If I wanted, I'm sure I could go to the New York Public Library and microfiche an article from the early 80s explaining why all the movies we grew up with won't ever be transferred to home video.