Dizzy nuns

Come to the Stable was on the Fox Movie Channel this morning, and to be honest, I had never seen it before. Loretta Young and Celeste Holm star as a pair of nuns who, depending on your point of view, could be considered anything from naïve to pushy. They've just come from France to try to build a children's hospital, and seem to have no idea of the way America works. (Surprising, since the impeccable American accent of Loretta Young's character is explained by her having been born in the States.) They simply expect God in His providence to provide for them because, by golly, they've got faith.

It reminded me of Lilies of the Field, and the piece that TCM runs from time to time on Sidney Poitier. In the movie, Poitier plays a man traveling through Arizona who gets waylaid by a bunch of East German refugee nuns trying to build a chaple in the middle of nowhere. Through their guile and faith, they get Poitier and everybody around them to help out with the construction. This, like Come to the Stable is thoroughly unrealistic (not that the unrealism takes away from either movie), and one of the speakers in TCM's piece on Poitier refers to those "dizzy nuns" getting Poitier to build that chapel.

I wanted to do a longer piece of Nuns on the Run. It's an enjoyable enough (even if not great) movie about two career criminals who find that modern crime is getting too violent for them, and find that the only way to escape this life is by escaping -- into a convent! Insert the standard string of cross-dressing jokes, along with the standard Catholic jokes, as one of the criminals is Anglican and doesn't know any of the finer points of Catholicism. It was released on DVD, but is apparently out of print.