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“The Nun’s Yarn” is probably Audrey Hepburn’s best film and by far the one which shows to best conclude her mammoth acting talent. It is the autobiographical yarn of Sister Luke, a very young Belgian nun, who enters the convent at age 17 for specifically the defective reason: her doctor father refuses to let her marry the young man she loves because there is insanity in his family background. She won’t admit to him, as she is too young to admit it to herself, that her underlying reason in entering the convent was to spite her father, who believes women have a duty to marry and have children, but he is powerless to oppose her in this; he can prevent her from marrying her fiance, but who is he to defy God? Sister Luke, as played by Hepburn, wins us over instantly: she’s honorable, open-hearted, all or nothing, trying and failing and trying again, expecting too great of herself, wanting to fit in to the routine of her cloister, but feeling stifled by its constraints. The atmosphere of the convent is brought so vividly to life that we feel the conflicts pulling her in opposite directions: the peace and serenity that are embodied in the Reverend Mother Emmanuel (Edith Evans is so big in this role that she doesn’t seem to be acting at all), and the incessant weight of seemingly arbitrary and nonsensical rules and regulations that attempt to crush all individuality and spontaneity. The pivotal conflict arises in the first half of the movie, when Sister Luke is asked by her Mother Pleasurable to fail a qualifying examination for a nursing post in the Congo so that a less gifted nun can have her site, and Sister Luke has to obtain a choice: her failure will be a gift from God, but her success in the examination will obtain her a situation in the Congolese hospital where her talents can be most fully utilized. And this is where Sister Luke has to face her inner dilemma: the convent, with all its rules and regulations, hasn’t managed to crush her individuality — she is too mighty her occupy person to let go of herself.

It is in the Congo that Sister Luke comes into her gain. She falls in cherish with the country and its people as soon as she steps off the boat. She is sent to the European hospital to wait on Dr. Fortunati, a shiny, cynical surgeon who immediately sees through Sister Luke and understands her better than she understands herself. The meeting of minds between these two is awesome to examine and in itself makes the movie worth seeing. Dr. Fortunati, brilliantly played by Peter Finch, tells Sister Luke time and again that she will never be the kind of nun her convent expects her to be. The sexual tension between the two is evident but downplayed; Dr. Fortunati knows it’s impossible and Sister Luke simply refuses to reply it. The climax comes when Sister Luke is ordered support to the mother house in Belgium, and we suspect that Dr. Fortunati may have had a hand in it, to force her to face up to the fact that she is more nurse than nun.

The year is 1939 and World War II is about to originate. Sister Luke, chafing at the constraints of the mother house, is drawn into the war in ways her convent never imagined or would sanction. She assists a young lay nurse, who looks up to her as a role model, to work for the Resistance. She is jubilant when a German woman dies in the convent hospital. And she is finally forced to witness inside herself and realize that while she may be able to derive chastity and poverty, obedience is impossible. At this point Sister Luke realizes she can no longer go on living a lie. The scenes in which her confessor and Reverend Mother Emmanuel attempt to dissuade her from leaving the convent are the most remarkable in the film. “You joined the convent to be a nun, not a nurse”, remonstrates Reverend Mother. But this is precisely where she’s wrong; Sister Luke is noteworthy more a nurse than she will ever be a nun. After 17 years at war with herself, Sister Luke signs the papers severing her from her convent, and goes out into the world.

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Hepburn’s performance in a role which demands so distinguished from her is incredible; we not only feel but section all her conflict and inner distress. There is no contrivance she could near across as a lifeless, mousy nun (Hepburn would be drop-dead comely even in a burlap sack) but her acting is so convincing that we forget she is the beautiful Audrey Hepburn and glance her only as a soul in torment. Peter Finch is honorable as Dr. Fortunati and all of the minor characters are very well portrayed, but the accurate soul of the movie is Edith Evans as Reverend Mother Emmanuel, concerned with the spiritual health of her flock, and despairing yet fatalistic as one of her flock inexorably slips away. The movie is long (two and a half hours) but it’s never boring; it grabs our interest from the opening frame and holds it to the final frame in which Hepburn turns a corner out of the convent grounds and out of our look. The one jarring impress, especially after 40 years, is the patronizing paternalism of the Belgian colonization in the Congo; except for the education and medical care provided by the Church, the cruelty of Belgian colonial occupation was legendary and makes us wonder what Sister Luke’s fate would have been if she had returned to the Congo after she left the convent. At the slay of the film we are left with huge respect and admiration for an incredibly strong yet fallible young woman whose bound to self-knowledge is a life-long project.

Audrey Hepburn is best known for her light romantic comedies. Everybody loves them. She dresses up in some Givenchy outfits and blows the audience away with her beauty and charm. In “The Nun’s Yarn” she completly sheds that image and immerses herself in the role of the conflicted Sister Luke, a Belgian nun torn by her obligations to her church and order, her duty to her patients as a nurse, and her duty to her country during the Nazi occupation.

This a long and very introspective film that is not for everyone. It contains a detailed behold at life in a Belgian convent and a Congo hospital in the years before WWII which may bore some people. Also some of Audrey’s fans looking for her as Princess Anne or Sabrina Fairchild or Holly Golightly may be disappointed to come by only the obvious, reserved, and prideful Sister Luke. (Although Audrey does compose heavenly looking nun.) The length, the slowly paced style, the subject matter, and the unique role for its star have combined to maintain it off the list of Audrey Hepburn’s best known films.

Personally, I believe this Audrey’s greatest dramatic performance and maybe her best performance ever. She very ably conveys Sister Luke’s inner conflict between her oath as a nun and her duties as a nurse, daughter, and Belgian citizen. That she is able to do so in a film that has long stretches where there is no dialogue is noteworthy. She was nominated for Best Actress for this role, and she more than deserved to come by, but came up short. “The Nun’s Epic” illustrates that Audrey Hepburn certainly had the ability to flesh out dramatic characters and that she was more than objective a charming and radiant woman in a Givenchy outfit. She was a broad actor as well.