Thomas Jefferson once coined
the Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment of the
US Constitution by saying ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof’, or in other
words, the ‘Separation of church and state’.
Despite being cited repeatedly by the U.S. Supreme Court, the
impassioned debate regarding the extent of the separation between bureaucracy
and theology remains a worldwide controversy which rages on to this day. It’s important to consider this before going
into the late British enfant terrible Ken Russell’s greatest and most ragingly
incendiary work to date, The Devils. Based upon the nonfiction novel by Aldous
Huxley and the stage play by John Whiting, the film is a historical drama/transgressive
psychedelic horror film set in 1634 Loudon, France chronicling a rare moment in
time when church and state functioned as one unholy genocidal murder machine
wiping out any and all Protestants from “uprising”. Standing in the way of the religious and
political corruption led by Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue) and Louis
XIII (Graham Armitage) is renegade Roman Catholic priest Father Urbain Grandier
(Oliver Reed in top form), the only figure preventing the demonic duo from
destroying the wall fortifications protecting Loudon. To get him out of their way, a scheme is
concocted to convince the public at large he is responsible for the demonic
possession of an entire convent of Ursuline nuns led by the hunchbacked and
sexually repressed Sister Jeanne of the Angels (Vanessa Redgrave also at the
apex of her career).
What ensues is as close to
Hell on Earth in the form of religious and political chicanery the cinematic
medium has ever seen. Once dubbed ‘the
film that shocked even the film people’, The
Devils remains a polarizing and still ragingly controversial work of art
that is as monstrously blasphemous and perverse of an exploitation as it is a
spiritually enriching and God fearing passion play depicting a very real world
battle between good and evil. Violence,
sex and religion remain three disparate topics that are not meant to coincide
with one another, yet here is The Devils feverishly,
subversively and even gleefully mixing all of it together to create a truly
Satanic and irreverent cocktail of sensory overload, madness, fire and
brimstone. For a mainstream studio film,
the degree of nudity and sexual depravity depicted onscreen at the time easily
exceeded that of most pornographic films and became the subject of intense
controversy before, during and after the production of the film. So sharp and bloodily fanged is Russell’s
vision of religious and political corruption that it engendered the ire and
shame of the studio which financed it, Warner Brothers, to such a degree that
to this day the studio has all but censored the release of the film on home
video in North America.
Made in 1971 during the height of artistic freedom alongside such transgressive masterworks as Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, Ken Russell’s epically gorgeous shock fest represents the benchmark of what you can and cannot show in the movies, resulting in the film industry’s own gradual push back against films that dared to provoke in the hardest and heaviest measure. Initially passed on by United Artists, Warner Brothers in their eagerness to employ the Academy Award winning director of Women in Love greenlit The Devils, not knowing what they were in for. It wasn’t until they saw firsthand a rough cut of Russell’s elegant horror show that they angrily declared they had ‘never seen the likes of this disgusting shit!’ After being shown to executives, two crucial extended sequences deemed ‘distasteful’ were excised by the studio before being submitted to the BBFC with further trimming made to receive an X rating. Even after the film came out in the UK and the US, the film was further edited down to an R rated version and preexisting X rated prints were recalled and recut to conform with the newly created R rated cut. Many theaters refused to show the film with conservative groups such as the Festival of Light demanding the X certificate be withdrawn and for the head of the BBFC to resign. The animosity towards the film didn’t stop there, as it was banned in many countries including Italy which threatened to jail the films leading actors Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave should they ever set foot in the country. Probably the most infamous public display of the general critical attitude towards the film came in the form of a televised confrontation between The Evening Standard critic Alexander Walker and Ken Russell who arrived on the set with a rolled up copy of Walker’s negative review of the film. The exchange became so heated that Russell whacked Walker over the head with his own review before storming off the set.
And yet despite all the
divinity and obscenely explicit demonology contained therein, The Devils (finally released on DVD in
the UK only around 2012) is a staggeringly beautiful horror film about what
Russell in his own words called ‘the story of a sinner who becomes a
saint’. With a still astonishing,
anachronistically futuristic production design by future filmmaker Derek Jarman
filmed at one of Pinewood Studios’ largest sound stages, a dissonant and atonal
avant garde score by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, sumptuous and precise
cinematography by David Watkin and pitch perfect performances from its star
studded cast, The Devils is as true
of the definition of the word ‘epic’ as has ever been attempted. The scale of Jarman’s sterilized and
gargantuan cityscape with white brick and mortar walls akin to a public
restroom can barely be contained within the 2.35:1 Panavision widescreen format
with as many extras as some of Cecil B. DeMille’s biblical epics. Considered by the late Oliver Reed to be his
best performance, the infamously hellraising actor’s conviction to the role of
the proud and womanizing Grandier has never been more passionate or
intense. Easily one of the finest
performances ever given to a film by an actor, Reed is extraordinary and serves
as the film’s flawed but well-meaning moral compass beset by a community gone
berserk with debauchery and madness.
Equally powerful, if not more, is Vanessa Redgrave as the hunchbacked
Sister Jeanne, who gives as much of an astonishing physical performance with
her contorted neck and head as she evokes suffocating madness that radiates off
the screen. Also fantastic are Dudley
Sutton as Baron de Laubardemont who imbues the minion of Richelieu with
sinister calculation and conspiratorial manipulation and Michael Gothard as the
depraved and sociopathic rock-star “exorcist” Father Barre who possesses the
uncanny ability to create a religious, sexual and social frenzy out of thin
air. The first time you see the young looking
Gothard with his John Lennon glasses and long hair is rather jarring but once
he whips the nuns up into a frenzy of tearing their clothes off and jumping
around acting like animals, a loose allegorical connection to the mad mob
mentality of rock concerts (particularly Woodstock)
becomes all the more apparent.
Despite being over forty
five years old, Ken Russell’s The Devils is
still as the poster tagline warns ‘not a film for everyone’. To this day, Warner Brothers refuses to allow
the film to be released on Blu-Ray or for Russell’s recently restored 2004
director’s cut to be exhibited, effectively blocking the film from being seen
as he intended even after his death.
With exception to a handful of screenings cropping up throughout the US
this year, including a sold out showing of the 35mm X rated print I attended at
the Music Box Theater which was sponsored by the Northwest Chicago Film
Society, The Devils is virtually
unavailable in the United States. Even
with considerably more violent and more sexually explicit films, television
shows, novels, music and videogames currently being produced and/or available
for public consumption, The Devils still
manages to touch nerves and arouse anger in many viewers. As for myself, it’s a brilliant and deeply
moving passion play about one man’s act of goodness in the face of towering
madness and evil and a testament to man’s ability to remain calm and true to
his ideals in the face of it all.
Moreover, the most frightening prospect The Devils poses isn’t so much what happens in the film as how
little things have changed between then and now. Like renowned filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro
said of the film, we are still living in the Middle Ages whether we want to
admit it to ourselves or not. Despite
centuries of technological advancement, quantum leaps forward in modern
medicine and the evolution of communication, we really are as a society and
species trapped in the past regardless of how much we consider ourselves
modern.
Score:
- Andrew Kotwicki