Astonishingly, Black Narcissus was nominated for only two Academy Awards. How Kathleen Byron was overlooked for a Best Supporting Actress nominee is one of the many enormous mysteries that plague the credibility of winning an Oscar. In addition, the film should quite easily have replaced the eventual Best Picture winner, Gentlemen’s Agreement and there likely does not exist anyone who has ever lived who is capable of explaining how HUAC's best friend Elia Kazan did a superior job of directing that movie than Michael Powell did directing Black Narcissus.
No, instead Black Narcissus just received just nominations. And won them both. And each of the Oscars point to the shocking truth about what is seen on screen. Jack Cardiff won for his color cinematography while Alfred Junge was honored for Art/Set decoration. Those two were the most deserving wins of the night because their contribution to success of Black Narcissus are nothing less than absolutely essential.
When it comes to the influence of director Michael Powell on this movie, one decision above all stands out from the rest. And that decision usually serves to make anyone who has just seen the film vigorously shake their head and say something along the lines of, “No. Maybe some. Maybe most. But not the whole thing.”
That denial is in response to Powell’s decision that he wanted to make the entire film in a studio in England and did so. The response is to be expected because rare would be the person viewer of Black Narcissus who would not believe that—like most films set in an exotic location—surely at least some of the incidental footage of this film which takes place almost entirely at an abandoned palace set high in the mountains of the Himalayas was filmed by a second unit somewhere in the world that at least looks enough like those peaks to fool audiences. But...no.
Not one single image in Black Narcissus uses location filming except for a few scenes. The filmmakers never got closer to the Himalayas than Leonardslee Gardens in West Sussex. The sets and backgrounds designed by Junge and the filming of those sets and backgrounds by Cardiff was such that it is just impossible for most viewers to accept that this is a studio movie. The infamous site of the climax of the movie when Sister Clodagh is pulling on the ropes ringing a bell while standing on the precipice of a cliff with just inches between her and the infinity of a fall off the side of a mountain down to the lush green valley below seems vividly real to the point that one does not even question that it must have been shot somewhere on location, if not necessarily in India or Tibet. In fact, it was shot on the backlot of Pinewood Studios and rather than being hundreds of feet above the lush green valley below, Deborah Kerr was only about ten feet above the British soil.
Powell’s influence is everywhere in the film because he was an authoritarian director; a control freak. And Powell wanted complete control over the lighting of this film because the use of color is so integral. So, ultimately, what struck most at the time as the simply ludicrous idea of trying to recreate the snow-capped mountains of the Himalayas inside a British studio turns out to be the controlling influence which guided everything and ended up creating a masterpiece.
