THE DEVILS' ADVOCATE

by David Guglielmo

THE DEVILS’ ADVOCATE

Ken Russell’s controversial classic THE DEVILS is back in theaters. But does it still have the power to shock?

Originally cut against his wishes, THE DEVILS (1971) has been restored in 4K, with its picture and sound refurbished and long-excised footage reinstated under the new title “KEN RUSSELL’S THE DEVILS.” It arrives courtesy of Clockwork, Warner Bros.’ new specialty label.

An unexpected way to launch a label: put an older title back in theaters and turn it into one of the year’s most anticipated events for cinephiles, with the promise of all the shock and awe that got it into trouble with the censors of its day.

But its day was 1971, when popular culture had far fewer outlets and movies occupied more common ground—what we now call “the monoculture,” as opposed to our algorithm-driven niche culture. “Nunsploitation” was barely a genre, and churchgoing wasn’t shorthand for a political position—one that has given up on the idea that Hollywood ever releases anything worth watching. THE DEVILS returns to a completely different cultural landscape, and to an audience that has largely selected itself. The poster alone—a shackled nun in an image reminiscent of S&M—seems designed to attract the already converted while deterring many of the people whose beliefs it might actually offend.

I recently saw another controversial classic from the same year on the big screen. Stanley Kubrick’s A CLOCKWORK ORANGE was playing on 35mm at the New Beverly Cinema to a packed house. It was one of the most uncomfortable movie experiences of my life. Kubrick remains a beloved figure, and as the audience settled into their seats, I sensed an expectation of formidable art. A few scenes later, Alex and his droogs invaded a couple’s home. As Alex assaulted the wife in front of her husband, cheerfully belting out “Singin’ in the Rain,” the tension in the theater was thick. I kept looking over at the men who had brought dates, wondering whether they were regretting the decision.

Does Kubrick think this is funny? How far is he going to go? Alex cuts open her bodysuit, exposing and humiliating her, before dropping his own pants. This isn’t the antagonist. This is our protagonist! And we’ll have to follow him through the whole movie?

Eventually, the discomfort began to ease. The first release of laughter I noticed came when Alex’s probation officer visited his house and struck him in the balls. The audience seemed comfortable laughing at pain inflicted on him, but not by him. As the movie went on and Alex underwent his “rehabilitation,” even those feelings became complicated.

THE DEVILS (also on 35mm—gotta love LA!) was quite the opposite experience. Set in seventeenth-century Loudun, it follows Father Urbain Grandier, a priest whose resistance to the demolition of the town’s walls makes him a political obstacle. When Sister Jeanne accuses him of using witchcraft to possess her, the state turns this into a means of eliminating him.

The audience laughed readily at the nuns’ infatuation with Grandier. Their escalating hysteria, ultimately leading to an orgy, played as high camp in my theater. Russell is no stranger to camp achieved through over-the-top luridness. Films such as THE MUSIC LOVERS, MAHLER, and LISZTOMANIA challenge good taste by dragging revered historical figures into extravagant fantasies. Even his adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s WOMEN IN LOVE features an all-nude male wrestling scene. This isn’t the version your substitute teacher shows you on a box TV wheeled in on a cart. Later came CRIMES OF PASSION and THE LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM, with their fetishistic sex and appetite for the grotesque. But in THE DEVILS, we are asked to understand the vulgarity as serving a sociopolitical argument about religious hypocrisy and the collusion of church and state. Having seen much of Russell’s work, I’m dubious about how much of what we’re watching is exploration and how much is provocation.

The film’s visual flamboyance, its carnivalesque collision of the obscene and the sacred, reminds me of Federico Fellini’s later work. But in CASANOVA and SATYRICON, I feel Fellini putting something of his own desires, anxieties, and spiritual conflicts on display. Historical figures and distant periods become ways of looking at himself and the modern Rome around him, where reverence and decadence coexist. I can trace that struggle back through his earlier, neorealist work, albeit without the bells and whistles. However nasty the imagery gets—and it does—I still feel his attachment to what he’s depicting.

Russell’s psyche is harder for me to discern beneath the spectacle. Where Fellini can seem almost embarrassingly vulnerable, Russell seems to be taking the piss. He has a rebellious, fuck-you attitude, and I suspect that’s much of what the audience is responding to. I see Fellini films regularly in Los Angeles revival houses and saw CASANOVA at the New Beverly in March, but the atmosphere at THE DEVILS felt different. Like a rock concert. Even the Clockwork merchandise advertises the attitude, with “Fuck it, let’s release The Devils” printed on T-shirts. I can’t picture the same campaign for a Fellini movie.

THE EXORCIST, released two years later in 1973, also opened to enormous controversy. It remains beloved, but I more often hear its transgressions discussed as a matter of history than as a present threat. I suspect its religious seriousness helps explain why even a conservative religious viewer might embrace it, provided they have the stomach for it. Within the film, evil is real, the Devil exists, and faith has power. For a believer, its horrors can affirm convictions as much as assault them. For a nonbeliever, the film asks for a temporary acceptance of that spiritual reality.

In THE DEVILS, the title points toward the people who use religion as a politically convenient tool. The exorcisms are staged as grotesque and cruel spectacles. At my screening, the audience laughed at their absurdity, even while cringing at the graphic details. We understand that these rituals will not cure the supposed possession. In THE EXORCIST, we hold out hope that the priests can save the girl, and Father Karras ultimately does, sacrificing himself.

The response to THE DEVILS reminded me of a John Waters screening or a gross-out horror movie: morbid glee abounded! Its restoration had its West Coast premiere at Beyond Fest, the Los Angeles genre festival known for crazy midnight fare. Although THE DEVILS is a different kind of film, the choice of venue made sense. This was an audience ready to embrace its excesses.

At this point, I should acknowledge that the film has more than its share of things to admire. Vanessa Redgrave’s Sister Jeanne, with her hunched posture, peculiarly cadenced laugh, and searing stare, makes me reconsider my distinction between historical drama and horror. Her mannerisms would be at home in a pre-Code Gothic chiller. Think Lon Chaney or Charles Laughton. Then there’s Oliver Reed, who commands the screen with a physical authority and testosterone that audiences have been missing for decades. Looking at our current leading men, I sometimes wonder whether evolution has done away with the hairy chest.

His Grandier is the most interesting character in the film, but I found his spiritual evolution more assumed than explored. His movement toward faith gives the film a dimension beyond its attack on religious institutions. I wanted to spend more time with him away from Loudun, to experience the change in his understanding of himself. Instead, Russell returns to the image of him breaking bread while devoting so much of the surrounding sequence to the orgy at the convent. I wanted the man’s transformation to feel as fully developed as the spectacle around it.

That spectacle is certainly accomplished. It reminded me of Jack Smith’s experimental queer short, FLAMING CREATURES, another film notorious for its censorship battles, with exhibitors even arrested for showing it. Screams and moans echo across the room. Women grind against statues and other inanimate objects (and later a charred bone, in a scene cut from the original release), their limbs tangling like subway rats until we’re no longer sure whose is whose. None of it struck me as erotic—this isn’t a Tinto Brass movie—and I could almost picture Russell smiling cheekily at the mayhem. He’s a punk-rock maestro.

Derek Jarman’s set design is among the film’s most striking achievements. The underground filmmaker gives the convent a modern, almost futuristic appearance, with stark white surfaces and tiled interiors. This isn’t BLACK NARCISSUS, with its saturated Technicolor and sensuous atmosphere. It’s naked and garish, like an asylum. Shirley Russell’s costumes are equally inspired: the clinical severity of the nuns’ habits contrasts with Grandier’s flamboyance.

Shot after shot is striking and painterly, even at its starkest. This is filmmaking executed at a very high level of artistry, although its shifts between formal compositions and loose, zany passages with snap zooms sometimes jarred for me. I understand the claims that it’s a masterpiece. But its reputation also precedes it in the way that the reputations of lost or heavily cut films often do. Decades of anticipation become part of the viewing experience, whether they heighten the excitement or leave the film struggling to live up to its legend.

My question goes beyond the aesthetics, which I often enjoyed. Can a movie retain its transgressive force when its audience aligns so comfortably with its rebellion? At my screening of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, that alignment was far less secure. We had to sit with our discomfort, including our uncertainty about the filmmaker himself, wondering whether depiction amounted to endorsement.

Andrew Dominik’s BLONDE gave me a more recent version of that discomfort. I found its visual achievement to be among the most striking of its year, but its beauty offered little reassurance. This nightmare portrait of Marilyn Monroe made me feel complicit in the exploitation of its star, confronting me with pleasures akin to those of reading HOLLYWOOD BABYLON or a tabloid. We are consuming someone’s suffering as entertainment, without the comfort of a filmmaker standing alongside us, telling us how to feel. When Marilyn’s unborn baby talks to her from the womb, pleading with her not to have another abortion, some viewers and critics interpreted it as a pro-life message. I understood it as part of the film’s subjective nightmare. That hostile reception suggests how differently viewers can respond when they feel that the filmmaker’s gaze or ideology is itself part of the problem.

Released at the same time, FJORD seems to be generating more controversy than THE DEVILS because the central family, led by Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, is conservative. Is portraying “traditional values” more incendiary than obscenity? In a world where porn of every conceivable kind is available at the touch of a button, perhaps that is more shocking.

Rotten Tomatoes’ listing for the original version of THE DEVILS sits at 56%. The restored release, listed separately as KEN RUSSELL’S THE DEVILS, has a score of 97%. I’ve compared both versions, and aside from a few salacious scenes added—an orgy and the aforementioned femur-bone scene—the story remains the same. As accomplished as the film may be, and as much reason as there is to rejoice in its reconstruction, I’m afraid it now risks preaching to the choir. In order for a film to be polarizing, it needs to polarize.