55 Years Later, The Devils Is Still An Audacious Shock To The Senses

When the Motion Picture Association first moved away from the draconian Hays Code to the voluntary rating system still widely used today, the infamous X rating was reserved for films with obscene levels of bloodshed, erotic content, or coarse language. It was viewed by mainstream studios as a mark of doom for a film’s theatrical potential, both because material restricted to adult audiences limited commercial viability and because the non-trademarked nature of the X-rating led to it being used as a marketing tactic for pornography. But between the 1960s and the 1980s, when the X was replaced with NC-17, several well-regarded films were given the dreaded stamp, including Midnight Cowboy, A Clockwork Orange, and even The Evil Dead.

The X-rating often mired a film in controversy, harming its box office results. Sometimes, though, it induced a sort of Streisand effect, where the inflammatory nature of the material drew more attention to the film, creating a legacy that would ironically outlast the label itself. Perhaps the most iconic example is Ken Russell’s intensely volatile 1971 film The Devils, a movie whose reputation only helped it to achieve cult status, and one with a central message that remains incisive and dangerous to the institutions it critiques to this day.

There’s a playfully theatrical quality across most of Russell’s filmography, and in The Devils it emphasizes the unbelievable truth of the source material. Based on the real case of the Loudun affair, when a convent of nuns claimed to have been demonically bewitched by a priest named Urbain Grandier, one would think the film would be grim, and yet Russell’s depiction is deeply artificial in a way that feels almost farcical. Loudun itself, a set on the legendary Pinewood Studios, calls attention to its own construction in the same way as most of the acting, almost as if to ask the audience “isn’t this all a little absurd?”

Unfortunately, Warner Bros. and censors around the world didn’t see it that way. Even with significant cuts to Russell’s original vision, the film received an X rating in the United States and the United Kingdom, while a 1973 American re-release further truncated the movie to get an R rating. For most of its existence, the only way to see The Devils has been the compromised version, although that’s finally set to change with WB’s upcoming re-release of the director’s cut, in all its blasphemous glory.

From the very opening, with its cheeky title card drop that places “The Devils” directly over the faces of the powerful Cardinal Richelieu and King Louis XIII, it’s easy to see that the movie’s hotly contentious nature doesn’t just boil down to its gratuitous nudity and hard-to-watch bloodshed. The film is set after the Huguenot rebellions, a period of French history that saw the Catholic Church amass significant power and stoke the transition of France from a kingdom of self-governing feudal cities to a centralized authority, essentially giving birth to the modern nation-state. Russell very deliberately frames the Loudun incident as the targeted machinations of an increasingly political Catholic Church, with religion positioned as a blunt-force weapon.

The unfortunate target of that weapon is Father Grandier, played by an immensely charismatic and dangerously handsome Oliver Reed. Despite his priesthood, Grandier is all too human. He’s a serial philanderer, prideful, and boisterous, but his greatest sin in the eyes of the Church is his advocacy for the continued self-governance of Loudun and the religious freedoms of the Protestant population. It’s this infraction that seals his ultimate fate, and that narrative focus exposes the truth behind The Devils’ reviled reputation — at its core, it’s a movie about how easily faith can be turned into a tool of repression.

Of course, the film isn’t widely known for its political subtext, but the audacious and blasphemous “exorcism” after Grandier is accused of witchcraft by Sister Jeanne des Anges (Vanessa Redgrave). Redgrave’s Sister Jeanne is a strict, pious nun concealing an insatiable erotic desire for Grandier, and she’s played with a potent mix of sneering contempt and self-loathing at the physical disability she blames for marring her beauty. Her intrusive fantasies of consummating her love for Grandier (visualized as an impossible-to-look-away-from perversion of Christ on the cross) are shattered when Grandier takes a local woman in secret as his wife, and her resentment and unrequited feelings boil over into vengeful claims of demonic possession that eventually consume the entire convent.

Russell portrays the unleashed sensuality of the nuns as an overwhelming force, a whirlwind of primal lust that leads them, in the film’s most controversial scene, to desecrate the church and a statue of Christ — but they’re matched by the animalistic barbarity of the priests tasked with “saving” their souls. The exorcism sequence is a total assault on the senses, with the raucous horns of the film’s score blaring as nun and exorcist alike succumb to base animal instinct. The absurd circus of it all is presented with an obnoxious visual aesthetic that serves as a sharp contrast to the romantic post-marital exploits of Father Grandier, who has no idea of the absurdity and cruelty lying in wait for him.

Eventually, the film’s chaos dies down and gives way to a sobering, crushing sense of injustice as Father Grandier is tried, tortured, and eventually burned at the stake for his “crimes.” Beyond the exorcism, it’s Grandier’s humiliation and degradation that give the movie its most harrowing moments — as the flames lick his body, his impassioned pleas for the people of Loudun to maintain their freedoms are drowned out by their laughter. The wool has been pulled over their eyes, and almost immediately after his demise, the town’s walls are blown to smithereens in an explosion as volatile as the spiritual one preceding it.

The Devils is a movie that has lived in infamy from the moment of its release, marked by studio censorship and protests from the Vatican. And yet those attempts to suppress it have only ensured that it stays perpetually relevant, both as a testament to artistic freedom and as a warning of the dangers of mixing religion and authority. Fifty-five years after its release, the X that served as a public target has become a trophy of sorts, marking it as an example of the truths we miss when we allow institutions to define things as dangerous without question.

The Devils will be re-released in October.