The Devils (no 41)

by Allan Fish

(UK 1971 111m) not on DVD

Seduced by sensual delights

p  Robert H.Solo, Ken Russell  d/w  Ken Russell  play  John Whiting  novel  “The Devils of Loudon” by Aldous Huxley  ph  David Watkin  ed  Michael Bradsell  m  Peter Maxwell Davies  art  Robert Cartwright, Derek Jarman

Vanessa Redgrave (Sister Jeanne), Oliver Reed (Fr Grandier), Gemma Jones (Madeleine), Dudley Sutton (Laubardemont), Max Adrian (Ibert), Murray Melvin (Fr Mignon), Michael Gothard (Fr Barre), Georgina Hale (Philippe), Brian Murphy (Adam),

John Trevelyan and his censors, not to mention the Daily Mail morality brigade, were just waiting for a film like this with which to accuse the entire film industry of perversion.  In America, the film was released in a butchered 103m version, so bad that US critics who attacked the film must be forgiven as they didn’t see the proper beast.  Even in the UK, it suffered.  I list the running time as 111m, which in all prints it is, but it should have been around 120m, and of the minutes cut out, by far the most important and controversial was the sequence that came to be known as ‘The Rape of Christ’.  Believed lost, it became, in the words of Mark Kermode, “the Holy Grail of Ken’s black mass.”  How fitting it was then than it was Kermode, the film’s biggest champion as he had been with The Exorcist, who was largely responsible for its recovery.  It hasn’t as yet been reinserted into the film as Warners are digging their heels in and refusing to release a DVD, but armed with an old semi-widescreen VHS and the clip of the Rape of Christ sequence sneakily downloaded off the internet, one can at last get an idea of the film as Ken intended it.  And as Vanessa Redgrave said, “I think every director should have the right to show their film the way they wanted it to be seen.”

            The possession of a group of nuns in Loudon in the 1630s is still seen as an infamous chapter in history, and it had been the subject of an excellent, more restrained film in 1961, Kawalerowicz’s Mother Joan of the Angels.  That film actually began in the aftermath of the burning of the accused Father Grandier, which provides the climax to Russell’s film.  Kawalerowicz’s nuns are disturbed and certainly act possessed, but documents of the time refer not to mere possession or madness but hysteria.  There was no real hysteria in the Polish film, and that’s what Russell’s film sought to capture.  The problem, of course, is that hysteria breeds hysteria, so that Russell would have been very naïve indeed to have expected his film to pass without controversy in 1971. 

            What astounds most about the film now is how revolutionary some of the decision choices of the director were.  The film perhaps cried out for location shooting, but he shot it at Pinewood, and then had the incredible foresight to hire Derek Jarman to design the sets.  Not mere designs, but a literal psychological statement in themselves.  His high off-white walls both protecting and, in the case of the pure white walls of the convent interior, suffocating the citizens.  The sets, with their archways and small chambers, are cramped, oppressive, as if mirroring the sexual hang-ups of the nuns and the stretching to breaking point of their nerves. 

             Without the Rape of Christ sequence, the film lacks the cumulative explosion of hysteria that had built up in the previous scenes, and in inter-cutting the sequence with Grandier saying a simple mass on the side of the road, he essentially shows how Grandier was to gain redemption as a martyr, thus bringing the vision of Grandier descending from the cross and walking on water in Jeanne’s dreams to life as he literally assumes the role of Christ and the forces of the law and church, Sanhedrin-like, put him to death.  It’s an integral scene which turns the politics and morality of the piece on its head.  It’s a remarkable sequence in a remarkable film, one gorgeously shot by Watkin and magnificently acted.  Redgrave is astonishing as the totally possessed hunchback nun, while Reed is beyond even that in his finest screen performance.  Depicting blasphemous acts but not blasphemous in itself, if it would only be seen as it should be seen, it would be seen as one of the most shocking, challenging and morally complex films of its era.

Ed: news came to me only last week that Sky Arts (UK satellite channel) have acquired the rights to show a special director’s cut of The Devils in August.  We can only hope it is one that reincorporates the ‘Rape of Christ’ and other controversial footage, but either way, DVDR machines will doubtless be primed when the airing dates are announced, so they can be slotted into the boxes of those bootlegs floating around the net for years.  ACF