An obscenity
I THINK The Devils, Ken Russell’s fifth big-screen feature, is a culmination of his previous works dealing in history ( Pop Goes the Easel, The Debussy Film), literary fiction ( Women
in Love), surreal and sustained passages of cinema ( The Music Lovers), the same time it casts a shadow — or glimmers and flashes if you like — over subsequent films: the slippery nature of reality ( Altered States), the link between sexual and religious mania ( Crimes of Passion), the exploration of mythic origins ( Gothic) — here the true story of an entire convent of nuns possessed by demons in the small town of Loudon. Or put another way: he’s experimented and explored throughout his career, often provoking shock and disgust, but never with this much intensity this level of imagination.
Russell’s ( putting it a third way) masterpiece has been censored in some countries, banned in others, lambasted by critics — Vincent Canby of The New
York Times compared the director to “a hobbyist determined to reproduce The Last Supper in bottle tops”; Roger Ebert of The Chicago
Sun-Times sniffed sarcastically “If the movie industry had more hard- nosed, tell-it-like-it-is artists like Ken Russell, Loudon might never happen again.” The film was pointedly ignored — is in fact still being ignored — by its own distributing company ( Warner Brothers), all these actions having contributed to the strange silence that has hung over the film for decades.* The film has nevertheless influenced a number of filmmakers and their work: William Friedkin’s The Exorcist of course, including the vomiting,
the masturbating, the odd detail of a woman arching her spine backwards like a spider upsidedown; films with passages of psychedelic horror, from The
Black Swan to American Psycho; filmmakers who make a career of constant provocation (Lars Von Trier, Park Chan Wook, Gaspar Noe to name a few); the image of a lone figure walking into a landscape of utter desolation (as used in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist).
Two things distinguish Russell from the rest: a gift for characterization, a sense of mission. We’re introduced to Fr. Urbain Grandier ( the massive Oliver Reed) early on, a small figure perched on a high building, looking down at the former governor of Loudon. The camera swings round to rise and peer at the governor’s corpse; Russell cuts to a long shot, to a reverse shot ( looking up the governor’s chin instead of down his forehead), cuts to a longer shot of the same angle, then swings up to catch Grandier explaining (in a voice that fills the vast courtyard) what the governor did and what the citizens of Loudon owe him — the shots and Reed’s presence selling the idea that the mantle of authority has passed from one to the other.
As the funeral procession passes the Ursuline convent Sister Jeanne Des Ange ( Vanessa Redgrave) fantasizes about wiping his feet with her long lustrous red hair; later we see Grandier lying naked with the young Philippe (Georgina Hale) quoting her a translation from Latin: “But in everlasting leisure like this, lie still and kiss time away. No weariness and no shame. Now, then, and shall be all pleasure. No end to it.” When she weeps and declares she’s pregnant Grandier sighs: “And so it ends.”
As Grandier deftly walks past Philippe’s clutching embrace we wonder: this is our protagonist? A hedonistic priest, bedding women right and left, preaching a philosophy of transcendence through pleasure?
Apparently yes. Russell channeling Huxley’s original text through John Robert Whiting’s play proposes that Grandier was in fact a deeply flawed yet heroic man, perversely seeking salvation (“My intention is different. You see, I need to turn them against myself.” “And bring about your own end?” “I have a great need to be united with God.”) and finding it in the arms of Madeleine de Brou (Gemma Jones), a virgin whose directness of thought and feeling (“I am a sinner, but I do not think that God has deserted me. I would not be afraid to come before Him with you, even in our sin”) startles and ultimately subdues him.
That’s part of Russell’s secret really; in the heart of this difficult-to-watch parade of maggoty corpses, crotch- grinding nuns sans wimple (or any other stitch of clothing), and harrowingly graphic tortures (those involving bone are in my opinion some of the worst) is this oddly persuasive love story between a refreshingly simple beauty and her gorilla-chested beast. You’re charmed by them (as Grandier was by Madeleine); you develop affection; when the film darkens further ( yes it happens) you fear for their future.
I mention “mission”; a key exchange happens early on, between Cardinal Richeliu (Christopher Logue) and Louis XIII (Graham Armitage): “I pray that I may assist you in the birth of a new France, where Church and State are one.” That’s the film’s real conflict: not between mere good and evil but between independent city-states and an encroaching theocracy. Russell ( through Whiting’s streamlining) follows Huxley’s complex portrait of 17th century France — the politics and the social dynamics — to a remarkable degree, setting the background for Jeanne Des Anges and her fellow sisters’ hysteria, and why they were chosen by the government as a weapon against Grandier. Russell reportedly lost his Catholic faith after making this film — possibly in part because of the church’s ferocious response, possibly in part (and I can only speculate here) from learning the details of what the church did to Grandier all those centuries ago. And the anger inspired, plus Russell’s skill with historical facts ( honed from a decade of making biopics and documentaries) drives the film’s unflinching cruelty, its relentlessly corrosive satire.
Can’t help but go back to Ebert’s sneer: Loudon never happen again? Far as I can see it’s happening right now, in the one country where you thought it would never happen, Muslim bans and Christian intolerance and all. “(T)he work of men who are not concerned,” Grandier informs the theological court “with fact or with law or with theology but a political experiment to show how the will of one man can be pushed into destroying not only one man or one city but one nation.”
Sounds like anyone we know? We need a Russell to tell it like it is now more than ever — Warner Brothers’ continued suppression of the film is in my book unconscionable and obscene.
* Online horror streaming service Shudder has just recently made the film available — but only the American release version, from which two crucial scenes have been deleted (one is available online; portions of the other can be seen in a documentary on the film, also available online).