I don’t fully remember when I first heard about Ken Russell’s 1971 film The Devils, but I do remember going to see it (a very old print of a censored cut of the movie) and feeling like I was watching something forbidden. The movie just feels like you shouldn’t be watching it. In the decades since, seeing it multiple times, I thought for the most part I’d know what I’d get from the newly restored and uncut version. I was wrong, and even the parts I’d already seen felt, to use Edgar Wright’s word, elicit. Ken Russell’s The Devils still shocks 55 years later.
The lore surrounding the movie is almost as infamous as the movie itself. Ever the maximalist, Russell adapted John Whiting’s stage play The Devils and Aldous Huxley’s historical novel The Devils of Loudon to include as much of the wild and upsetting imagery as he thought he could get away with. The UK censors made him cut out three minutes; the US censors five. Though the offending sequences contain violence and nudity, the main reason for the cuts was blasphemy and sacrilege. Russell always thought the footage was lost for good.
Cut to 2002 when film critic, author, and TV presenter Mark Kermode—the GOAT in my opinion—while making a documentary about the movie was able to find the cut sequences in the Warner Bros. archives. He and Russell then worked on a director’s cut, adding in all the excised footage. But when they brought it to Warner for release, the studio said no way. At that point, 31 years after release, it was still too much for them.
This is what makes the decision by the newly created specialty arm, Warner Bros. Clockwork, to finally, for real, restore the movie all the more unfathomable. Russell died in 2011, so he never lived to see the movie in its current, gloriously debauched and disturbing glory. But you can, and you should.
The Devils depicts the real historical events that befell the walled French city of Loudon just after the Huguenot rebellions of the early 1600s. The head of the Catholic Church in France, Cardinal Richelieu (yes, the villain from The Three Musketeers), in an effort to shore up the church’s control of the more rural areas of the country, attempts to convince King Louis XIII—portrayed in the movie as an absurdly over the top foppish hedonist—to tear down the walls of any independent city, including Loudon. However, the King had already promised to leave Loudon alone, so the Cardinal, and his representative Baron de Laubardemont (Dudley Sutton), need a reason to take power from Loudon’s popular head priest, Father Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed).
Grandier, while a born charismatic leader, is not what you’d call a supremely pious man. He enjoys his power and enjoys the hold he has on the women of the city. He has affairs with young ladies and doesn’t particularly care if their fathers find out. Also in Loudon is an order of Ursuline nuns, totally cut off from the rest of the citizens, save small windows in their otherwise fortress-like convent. The abbess of the convent, Sister Jeanne of the Angels (Vanessa Redgrave), is sexually obsessed with Grandier, despite never meeting him. She has sexual dreams about Grandier as a stand-in for the crucified Christ, sensually kissing his wounds. When she learns he has, in secret, married a local woman, she begins accusing him of cavorting with the devil to corrupt her soul.
This is a good “in” for the Baron, who hires a professional “witch-hunter” to corroborate. As Grandier leaves to seek audience with the King, the Baron and all of Grandier’s enemies hatch a scheme for the Ursuline sisters to all claim Grandier corrupted them and they begin acting as debauched and sacrilegious as possible.
The Devils has always reminded me of a horror version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The movie is clearly a broad satire of the events, but it still takes the material seriously. This makes it all the more upsetting. How could reasonable people have believed these claims? And yet they did. All of this pettiness and sexual repression and political corruption occurred amid the black plague taking lives daily, which Russell depicts with the perfect a macabre absurdity.
At its heart, amid all the salacious and outrageous sexual content—and the restored footage contains a particularly startling nun orgy—and some harrowing violence, The Devils skewers the hypocrisy of power hiding behind God and the damage it can do. Grandier is not a perfect man by any stretch, Sr. Jeanne is not a well woman, but neither deserve what they get as mere unwitting cogs in a larger, unforgiving game. Reed and Redgrave are unbelievably good in this movie, each perhaps giving career-best performances.
The Devils has always been a “holy shit” movie, offering some of the most striking and upsetting moments in all of cinema. Seeing the full version, in all its NC-17 glory, only adds to the feeling that Russell made perhaps the quintessential piece of subversive cinema. The movie has a limited theatrical run beginning October 16 and I urge everyone reading this to seek it out. I say this with no hyperbole, it’s a masterpiece as it was meant to be seen.
⭐ (5 of 5)
The post THE DEVILS Earns Its NC-17 Rating in the Best Way (Review) appeared first on Nerdist.
This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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