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Lilies of the FieldLilies Of The Field is an avowedly Christian film. The title comes from the Gospel of Matthew ("Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not... and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these") and the film is correspondingly preachy and didactic.
Poitier plays Homer Smith, a traveling handyman who stops to request some water from a group of five nuns and ends up staying to work for them. The nuns - all escapees from across the Berlin Wall - can't afford to pay Homer, but he stays with them anyway. Homer always does the right thing. In one of the film's genuinely amusing scenes, Homer discovers that the nuns are trying to learn English from a gramophone record full of unhelpful phrases like "please send the valet up to my room". He starts to "sho nuff" teach them useful English. The mother superior becomes convinced he's been sent to her by God and persuades him to build her an entire chapel for free.
Homer sets about his task with vigour, overcoming prejudice and hardship by virtue of extreme effort, faith, patience and perseverance - which are pretty much the traits any non-religious viewers will need to get through this film. Poitier is charismatic and as engaging as ever, but does little more than tread water in a one-dimensional role. The nuns are amusing company and all five actresses give engaging performances, but they too are insubstantial. Meanwhile, the script is slow, laborious and moralistic, the cinematography uninteresting and the action severely lacking. What's more, the outcome is as predictable as the Pope's Catholicism, and the film is devoid of dramatic tension.
The pleas for understanding and tolerance are laudable enough, and it was a well-motivated decision of the Oscar panel to reward the film so highly back in 1964 (it received four nominations in addition to Poitier's gong), but Lilies Of The Field has not stood the test of time.
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