Discover the Nuns On The Run
Published: Sunday 27th April 2025
Nuns have a rather mixed record in films. Sometimes, they have been good (The Sound Of Music). Sometimes they have been bad (The Magdalene Sisters). Often they have been a mixture of the two (Black Narcissus), while just occasionally they have been portrayed as hysterical, rampaging sex maniacs (as in Ken Russell's The Devils).
Of course, when we start being more specific and discussing stories about fugitives escaping gangsters by disguising themselves as nuns and hiding out in convents, many will immediately think of the Sister Act films. But, in truth, two years before Whoopi Goldberg's hit American comedy arrived in 1992, a smaller, altogether less musical, British film ploughed a similar furrow: Nuns On The Run opened In UK cinemas in May 1990.
It is the tale of two men, Brian Hope and Charlie McManus (Eric Idle and Robbie Coltrane). We first meet them dining out at the local greasy spoon where both are moaning about work. "I really hate this bank job...so much stress...no pension plan...no insurance," they say. Little wonder they want to jack it all in.
However, here comes the twist: Brian and Charlie are not talking about any ordinary "bank job", for they are professional criminals and their gang will, within minutes, be engaging in this "bank job" fully armed. Brian is one of the foot soldiers taking part in the heist while Charlie is a skilled getaway driver.
But this is not Reservoir Dogs. Brian and Charlie are clearly too nice to survive for long in such a brutal work environment. Charlie has furthermore recently fallen in love with Faith, a ditzy and very short-sighted young waitress who also moonlights as a guinea pig for a team of scientists studying her sleep patterns. Faith is played by Camille Coduri, an actress with great comic chops who is now best known for her role as Rose Tyler's mum in Doctor Who.
At any rate, Brian and Charlie are stuck. They desperately want out but know that any attempt to retire will result in fierce consequences from their vicious young boss, Casey (Robert Patterson), who has a nasty tendency to kill anyone who attempts to withdraw themselves from his ranks.
Luckily for the hapless duo, thanks to a clash between Casey's gang and the Japanese Triads they soon spot a golden opportunity to evade both their fellow criminals and the police, and flee with two suitcases stuffed full of stolen cash. Unable to reach the airport as planned when their not-so-trusty getaway car lets them down, they take refuge in a large building nearby. But where are they? They soon realise they are in a nunnery. The two men seem unlikely candidates but after adopting the garb and wimples of two nuns themselves, they realise they may just have found the perfect place to lie low until things die down. As Charlie says: "This is our only chance to go straight!" Brian looks incredulously at their matching nun outfits: "You call THIS going straight?"
Nuns On The Run was the brainchild of Jonathan Lynn, the man - who with Antony Jay - had created and written one of the most acclaimed British TV comedies of the Eighties: Yes Minister and its follow-up, Yes, Prime Minister. Lynn had come up with the idea for Nuns On The Run five years earlier while living in Los Angeles. His first film, Clue (now a cult favourite) had just flopped and he had needed to come up with something new quickly. But Lynn was disappointed by much of the American reaction to his script. The major studios suggested he remove all references to religion for fear of causing offence. He disagreed and in a flash of inspiration decided to rewrite it as a British film instead. He soon envisaged his old Cambridge University chum, Eric Idle and another ex-Python, Michael Palin, playing the leads. Both Idle and Palin loved the script, but with Palin proving too busy to commit to filming, Idle suggested Robbie Coltrane take on the role of Charlie instead. With the leads thusly cast, the game was on.
Then in his late thirties, Coltrane was already a well-known and fast-rising comedy star who had played everything from a pirate in The Young Ones to dictionary creator Samuel Johnson and the Ghost of Christmas Past, Present and Future in Blackadder during the preceding decade. He had also received acclaim for more dramatic turns in TV's Tutti Frutti and for a supporting role opposite Bob Hoskins in crime drama Mona Lisa (1986).
Produced by HandMade Films - famously founded by Beatle George Harrison to finance Monty Python's Life Of Brian a decade before - Nuns On The Run commenced filming in April 1989 under Lynn's directorship. It seems to have been a very happy production.
"It was tremendous fun. Eric and Robbie were hilarious," Jonathan Lynn recalled. "They were a wonderful double act. They were as funny off camera as on camera. Between takes, the crew was laughing continuously because of the non-stop cabaret that was going on with Eric and Robbie." Idle agreed that it was "a great shoot", while Coltrane also recalled enjoying the experience enormously. Surprisingly, the two men were genuinely mistaken for real nuns by members of the public while out filming in London several times. Initial plans to set all the action in Scotland had been abandoned early on.
The cast was cast filled out by the likes of Janet Suzman as Sister Liz, the Sister Superior, and former On The Buses star Doris Hare (by then well into her eighties) taking the role of the elderly Sister Mary of the Sacred Heart. Irish actor Tom Hickey also appeared as the lecherous Father Shamus. There is relatively little religious satire In the film, although there is fun to be had seeing Coltrane's Catholic character prepping Idle's on the basics of theology in order for the latter to teach a class on religious education. It is Coltrane's Charlie who, of course, comes up with the character's two alternative nun names (Sister Euphemia of the Five Wounds and Sister Inviolata of the Immaculate Conception) and who ends up explaining the Holy Trinity thus: "God is his son. And his son is God. But his son moonlights as a holy ghost, a holy spirit, and a dove. And they all send each other, even though they're all one and the same thing."
When Brian points out this makes no sense, Charlie sums it up: "That's why you have to believe it. That's why you have the faith. If it made sense, it wouldn't have to be a religion, would it?"
Coltrane's guide to crossing yourself ("spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch") is also often fondly remembered, however the joke, in fact, predates the film. With Idle's character designated to instruct on religious matters, Coltrane's Charlie is forced to assume the burden of teaching a class of attractive eighteen-year-old women how to play basketball. This leads to two of the film's most memorable scenes, in which Charlie is first seen wowing everyone with his skills on the basketball court, and a stereotypical male fantasy sequence in which the two men are left awestruck by the sight of the girls bathing in the changing rooms afterwards.
Although certainly not a musical in the sense that the later Sister Act was, the most memorable song on the soundtrack is undeniably opening theme The Race by Swiss electronic duo Yello, which had already been a top ten hit in the UK in 1988. Yello's other big hit - 1985's Oh Yeah - had also proven to be a popular choice for movie soundtracks, featuring in a number of films including The Secret Of My Success (1987) and Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986). Nuns On The Run also featured music from Hidden Places. A song by executive producer George Harrison was dropped from one scene on the grounds that it was so strong that it distracted from what was actually going on in the film. George doesn't seem to have been too bothered.
As the release of the film approached, however, potentially discouraging news came from the U.S. box office. December 1989 saw the release of We're No Angels. A remake of a 1955 comedy, the film from Irish director Neil Jordan starred Robert De Niro and Sean Penn as two runaway hoodlums who disguise themselves as priests to escape the authorities. On paper, a very similar premise to Nuns On The Run, and, in practice it proved to be a resounding flop.
Happily, this was not the bad omen it seemed and Nuns On The Run played well with American test audiences. Only the end of the film was amended before its initial US opening the following March.
Basking in the warm afterglow of John Cleese's success in A Fish Called Wanda, the film was well received in the US and lapped up by audience and (some) critics. The Village Voice, for one, was keen, arguing: "Idle and Coltrane are physically in the tradition of Laurel and Hardy." The New York Times suggested "Nuns On The Run is a great leveller. It makes everyone in the audience feel a rascally 8 years old, the age at which whoopee cushions (when they work) seem the greatest invention since firecrackers." Entertainment Weekly added: "It's a cleverly-directed caper comedy about two crooks on the lam, and it has its fair share of chuckles."
A notable exception amongst all the praise was the influential American critic Roger Ebert who had received a Catholic upbringing and who took strong exception to the film's comical depiction of nuns, "Why do filmmakers so often insist that nuns are funny? I'll bet there are some psychological reasons buried around here somewhere," he argued. Distributors 20th Century Fox responded badly to Ebert's barbs and retaliated by temporarily banning him and his TV co-host Gene Siskel from seeing any of their films for review purposes.
Come May, when the film opened in Britain, it again received mixed reviews. The Sunday Telegraph, for example, hailed it as "an outstanding achievement within its genre", while The Observer condemned it as "a pre-cooked microwave version of Some Like It Hot". Ultimately, however, Nuns On The Run was a box office hit on both sides of the Atlantic.
There was a sour footnote to all this, however. For all the film's success, due to internal studio politics, neither Eric Idle nor Robbie Coltrane ever got paid for their work. Both had deferred their fee to ensure the film got made in the first place and were thus understandably annoyed when they realised they would never receive a penny. "I don't take kindly to working very hard," Idle said, who had not lived up to his surname, "deferring my money, making a success - God knows, which is rare enough in movies - and then having someone take the money and just keep it."
Coltrane, who died in 2022, was similarly irate. He is quoted in Very Naughty Boys: The Amazing True Story Of HandMade Films by Robert Sellers:
I am still very fond of Nuns On The Run, but every time I see it on Channel 4, getting huge ratings, I get severely pissed off thinking about the money I am owed. And it's a shame because a lot of goodwill went into that film, the crew and everyone else alike. It was all legal, but in the scheme of things, legal isn't everything.
Jonathan Lynn never got paid either. After Nuns On The Run, Lynn continued to direct, overseeing the classic Joe Pesci comedy My Cousin Vinny (1993) and the Matthew Perry/Bruce Willis vehicle The Whole Nine Yards (2000). Eric Idle took a few more small film roles (Splitting Heirs and voice roles in the South Park film and Shrek The Third, notably) before devising stage sensation Spamalot.
Meanwhile, Robbie Coltrane followed up Nuns On The Run with another ecclesiastical comedy, The Pope Must Die (1991) taking the role of a lowly, somewhat unorthodox priest who unwittingly finds himself becoming head of the Roman Catholic church. In a bid to head off potential controversy, Peter Richardson's film was renamed The Pope Must Diet! in the U.S, even though this title (Coltrane's overweight appearance notwithstanding) had not even the remotest connection to the story. Ebert nevertheless once again took against it: "Robbie Coltrane is a British comic actor of genuine talent," he stated. "but he seems under a compulsion to make bad comedies about the Catholic church." This time, however, Ebert may have been closer to the truth: the film tanked. Coltrane nevertheless continued to have a golden career. His two biggest successes: TV's Cracker and the Harry Potter film series both still lay in the future. For many fans, however, it is Nuns On The Run that will always have a special place in their heart.
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Love comedy? Find out moreNuns On The Run
Following in the great Carry On... tradition with a bit of Monty Python thrown in for good measure, Nuns On The Run is a classic slice of slapstick comedy starring Eric Idle and Robbie Coltrane.
Brian and Charlie work for a gangster. When the boss learns they want to "leave", he sets them up to be killed, after they help rob the local Triads of their drug dealing profits. Brian and Charlie decide to steal the money for themselves, but when their escape doesn't go to plan, they have to seek refuge in a nuns' teacher training school. Disguised as nuns, Brian and Charlie have to avoid their boss, Triads, police and Brian's girlfriend. There's also the problem of them being men disguised as nuns in an all women institution.
First released: Monday 4th January 2010
DVD DVD- Released: Sunday 26th June 2016
- Distributor: Arrow Video
- Region: 2
- Discs: 1
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- Distributor: Optimum Home Entertainment
- Region: 2
- Discs: 1
- Catalogue: OPTD1679
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Very Naughty Boys: The Amazing True Story Of HandMade Films
This is the gripping true story of the rise and fall of one of the UK's most innovative film companies.
HandMade Films was personally set up by George Harrison to make Monty Python's Life Of Brian. They went on to make Withnail And I, Nuns On The Run and Time Bandits, amongst many other classics. However, it all went sour when Harrison fell out with his financial partner and filed a $25m lawsuit against him.
Now Robert Sellers has interviewed a host of key players such as Robbie Coltrane and John Cleese for this history of the troubled film company. Packed full of hilarious anecdotes and behind-the-scenes stories about stars as diverse as Madonna, the Pythons and Coltrane, Very Naughty Boys is an essential item in any film-buff's library.
First published: Friday 13th September 2013
- Published: Friday 20th September 2013
- Publisher: Titan Books
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- Publisher: Titan Books
- Pages: 376
- Catalogue: 9781781167083
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- Published: Thursday 30th September 2004
- Publisher: Metro Publishing
- Pages: 306
- Catalogue: 9781843580935
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