Hardscrabble Chapel

Lilies of the Field

One day, Homer Smith (Sidney Poitier), a young black handyman who knows how to lay brick, move earth with a backhoe, build walls and roofs, and many another thing that can be done with a strong back and clever hands, happens upon a small group of Catholic nuns who need a man to do some work. He is rootless and on the road, and he’ll gladly do the work for a day’s wages. We are not near a big city, either, but in a near-desert area in Arizona, with only a single road going through.

What Smith doesn’t know is that the Mother Superior (Lilia Skala) has no money on hand to pay him with, and that she views him as sent by God to help them build a chapel. For the Catholics roundabout—ethnically Mexican and Indian—are too poor to do it on their own, nor do they have the skill. Meanwhile, the sisters themselves, as Smith soon learns, have been, somewhat like the Catholics they serve, outsiders in their own land. They have come as refugees from Germany and the terrible war and the moral and physical destruction it has left in its wake. They hardly speak a word of English—Homer is happy to teach them a little.

And so it is that Homer Smith, without knowing it, and much of the time without wanting to do it, and in the end getting no money from it at all, fulfills the words of Jesus when he warns us and assures us about the things the pagans seek—what to eat, what to drink, and what to wear. “Behold the lilies of the field,” he says. “They neither toil nor spin, but I tell you that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these.”

Strong Heads

Lilies of the Field (1963) is not a sentimental film. Everyone in it has something to learn. The Mother Superior is a hard-driving woman who has suffered much, and who finds it difficult to express even the slightest gratitude to the man she has, in part, tricked into doing the work. When Homer gets a job with the local head of a construction company, to earn money for food for himself and the sisters and for bricks and mortar and other necessaries, that chief—a white man named Mr. Ashton—calls him “boy,” and it is that small knife-edge of racism that impels Homer to say that in fact he has a contract with the sisters, and that he will build the chapel.

Meanwhile, there’s a greasy-spoon diner next to the Ashton business, run by a cynical fat man, a Mexican named Juan (Stanley Adams, the seller of “tribbles” in the famous Star Trek episode), who doesn’t believe in religion, and who thinks at first that Homer ought to get free of the sisters and move on. Even the priest, Father Murphy (Dan Frazer; you may remember him as the chief Frank McNeil on Kojak), who comes to the area every Sunday to say Mass out of the back end of his trailer, doesn’t believe that anything can be done. He keeps a bottle of whisky on hand to dull his disappointment. He had wanted a big parish and a fine church, and this is what he has gotten instead.

As for Homer himself—he cannot build that chapel on his own, either. We may say that the movie is an exploration of what the Psalmist says: “Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.” Not that the writer and the director (Ralph Nelson, who plays Mr. Ashton and who gives himself no notice in the credits; Nelson financed the movie mostly out of his own pocket) pound us over the head with Bible verses. Except in one grandly comic scene when Homer, who doesn’t seem to be living a godly life but who obviously was trained up in the Bible, gets into a battle of verses with the Mother Superior, arguing with her for his right to expect wages. “The laborer is worthy of his hire!” he says, opening the Bible to the passage from the gospels. But she has her turn, and he has his, and she has hers again, and that is how we come to “the lilies of the field.”

In fact, the struggle between these two strong-willed personalities, Mother Maria and “Schmidt” as she calls him, provides the film with much of its comic and dramatic force. “We build a schapel,” says the Mother.

“That’s very nice,” says Homer. “What’s a schapel?”

“Eine kleine Kirche,” says the Mother; then she corrects herself. “A cha-pel. We build a chapel right here!”

“Who’s we?”

“You!” says the Mother, pointing, absolutely certain of herself, the essential Boss in female form.

“Lotsa luck. I ain’t gonna build you no chapel.”

And then some of the comedy, and the strong but never obtrusive call to our feelings, comes from the fact that, in some way, everyone here is out of place. So it happens when Homer, sitting at the supper table, begins to teach the sisters a little bit of English, and he gets round to the simplest colors.

“I am black,” he says, pointing to himself.

“I am black,” say the sisters, pointing to themselves and smiling.

“No, no,” he says, laughing. “No, I’m black, and you’re white.” That puzzles them, and they whisper back and forth—“Was meint er?” “Was ist ‘black’?” “Ach, white, das meint weiss.” “Och, denn black ist schwarz!” And they are delighted.

American Folkways

You couldn’t make Lilies of the Field now, because it wouldn’t work. We lack the biblical and spiritual literacy. We may be interested in racial things, or we may persuade ourselves that we are, but we are not interested in human things. There can be no computer-generated images to illuminate a moment of shame, or self-knowledge, or regret, or gratitude. We would turn Father Murphy into a nasty racist, rather than someone who subtly embodies all of our own unstated assumptions about what a successful career looks like, in the church or out of it. We would bombard the viewers with ghastly images of the concentration camps the sisters knew years before. We would turn the wives of the Mexicans into feminists in the making, rather than hard-working and long-suffering women who sit quietly while their men, after long days of labor, celebrate round a fire with music and tequila. We would have devils and more devils, and “saints” of political correctness who are impossible to tell apart from the devils—assuming that we would attempt to make the movie at all.

Ralph Nelson, the director, understood something about storytelling that I think Steven Spielberg never learned, which is that you suggest more than you say, and you build up to a climax and then let it be, as the story does the work, not you. There is music in Lilies of the Field, and it is itself the climax, though I won’t spoil things by telling you how it comes about in the end. It is prepared for early on. Homer overhears the sisters, as they sit on their porch one evening, chanting, in Latin, a hymn to Mary, and they ask him if he knows any music. He takes up the guitar and begins to sing a racy love song, but then stops himself, and instead he teaches them the rousing Negro spiritual about the story of Jesus, whose refrain is the well-known “A-a-a-men, a-a-a-men, a-a-men, a-men, a-men!”

That melody, whimsically and sometimes ironically fitted to the scenes, played with instruments that remind us of unsophisticated America and her folkways, is the background for the film, and it returns in the end, in a manner that should bring a tear to the eye of the good Christian. For we recognize ourselves in those people, and more than that, we recognize the power of God, who makes much out of our littleness. As one of the last lessons goes:

“I built the chapel,” says Homer.

“I built the chapel,” the sisters say.

“You built the chapel.”

“You built the chapel.”

“We all built the chapel!”

“We all built the chapel!”

Then Mother points upward. “He built the chapel.”

“Amen,” says Homer.