Is Ken Russell's 'The Devils' the Hottest New Release of the Fall?

It’s Saturday night on the Upper West Side and a line stretches onto the elevated concrete plaza outside of the New York Film Festival. Under the threat of a Nor'easter, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has urged New Yorkers to cancel their plans and stay home. But here we are, layered in sweaters and scarves, waiting to see a movie that came out in 1971.

The Devils is Ken Russell’s best and most personal film, a once-divisive 55-year-old horror masterwork based on a 65-year-old play and a 74-year-old non-fiction novel about a 392-year-old French witch trial.

As the sold-out crowd filtered into the Walter Reade Theater, Sight and Sound magazine’s new November issue, largely dedicated to The Devils and featuring a beatific Vanessa Redgrave on its cover, is handed to each guest. According to an article in the magazine by critic and Ken Russell historian Mark Kermode, The Devils was “the hottest ticket" at this summer’s Cannes Film Festival, too. And this all precedes the film’s official theatrical re-release, by the new prestige imprint Warner Clockwork, this weekend.

It would be fair to ask: What’s the big fucking deal? Kermode has a theory. “[The Devils] is even more important now than it was in '71,” he told the NYFF audience. “It is a story about a despotic tyrant with stupid hair, using religion to oppress the masses, to whip up hysteria, to cause destruction, to enrich himself. It could not be more timely.”

Today, Loudun is a commune of less than 7,000 souls just under 200 miles southwest of Paris, below the Loire Valley, in the Viennese department. It’s in Saumur AOC, an area of France perhaps best known by Americans today, if known at all, for stellar, light to medium-bodied cab francs.

But it was once the site of an operatic 17th century tragedy. Loudun was unique in that it was one of the few towns that didn’t get swept up in the Huguenot rebellions, an uprising that pitted French Calvinist Protestants against King Louis XIII’s crown and Cardinal Richelieu’s Catholic church. Majority Protestant Loudun remained loyal to the government, and its castle walls stood tall.

In the early 1630s, though, a demonic possession scandal within a convent of Usruline nuns eventually led to the execution of the perfectly named secular priest Urbain Grandier, which became the pretense for the demolition of the castle and the further consolidation of Cardinal Richelieu’s power. This event became the subject of Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun, a miraculous exploration of history, totalitarianism, religion, society and sex that’s every bit as urgent and animated as Brave New World, from 20 years earlier.

The Devils of Loudun tracks the personal journey of Grandier, a combative egoist whose dick constantly gets him into trouble but who nevertheless becomes a true believer, achieving something like saintly transcendence in his final moments on Earth. He was the architect of his own destruction, brought low by a cabal of enemies composed of former allies and occultist apothecaries. Sister Jeanne des Anges, meanwhile, was a hunchbacked and self-loathing nun who rose to the position of mother superior in her convent and became sexually obsessed with Grandier, eventually accusing him of being an incubus (a charge that became the basis of a trial in which he was accused of sorcery). Though they knew this was specious, Grandier’s enemies convinced the powers of church and state that getting rid of the outspoken priest was a politically expedient way to consolidate papist control of France. Grandier was found guilty, then tortured and burned at the stake, his charred remains scattered to the four winds. As Huxley wrote, Grandier’s execution was “a political experiment carefully designed to show how far, in this third decade of the seventeenth century, the methods of totalitarian dictatorship could safely be pushed.”

Those who know Ken Russell’s exuberant, expressionist work—from Lisztomania (1975) and Altered States (1980) to 1988’s The Lair of the White Worm—might have trouble recognizing The Devils as a product of the same extreme, goofy, stoned and demented filmmaker (despite the fact that it opens with the flamboyant king of France putting on a play as a gender-bending mermaid/deity). In its fusion of both classicism and restraint, the film owes credit to a murderer’s row of accomplished contributors: a young Derek Jarman for its gothic, Metropolis-inspired production design; Peter Maxwell Davies, who composed a dire and cacophonous score; and the performances of Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave, who ooze sex and convey the screenplay’s bombast with a properly Shakespearean gravity.

Russell self-identified as a non-political filmmaker. But The Devils, he confessed, was one exception. “Ken believed the problem with making a political statement in the present is it will soon be dated, because things that seem cut and dry politically now quickly change,” Kermode told the Walter Reade audience. And perhaps Russell’s understanding of the timelessness of historical allegories is why the film has aged so well.

Russell saw direct lines between the destruction of Grandier and the conservative backlash to England’s sexual revolution. But his adaptation was nevertheless shockingly faithful to Huxley’s text, down to Grandier’s facial hair and costuming (done by Russell’s then-wife, Shirley), the specific methods of torture he suffered, and the verbatim, half-delirious prayers Grandier mutters as his legs are crushed. Even the infamous nun orgy, detailed by Huxley as a kind of dark ages sex show, is rendered by Russell without fear or favor.

This did not spare The Devils from oversight, meddling, and suppression from its financiers, as well as the era’s British and American censors. United Artists initially pitched the property to Russell based on John Whiting’s 1961 play, which debuted on Broadway in 1965 with Jason Robards and Anne Bancroft. The studio subsequently balked at the screenplay Russell produced, though it was later bought by Warner Brothers. During filming, newspapers reported that Russell was shooting sacrilegious porn, setting off alarms that The Devils would be legally dicey and financially ruinous. Ultimately, critics rejected the film; protesters, of course, picketed. The finished film would gain cult status by word of mouth but remained unavailable in most formats and was rarely screened.

The main bone of contention was “The Rape of Christ, a climactic scene in which one nun face-fucks the phallic nose of a claymation Jesus while others are sent into a frenzy by a Ziggy Stardust witch hunter. This is cross-cut with a scene in which Grandier takes communion on the bank of a lake, juxtaposing the power of personal faith with its perversion at the hands of religious institutions. “Ken was a Catholic,” his wife Lisi Russell told the audience, “and he didn’t like his beautiful faith being tampered with by anybody.” The sequence was cut from the film, which led Russell to describe what landed in theaters as “damaged goods.” But when Kermode was working on a documentary about The Devils in the 1990s, he stumbled upon the footage, once lost to time, that facilitated its restoration. Russell would finally get to see his film as intended in 2004, screened from a DigiBeta tape seven years before his death.

Though that cut was shown once and never distributed, Warner Clockwork’s vital restoration will hit theaters this weekend, with a physical media release presumably in the offing. The film, Clockwork president Christian Parkes told me, “should be discussed in the same conversation as the work of other master filmmakers of that era: Coppola, Scorsese, Friedkin, Kubrick. For decades, it’s been the stuff of legend, whisper, and conspiracy. That [Warner Clockwork] has been able to democratize the film in its definitive form will give everyone the ability to see it and rightfully judge for themselves."

As The Devils ends, the walls of Loudun are detonated and the martyred Urbain Grandier urges his constituents to fight tyranny and protect their independence before he is reduced to memory and ash. Gemma Jones, as Grandier’s widow Madeline de Brou, scales the rubble and stumbles out into the barren French countryside, leaving the city behind her in a wide shot. Ken Russell’s frame desaturates and the film stock takes on sepia tones. It is a statement, and an evergreen warning, not to view this ancient world as so different from ours.