The Devils

The restored version of Ken Russell's famous psychological horror drama. In 1971, three English films challenged audiences, cinema managers and the British censorship body BBFC in their own ways: Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah), A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick) and Ken Russell's The Devils. Ken Russell’s film career began with a silent, low-budget film, followed by the powerful short film Amalia and the Angel in 1958. The film was clearly influenced by the fact that Russell had converted to Catholicism a few years earlier. Shot on 16mm by Russell himself, without synchronous sound and using only freely available music, it nevertheless showed such strong signs of a distinctive artist in the making that the BBC brought him on board as a director. Throughout the 1960s, he made a great number of popular documentaries, many of them about major composers, and a transition to fiction films seemed a natural next step. The Debussy Film, featuring a powerful Oliver Reed as Claude Debussy, attracted particular attention. After making the controversial Women in Love in 1969, which received four Oscar nominations, including one for Glenda Jackson, who won Best Actress, Russell was firmly established among Britain’s leading directors. The Devils is based on a true event that took place in the French town of Loudun in 1634, when the Catholic priest Urbain Grandier was accused of making a pact with Satan and of causing an entire convent of nuns to become possessed by demons. Following political intervention by the powerful Cardinal Richelieu, the case became a public trial in which the possessed nuns were allowed to act out their blasphemous and sexual fantasies. It naturally ended with a harsh sentence for Grandier. This well-documented event has inspired books, plays, operas and several films. The two most important sources for director Ken Russell were Aldous Huxley’s book The Devils of Loudun and John Whiting’s play The Devils. That this orgy of sexual excess and religious blasphemy, suffering and abuse of power — “my only political film,” according to Ken Russell — would meet with resistance was hardly surprising. But Russell had not anticipated the scale of the storm that followed. Even after numerous rounds of cuts and censorship, many cinema managers chose not to screen what has since come to be regarded as one of the central works of British cinema. When Russell, who was himself a Catholic, set out to make the film, he believed that Oliver Reed was the only actor who could portray Grandier, and Reed delivers perhaps the performance of his career. The challenge of playing the convent’s mildly deranged and sexually frustrated Mother Superior was taken on by Vanessa Redgrave. We are screening the restored 4K edition of The Devils.