A labour of love for Betty Box and Ralph Thomas and it's absolutely one of their best movies, a charming, moving, unashamedly sentimental look at some nuns in 1943 Italy protecting Jewish kids who have escaped from a concentration camp.
Lili Palmer is perfect as the head nun, with fine support by Sylvia Syms as the novice in love with Ronald Lewis (not a bad performance but not very believable as an Italian officer), Yvonne Mitchell is touching as a nun who doesn't want to get involved.
There's some amazing sequences - a nun is shot dead, a Jewish kid says her name is "Jew pig", the execution of George Colouris. These go right to the gut. The Yom Kippur sequence did feel long and the ending was a cheat. It builds up to the three main nuns being executed which feels dramatically right - as long as it had been arranged for the kids to escape. But they're saved by a convenient Italian changing of sides, which feels like a cop out. I know why they did it - it still feels like a cheat.
But it's handled with sensitivity and the Holocaust is actually referred to which wasn't super common around this time. I'm not surprised Box and Thomas liked the film so much.
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