When The Walt Disney Company released Sister Act (1992) through Touchstone Pictures they sold the film as a family comedy and targeted parents with children between the ages of 8 and 14 as their primary demographic. In part this was meant to cash-in on the built-in fan base for Nun comedies instilled in the parents by Sally Field’s The Flying Nun television show as well as to appeal to those who grew-up and were fans of Motown music (which features heavily in the film). But to be fresh, new, and exciting Sister Act could not follow the formulas of The Flying Nun or other popular depictions of Nuns in the media like Lilies Of The Field (1963) and The Nun’s Story (1959) anymore than a Whoopi Goldberg vehicle could recreate the lack of success of Nuns On The Run (1990). Instead screenwriter Joseph Howard and director Emile Ardolino returned to a tried and true Disney formula freshly imbued with the same nightclub edginess that made Pretty Woman (1990), one of Disney’s highest grossing films of the nineties.
The tried and true Disney formula I refer to first occurred at the height of Fred MacMurray’s tenure with the studio. The basic premise, exemplified by Follow Me, Boys! (1966), concerns a protagonist who is forced to take charge of a group of misfits and imprint these misfits with the protagonist’s own personality traits, thus creating a surrogate family where the protagonist belongs (shades of Howard Hawks and John Ford). Ironically this formulaic plot is the antithesis to popular cinema’s preferred depiction of Nuns since the boom of the porn industry in the early seventies.
From Boccaccio’s The Decameron to Walerian Borowczyk’s Behind Convent Walls (1978) to Norifumi Suzuki’s School Of The Holy Beast (1982), Nuns have been portrayed as closeted lesbians; a far cry from the sweet and familial asexual Nuns under Maggie Smith’s care in Sister Act. Oddly, Disney took it upon itself to project its typical family film plots into arenas where one would hardly suspect. Where Sister Act puts Whoopi Goldberg into a Nunnery to rejuvenate the family film genre, Operation Dumbo Drop (1995) puts Ray Liotta, Danny Glover and Denis Leary in Vietnam with an elephant. In short, Sister Act is the redressing of a genre to perpetuate box office receipts. This is not always a negative trend in the cinema, and in the early to mid-nineties it was a hugely popular approach.
