I’m an ardent fan of Ken Russell, yet I always considered “The Devils” to be a transgressive novelty: a voluptuous exercise in extreme blasphemy and extreme horror. No doubt: It’s both those things. Yet I didn’t think it was anything more than that. (For me, that was enough.)
When the film came out, in 1971, it was at the cutting edge of a movement of extreme cinema that was rising up, like an X-rated beast, out of the swamp of the counterculture. Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” and Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs” were both released in 1971. John Waters was already at work inventing punk and other filthy things — his revolutionary midnight movie “Pink Flamingos” would come out in 1972, the year that would also bring the dawn of the slasher film, with “The Last House on the Left.” At the time, these were movies that spat in the face of eveything decent and respectable. They were skeevy and violent and dangerous. Just going to see one of them could feel like an antisocial act.
To say that the culture has now caught up with them doesn’t mean that the films themselves are any less dangerous than they were. I was honestly shocked to see that “The Devils,” which has been given a full-scale restoration and re-release by a division of Warner Bros. called Warner Bros. Clockwork, is a movie that’s now drawing crowds. In its opening weekend, it played in 350 theaters and made nearly $2 million. That isn’t the sort of thing that tends to happen with once-scandalous art films from half a century ago. When this restored — and newly uncut — version of “The Devils” premiered at Cannes, I figured it would end up playing at a few theaters and, in essence, become a streaming release. I never imagined that crowds would be flocking to it. But when I saw it two weekends ago (in a packed theater), I could feel the excitement, and the relevance. More than I would ever have guessed, “The Devils” is a movie that now speaks to our time.
The relevance begins with the fact that it’s a fantastic film (much more so than I thought), something that wound up being obscured by all the nasty controversies that engulfed it. The movie is set in 17th-century France and centers on a Roman Catholic priest, played with searing brilliance by Oliver Reed, who is living the life of a libertine. He sleeps with young women and justifies it because in his mind it comes down to: If it feels good, God must have decreed it. “The Devils” plays like the ultimate lapsed-Catholic fairy tale, and that’s part of what got it in hot water at the time. Over the years, the film has been censored, butchered, and banned. But all of that is now just catnip to an era like ours, which might be called the Age of Armchair Insurrection.
From its extraordinary opening sequence, a baroque stage enactment of The Birth of Venus set to the perverse jauntiness of “Bourrée d’Avignon,” featuring King Louis XIII (Graham Armitage) in semi-nude drag, “The Devils” lures the audience with its ripe evocation of decadence. The film doesn’t necessarily justify the bad behavior of Reed’s Father Urbain Grandier, who is shown to be a callous playboy; when he learns that his mistress is pregnant, he cuts her loose with cold abandon. Yet it’s part of the film’s design that Oliver Reed’s scintillating star performance puts us on the side of this maximally flawed antihero. Reed, with his Olivier-as-wicked-knave soft-voiced leer, is playing both a moral and an immoral man. His Grandier is steeped in vice, yet his belief in freedom is no sham; he leads a crusade to keep the fortified city of Loudun an independent place. And that’s what gets him into trouble with King Louis and his even more scheming tyrannical henchman, Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue).
To clamp down on Grandier, the king’s representatives hatch a plot to destroy him through evidence of his depravity. This keys off the fact that the nuns of the Ursuline convent, led by the hunchbacked abbess Sister Jeanne des Anges (Vanessa Redgrave), are obsessed with Grandier, the rock-star priest they all secretly desire. A plot is launched to suggest that the entire convent has been bewitched by Grandier. Are the nuns possessed by devils? No. But it’s part of the film’s sensationalist design that they wish they were (in spirit, they want to join the orgy of the counterculture), and the plot against Grandier gives them the excuse.
The insanity of “The Devils” is that it turns political oppression into the political theater of a frenzied erotic-nightmare horror show. It does this to illustrate the following idea: that the leaders of fascism will resort to any means necessary to achieve their ends. They will create chaos and use it. And there’s an allegorical power to that that speaks to the chaos of our moment — political, social, spiritual — in a singular and surprising way. As the film moves into its demented centerpiece, where the nuns, casting off their robes (their shaved heads are redolent of the Manson girls in court), become “possessed,” you feel Russell’s sick genius as a film- maker, his way of creating a vibe of the entire movie spinning out of control. What “The Devils” shows us is a world gone mad. But the film’s fresh shock is that this world now feels disturbingly like our own. To see “The Devils” today isn’t just to revel in “blasphemy” or the voluptuous excess of the forbidden. It’s to gaze upon the scary spectacle of the center no longer holding.
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