The Nun's Story (1959)

Sister Luke: You can cheat your sisters, but you cannot cheat yourself or God.
Rev. Mother Emmanuel: Have you struggled long enough to say surely that you've come to the end?
Sister Luke: I think I've been struggling all these years, Reverend Mother. In the beginning each struggle seemed different from the one before it. But then they began to repeat, and I saw they all had the same core: obedience. Without question, without inner murmuring. Perfect obedience as Christ practiced it. As I no longer can.
Rev. Mother Emmanuel: Yes?
Sister Luke: There are times when my conscience asks which has priority. It or the Holy Rule? When the bell calls me to chapel, I often have to sacrifice what might be the decisive moment in a spiritual talk with a patient. I'm late every day for chapel or refectory or both. When I have night duty I break the Grand Silence because I can no longer cut short a talk with a patient who seems to need me. Mother, why must God's helpers be struck dumb by five bells in the very hours when men in trouble want to talk about their souls?

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[kneeling in prayer after offering to help the Belgian Underground]
Sister Luke: Dear Lord, forgive me, I cannot obey anymore. What I do from now on is between You and me alone.

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[after a nun has been beaten to death by a crazed native]
Illunga: If such a death happened with us, Mama Luke, we would tie the murderer to a pole and cut his body for fish bait.
Sister Luke: But we would not. We have been taught to forgive.

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Members of the Rome Opera ballet corps were hired to play some of the nuns, and complex convent rituals were literally choreographed for them.
An often-reported legend surrounding this movie is the story that Audrey Hepburn demanded a bidet be provided for her on location in the Congo. Hepburn always denied this, wondering how such an extravagance could even be hooked up in the Congo.
Audrey Hepburn met the real Marie-Louise Habets - inspiration for the novel and film - while she was preparing for the role. The two actually became great friends and Habets later nursed Hepburn back to health after her near-fatal horse-riding accident on the set of The Unforgiven.
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