[6] Roger Greenspun summed up the legend in The New York Times:In some medieval histories of the Roman Catholic Church there was a gap between the pontificates of Leo IV (847‐ 855) and his successor, Benedict III.

Possibly to explain this gap, a legend grew up concerning a woman, Joan, born near Mainz, educated in Athens, who went to Rome disguised as a monk and so impressed Leo with her wit and learning that, thinking her a man, he appointed her his secretary and made her a cardinal.

The men show up surely enough — the artistic Benedictine brother Adrian (Maximilian Schell); the fiery Louis, her favorite (Franco Nero), and great grandson, no less, of Charlemagne—and never more regularly than at the convent where Joan passes her adolescent girlhood.

It is an outrageous convent, wild despite the efforts of Olivia de Havilland as Mother Superior to keep things ladylike, and its novices might have been penitents from the cast of Sex Kittens Go to College... Like everybody else, I have adored Liv Ullmann in Persona and Hour of the Wolf.

Not even Pope Joan, which generally manages to make her look like George Peppard's twin brother, can suppress her grave appeal -- but I think she is being used to provide some Ingmar Bergman eroticism to balance the film's intermittent tone of Hollywood piety.