Highly Overrated But Still Good

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Ralph Nelson's inspirational do-gooder film from 1963 can be forgiven some maudlin tendencies because of the era in which it was released, but it's a bit hard to take now. Sidney Poitier made history by becoming the first black man to win an Academy Award and the first black person period to win in a lead category. But his performance is hammy and exaggerated, another in the long line of examples of the Academy giving actors Oscars for the wrong performances. He plays a handy man who stops off at a convent in the middle of nowhere to service his car and then ends up staying to help the dear little nuns build a chapel. It's a movie about cultural understanding, which is a topic that never goes out of style, but it hasn't aged particularly well, and it feels too safe for the incendiary times in which it was released, as if Ralph Nelson and his screenwriter, James Poe, were too eager to be liked to risk offending their audience with tough subject matter. Topics like racism and World War II are briefly mentioned in passing, but the film quickly skirts away from them in order to give us another cute scene of Poitier teaching the nuns how to speak English."Lilies of the Field" is a pleasant movie, and let that description be either thumbs up or thumbs down depending on your personal preferences.Nominated for five Oscars total, including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress (Lilia Skala, as the head nun), Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Black and White Cinematography (Ernest Haller).Grade: B

The type of triumph-of-the-human-spirit film that MGM made in the 30s but instead of Spencer Tracy and some delinquent boys, we have Sidney Poitier and some highly resourceful nuns. As a drifter with a heart of gold, Poitier's energetic performance dominates this film. He's somehow bullied by Mother Superior Lalia Skala into becoming a handyman for her tiny convent and then into building a chapel for the nuns. Poitier is great (he won the Oscar of course) and there's a fine supporting cast. In addition to Skala, there's Stanley Adams, Francesca Jarvis, and Dan Frazer (as an itinerant priest). Skala and Poitier engage in some feisty verbal sparring. The screenplay is by the great James Poe and the film is directed, efficiently, by Ralph Nelson.

I saw LotF when it was first released when I was just 11 years old and I loved it then. Over the past 50 years I've seen it about once every 10 years or so, including just now. Each time it seems to get better and better, the mark of a true classic film. The performances, the story, the production, all are first rate. Others have commented on the remarkable exchange, when Smith's boss calls him "Boy" and Smith handles it by tossing it right back at him. Interestingly enough, this exchange is mirrored later in the film when Smith angrily calls Mother Maria "Hitler." It was a careless remark on his part, but her pain was evident. But did she call her attorney and sue? No, she handled it exactly like he did, when he was being bossy on the chapel construction site, she threw the Hitler word right back at him - with a smile. Well done!A film for the ages, and for all ages (and faiths). See it again.

Before the serious part of the Review, this film contains probably the first on-camera use of "whatever," so prevalent among today's "mean girls," spoken by the Mother Superior.•• Not only is the cinematography B&W beautiful, showing the dunderheaded Instagram narcissists of today as Zuckerburgs using the internet to find girls, and the Poitier performance Oscar-worthy - deserved - for its perfect pitch of old-southern- black'ery that never quite breaches cliché' and a black man with modern aspirations, it serves as a a Crystal Ball vision 50-years forward to what we have today politically - with the clash of Euro-Black-Latino integration and a black man leading the amalgam. Add to that the uneasy Baptist-Catholic traditions, the agnostic, the entitled white "hey boah (boy)" business owner, latinos looking for work in the building trades, etc., and we see exactly what exists today, with a black man actually providing the leadership, if somewhat unwillingly at first, prodded by a zealot. In a sense, one sees all that's "bad" about America thrown into a filmed pot (plot) in the arid Southwest to combine to make the finest Louisiana gumbo one can imagine - the genius of the American Experiment for all its contentious nonsense and prefab prejudice. The film even presages the rise of Austrian nuns 2-years later as an entertainment motif in "The Sound of Music." And yet, for its themes, it emerges in the milieu of "It's A Wonderful Life," "Miracle on 34th Street," and "White Christmas" somehow. It's title? From the Bible, Matthew 6.Amazing. A must-see for true film'ophiles. An under-sung classic.