by Gordon Thomas
Bright Lights Film Journal
Back in 1971, if you were lucky enough to see Ken Russell's The Devils — and not that many did, or if they did, felt themselves lucky — you might've wondered: am I expected to take this film seriously? While shooting the film and over the years, Russell, who died in November 2011 at 84, insisted that he was very serious in his film adaptation of Aldous Huxley's 1952 book The Devils of Loudun, a semi-fictional, intensely researched treatment of the real-life, medieval witch-hunting circus that led to the execution of the secular priest Urbain Grandier in 1634. But when the film premiered first in the UK in a censored cut authorized reluctantly by Russell, and then in a more heavily cut version in the US, few people, especially critics, were disinclined to accept the film as anything more than sensationalist or — even worse — dastardly conceived, pornographic garbage.
Were these knee-jerk reactions? Since its theatrical run, it's not been easy to take a fresh look at the film. In the earlier days of home video, Warner Bros., the studio that owns the film, allowed VHS releases of The Devils in the UK and US, but these issues were transfers of the heavily censored American cut, hardly the version with which to revisit Russell's original intentions. With the advent of DVD and Blu-ray, much of Russell's catalog has gone to disc, but, other than on execrable bootlegs, not The Devils — until this year.
Through some sort of finagling, which must've resembled the US negotiating arms reduction with Leonid Brezhnev, the British Film Institute has been able to license from Warner Bros. the original, X-rated British theatrical release cut of The Devils. Not, mind you, the director's cut, recently reassembled by the late Russell himself and shown theatrically, once, in 2010; nor was the BFI allowed to issue the film on Blu-ray. The resultant two-disc, Region 2 DVD appeared in late March 2012, and the film looks many times better than the wretched bootleg from Euro Cult, made available in the US in 2011. The bootleg does, however, contain the rape of Christ sequence, which, along with a segment of another provocative scene, Warner Bros. would not allow for inclusion on BFI's release. With the passage of over forty years — and the reasonable assumption that these scenes would not, at this late date, scorch a reasonable person's eyeballs — the whys and wherefores of Warners' timidity are difficult to understand. The British X-rated version hasn't been seen since the initial theatrical run in the UK, and thus far, Warner has steadfastly refused to release The Devils on disc, in any version, in the US. Apparently, their somewhat admirable goal — to make their entire catalog of films eventually available via the made-on-demand service, the Archive Collection — will fall short, with one title slated to be cast into a lake of fire.
In '71, I knew nothing of The Devils' entanglement with censorship and controversy, and, enjoying the film tremendously, made sure to see it more than once, if only to be certain that the sets (designed by Derek Jarman) were really as strangely beautiful as I'd first thought (they were). At the time, transgressive filmmaking was in the air, or about to be: its harbinger, I Am Curious (Yellow), had arrived back in 1967, Fellini Satyricon in 1969, Jodorowsky's El Topo in 1970; Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris was to come in 1972, Pasolini's Salo in 1975, Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses in 1976, and Lynch's Blue Velvet a decade later. Yet Russell, with just one film, seemed to want to break more taboos than all of the others combined.
In Russell's case, though, it isn't just a matter of provocative content. Beyond frontal nudity and nuns masturbating against the toes of Christ's nailed foot, The Devils combines its transgressive content with transgressions in tone, a standard operating procedure for most the director's oeuvre, and one that has consistently gotten him in trouble critically. In The Devils, where Russell amps up the sex and nudity, mixing it all in with a mockery of organized religion — plus scenes of physical torture and degradation enacted on nuns and priests — the film's tone refuses to remain constant, often from scene to scene, creating an apparent confusion of intent.
With certain mindsets in place in 1971, though, was anybody really surprised when the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) adjudged the original cut a nasty free-for-all and thus — with its provocative elements presented in an in-your-face, sometimes confusing style — a film made in shockingly bad taste? It's the "shockingly bad taste" that I believe resulted in the extremity of the censorship, and not, per se, the pubic hair, violence, and rough treatment of organized religion.
Partly, I think, the bad boy in Russell always enjoyed deliberately taunting the unimaginative or conservative viewer. By no means should we consider this his only motivation behind the extreme content and apparently confused intent — I'll get to other, more laudable motivations later — but I'm sure he could anticipate how these factors might cause the BBFC to question the seriousness of his film. Any claims by Russell to the contrary I might consider disingenuous.
Besides shattering the narrative frame with numerous anachronisms in The Devils, Russell more than once inserts a sequence of deliberate, low-down burlesque that appears to undercut the seriousness of the drama. The film's biggest set-piece, the orgiastic possession scene in the cathedral, plays more like gleeful soft porn than the disturbing brainwashed display of blasphemy that Russell has said he intended. When the BBFC screened The Devils, they likely foresaw a potential obscenity case, with accompanying legal ramifications and liability.
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