The title of Ken Russell’s The Devils refers to politicians and political manipulators. That’s why the opening scenes seem to plunge us back into the horrifying daily carnival of the Biden administration: Epicene members of the aristocracy — catamites, fornicators, and prevaricators — parade unrestrained vices, flaunting their private identities through insistent, campy display in places of secular and religious officialdom.
Although set in 17th-century Loudun, France, dramatizing the infamous execution of Roman Catholic priest Urbain Grandier (played by Oliver Reed) following charges of witchcraft, this 1971 film depicts political conflict overtaken by religious hysteria. It resembles the progressive chicanery we recently experienced. (Fact-check the many taken-for-granted Covid-era superstitions and Biden-administration scandals that either went unreported or unaccounted for.) That’s what makes Russell’s period piece a startling, very necessary examination of decadent power.
Unfortunately, publicity ballyhoo for the 4K restoration of The Devils, including previously censored scenes, doesn’t sell the film’s ethics. The rerelease is being promoted as a horror movie promising steady, anti-Christian jolts and atrocities. The PR is yet another means of disarming our political skepticism.
This campaign conforms with Warner Bros. new dissolute program (from James Gunn’s perversion of Superman and Supergirl to The Bride), now under the rubric “Clockwork,” named after Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, which, like The Devils, was originally released in 1971 with an X rating. Advertising outrageousness misdirects us from Russell’s exceptional artistic intimidation. At the time, Pauline Kael pointed out the film’s “madness,” which was precisely Russell’s point — as well as his method.
Back then it could be maddening to endure Russell’s outré, surrealist visions (Women in Love, Tommy, Mahler, Whore, Valentino, The Boy Friend, The Music Lovers), but Millennial culture should be caught up with his follies by now — all the more reason to point out Russell’s seriousness.
The emphasis on sexual obsession that links Russell to the avant-garde forces The Devils to test (offend) commercial expectations. Using Aldous Huxley’s 1952 historical account of Father Grandier’s tragedy, Russell depicts a conflict similar to Arthur Miller’s witch-hunt drama The Crucible, but he doesn’t have Miller’s sanctimony. Grandier’s position as the leading priest in Loudon, a city that survived the fracture between Catholics and Huguenots, sparks a power struggle. Grandier’s liberalism is jealously opposed by Cardinal Richelieu, who presides over King Louis XIII’s licentious court at the film’s start. Richelieu’s minions enlist the aid of Sister Jeanne des Anges (Vanessa Redgrave), a neurotic, hunchbacked abbess obsessed with Grandier’s libertine approach to doctrine.
Grandier’s progressivism (he marries a woman in a private ceremony) is portrayed with the same seething sensuality that Oliver Reed brought to Russell’s Dante Gabriel Rossetti TV film and the role of the mine owner’s son in Women in Love. Explaining his controversial characterization, Reed, who was Russell’s ally, said, “We didn’t set out to make a pretty Christian film. Charlton Heston’s made enough of those.” Instead, The Devils insistently provokes.
Russell treads paths previously forged in cinema history, deliberately riffing on Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, and Buñuel’s still audacious l’Age d’or, adding his own signature concoction of sacred and profane outrages. His moral conceit inspired Derek Jarman’s stark, futuristic black-and-white design, shifting from realism to theatricality. Russell’s technique (described in John Baxter’s scholarly study An Appalling Talent) leaps past didactic messaging, often to startling visual extremes: medieval medical tortures and blasphemous orgies. Louis XIII’s “Bye Bye Blackbird” sequence shows Russell’s troubling embrace of sadism and anachronism. Always untamed, his flamboyance can get the best of his serious ideas. This was one year after Fellini’s ecclesiastical fashion-show sequence in Roma, and Russell surpasses Fellini’s showmanship wildly, flagrantly.
One of the most shocking jests is Vanessa Redgrave’s caricatured abbess, with one of the most astonishing entrances in movie history: her head crooked to the side, her blue eyes flashing. She emits an unnerving cackle, an absolutely daring and inventive performance. (Meryl Streep has tried to match it for the past 50 years.)
Sexual neurosis threatens to overwhelm Russell’s vision of what is essentially a historical political crime. As articulated by Grandier, the allusions to current political subterfuge are uncanny: “If the devil’s evidence is to be accepted, then the virtuous people are in danger. The devil has spoken, and to doubt his word is sacrilege. You have totally perverted Christ’s own teaching.”
Preceding the sequence of Grandier’s torture and burning at the stake, it becomes a man-for-all-seasons speech: “This new doctrine especially invented for this occasion is the work of men who are not concerned with facts or with law or with theology, but a political experiment to show that the will of one man can be pushed into destroying not only one man and one city, but one nation.”
If rereleasing The Devils appeals to this era of Clockwork political obscenities, it’s owing to the irony of our demoralized condition. As Alex Cox has warned, The Devils is nothing so simple as “a turgid tale of human rights versus intolerance.” When Russell and Redgrave introduced the film at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in 2010, an interviewer congratulated Russell’s assumed anticlericalism, and Russell quickly corrected him: “I am and have always been a staunch Roman Catholic!” To continue misinterpreting Russell’s complexity — instead of exposing political chicanery and the evils of a corrupt state — only serves to bedevil this millennium’s perception of art. The Devils could be the most politically astute film of this decade.