“Do you remember the first time your thoughts were turned to evil things?”
Speak of The Devils and it’s impossible not to conjure a lengthy conversation on censorship. The 1971 historical drama, about a promiscuous priest accused of witchcraft, is arguably one of the most controversial films of all time — so much so that its coveted complete version, as intended by late director Ken Russell, has never really screened until now. The pristine 4K restoration, overseen by critic Mark Kermode and soon-to-be distributed by Warner Bros’ Clockwork imprint, was the hottest ticket at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, with a packed house and queue of last-minute hopefuls extending to an entirely different floor. Those lucky enough to be granted access bore witness to history reborn, in all its kooky glory and contemporary urgency.
Bawdily entertaining, sensually spiritual, and above all politically provocative, The Devils is a deeply strange movie — mere minutes into the film, an alligator is tossed out of a window — whose reputation has been cemented by attempts to erase its most contentious scenes. Based on historical events, as re-told by Aldous Huxley in his book The Devils of Loudun, Russell’s masterpiece follows early 17th century Roman Catholic priest Urbain Grandier, as played by a sweaty, mustachioed Oliver Reed — the best any man has ever looked on film. A de-facto leader of the fortified city of Loudun, which has recently fallen to a plague, Grandier’s political disagreements with King Louis XIII (a foppish Graham Armitage) and his serpentine vizier Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue) result in a religious target being drawn on his back through accusations of devilish possession. These play out like something from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent courtroom classic The Passion of Joan of Arc, albeit with a bit more nudity.
The film is explicitly a warning against the merger of Church and State, a topic of perennial relevance, but especially in the modern era of global rightward shifts via zealous extremism. Its key concerns involve the moral policing of bodies and sexualities as an in-road to political control. Louis, Richelieu and their cartoonish cohorts enact this via the obsessive, hunchback abbess Sister Jeanne des Anges (Vanessa Redgrave), taking advantage of her unrequited infatuation with Grandier, and pushing her entire convent to testify against him by feigning possession through suggestion — which is to say, by setting loose their sexual proclivities in a courtroom setting.
This trial’s hedonistic climax — an orgy involving a statue of the crucified Christ — has long been a central point of objection, and for many years, became the stuff of legend. Until Cannes, this notorious sequence has rarely been glimpsed outside of a brief London release in 2002, shortly after Kermode rediscovered the footage in the Warner Bros vaults. Far from blasphemy for blasphemy’s sake, it forms a thematic centerpiece around the Catholic Church’s inadvertent deification of Grandier. His philandering and fornicating draw their ire, but bring him all the closer to the flawed and human Christ which they refuse to recognize; to them, Christ is merely a tool of oppression. This connection is rarely a point of explicit focus, but ultimately, the flawed and fickle Grandier is made to suffer so much for the sins of others that he becomes more overtly Christlike than either the Church or the throne could ever hope to.
A similarly censored scene that makes its way back into the runtime involves a nun masturbating with a charred human femur. It sounds ludicrous on paper, but remains morbidly and amusingly fulfilling in context — though the less revealed about it before viewers have had the chance to experience it, the better. The delights of this definitive cut, however, aren’t limited to these excised moments. The painstaking 4K restoration, from the original 35mm camera negatives, is an audio-visual miracle, appearing as clearly and vividly as anything shot today. However, its grandiose set and costume designs can’t be taken for granted either, as they imbue The Devils with a tactility that tickles the senses. It’s a lavish, un-real world that shouldn’t exist, but clearly does, born of ceremonial robes and uncanny shadows, and shot from all sorts of mystifying angles, which make the movie feel alive in all the most twisted ways.
Through blood, sweat, sacrilegious visions, and untamed bodily writhing, Russell’s operatic expression of desire — and the need to control it — remains both an elevated work of nunsploitation, as well as a grounded piece of artistic agitprop, fiercely rebuking the hijacking of cinema, religion and eroticism by political agendas. It has so terrified the moral arbiters of “good taste” that they’ve single-handedly Streisand Effect-ed it into the upper echelons of the confrontational arthouse canon. Though in watching the film today, it’s hard to imagine that it wouldn’t have struck a nerve regardless and enraptured the imagination, even if it had been left alone. There’s no way to be sure, but perhaps overdue, unfettered access to its complete version, which audiences are finally about to have, will tell us more about the ways in which The Devils could have, and should have, belonged to culture at large.
Siddhant Adlakha (@SiddhantAdlakha) is a New York-based film critic and video essay writer originally from Mumbai. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and his work has appeared in the New York Times, Variety. the Guardian, and New York Magazine.
