By 1971 it looked as though everything had been done in film. The Production Code collapsed, bringing new freedom. Nudity and sex was shown onscreen, obscenity and blasphemy could be spoken, violence was bloody and gory. There was nowhere else to go; nothing more could be shocking. Then Ken Russell came along.
Russell was already a veteran director by 1971. He’d begun his career making documentaries in the late-1950s, and through the 1960s moved back and forth between feature films and TV work. He often found himself butting up against the limits of what could be shown; a planned 1964 adaptation of A Clockwork Orange that would’ve starred the Rolling Stones was never made because of the British censors. But Russell’s 1969 adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s Women In Love had fewer problems, despite being perhaps (sources vary) the first major American film to show male genitalia. The film landed Russell an Oscar nomination for Best Director.
Early in 1971 his next film, The Music Lovers, came out; it was a biopic about Tchaikovsky that startled and affronted critics who found it garish, grotesque, hysterical, and far too irresponsible in the way it played with history. In retrospect, it was just a warm-up for The Devils, released in the summer of ‘71.
That movie’s based on a historical incident in the 17th century, as told by Aldous Huxley in his 1952 non-fiction book The Devils of Loudun, which was made into John Whiting’s 1961 play The Devils. United Artists brought Russell on to direct the adaptation of the adaptation of the book, then dropped the project when they saw Russell’s script. Warner Brothers acquired and released the film, which was censored in Britain and America, condemned by the Vatican, and largely denounced by critics.
It’s since been re-evaluated, and justifiably so. It’s strange and ambitious, confrontational and self-aware. Russell fills the screen with weird images, but keeps a thematic coherence that gives the movie a real power.
The story revolves around Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed), a brilliant but dissolute priest, beloved by the people of Loudun—especially of Madeleine de Brou (Gemma Jones), who he sleeps with and eventually marries in secret. But Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave), abbess of an Ursuline convent, is obsessed with Grandier. When Grandier leaves to meet with the King and defend the right of Loudun to maintain its city walls, Jeanne accuses him to the authorities of marrying Madeleine, as well of bewitching her and her nuns.
A witch-hunter’s brought in. Cardinal Richelieu takes an interest. The King goes to Loudun in disguise. Grandier has a religious experience alone in the countryside at the same moment an orgy breaks out among the possessed nuns. It ends in tears and madness.
The performances are strong. Redgrave’s Jeanne is terrifying and pitiful; Reed’s Grandier is fleshy and past his prime, but still invested with a charisma and real care for other people. Michael Gothard as witch-hunter Pierre Barre is startling, with John Lennon glasses and a wiry fanaticism. What they all do is match the movie’s multiplicity of tone. The Devils is ambitious, campy, extravagant, mystical, lustful, and confused; sometimes all at once. Russell makes that range make dramatic sense, and gets his cast to give him what he needs for that tonal variety to cohere.
From the opening at the court of Louis XIII to the final scenes of Grandier’s show trial and public torture, theatricality is at the heart of the film. Brisk stagy conversations predominate, and it’s hard to tell what to take seriously. But sex is never far away, and in this movie that’s a force that overcomes every attempt at repression. If Catholic monasticism attempts to deny sexuality, then sexuality will have its revenge by turning religious imagery into a means of sexual gratification. Sex denied becomes not merely destructive but apocalyptic.
With not a hint that the devils of Loudun might be real, the movie sometimes feels like a more knowing (or more adolescent) version of The Crucible, with trial and torture of a flawed but admirable man. It’s as political; Russell, a Catholic, shows the corruption of institutions as well as individuals. The frenzy of Loudun’s used for the cold-blooded purposes of Louis and Richelieu, and the mass hysteria becomes the pretext for the assertion of the power of the state.
It’s a bleak vision, but tolerable because it’s shot so well. Russell’s visual sense is brought out by remarkable set design from Derek Jarman. Specifically, much of the censorship inflicted on the film revolves around cuts to one specific scene, the orgy that contrasts with a moment of humble piety from Grandier; it’s an obvious dramatic idea, but the censorship’s partially testament to how well the scene works. Russell’s grasp of cinematic form means he doesn’t just show striking and sexualized imagery, but gives that imagery complexity that deepens a simple structure.
The movie was startling in 1971, and it’s still a little startling now. But a half-century later it’s easier to see Russell’s sympathy for his characters. That’s real, despite everything else going on. There’s a humanism to the film. The film’s decadent idealism is still idealism; it’s aware of the sinfulness of its characters but also of what’s admirable about them. There’s even a sentimental streak in The Devils, which is, when all’s said and done, a movie about the need for love as a form of redemption. For all the bleakness of its ending, and the sulfur and brimstone on the way there, the movie doesn’t deny the possibility of that redemption.