Ken Russell’s notorious film The Devils is back. Not that it ever really went away. But it’s returned in Russell’s authorised version now enhanced by more extra footage discovered in Warner’s vaults by Mark Kermode. I first saw the censored print in 1971. Thought it was good to very good, containing a strong performance by Oliver Reed.
Fifty five years on The Devils looks like one of the most important films of British cinema with Oliver Reed, a powerhouse of an actor, arguably delivering his finest moments on screen. It’s not just a beautiful restoration with more screen time but here is Ken Russell at his most serious: his moral concerns authentically focused and coherent.
Often a director rightly accused of being over the top, inept and shallow in such dire features as Lisztomania and The Lair of the White Worm (his worst cinema offerings). But now in The Devils Russell’s earlier creative passion is partnered with a genuine thoughtfulness and critique to be applauded for he doesn’t lapse into absurdity – except for a rather camp portrait of the king (played my Max Adrian) and the occasional mad giggle from the hunchbacked nun Sister Jean des Anges (Vanessa Redgrave). The manner of the Sister’s walking and the angularity of her body are well used symbolically to suggest a world that’s off kilter. No need for the giggling!
The Devils, Women in Love, Savage Messiah and much of The Music Lovers are for me his greatest achievements, for here Russell is sensitively focussed on themes concerning the expression of love, friendship and power. Yes, even in The Devils. For behind all the sound and fury of its often thrashing visual spectacle lies betrayal; no friend or colleague dares to come forward and defend the priest Father Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed) of the trumped up charges of sexual assault; his love for humanity, religion and his bride Madeleine de Brou (Gemma Jones) dominates the thoughts of Grandier when confronted by his false accusers as the priest’s earlier showy sense of power is transformed into a moral fortitude - under torture he’s unflinching in calling out the hypocrisies of the authoritarian state and its manipulative church leaders.
It’s Grandier’s persecution that ultimately makes his persecution really touching and tragic. Ironically he realises (confesses) his imperfections as a flawed, promiscuous and arrogant priest yet is burnt alive for sexual indiscretions, linked with the devil and Sister Jean de Anges, that he never committed. Yet we mustn’t forget those supposedly devil possessed nuns and their complicity in Grandier’s downfall!
All the initial critical upset about The Devils spoke of its hysterical, orgiastic atmosphere and many dismissed it as a camp affair of sexually repressed nuns. Yet there had to be crowd hysteria and requisite nudity because the church and the king are playing out manipulative games about devil possession, and this is an integral part of Russell’s storyline – that takes material from John Whiting’s play The Devils and Aldous Huxley’s non–fiction book The Devils of Loudon. It’s not exaggerated but horribly realistic stuff about how a conditioned state of madness, through screamed out accusations, wretched physical probing and phoney exorcisms, can be more suggestive, manipulative and destructive than any manifestation of the supernatural. Anyway the frightened nuns will go along with accusing Grandier of a fall from grace and their demonic ‘take over’ so as to save their skins.
Visually The Devils is one of Russell’s most remarkable films. Image after image is exciting and superbly composed. And a searing sense of apocalypse is realised so well in Grandier’s burning at the stake. Has one ever seen fire so dramatically realised in film? (Perhaps only the burning of the house in Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice and the fire in the Roger Vadim episode of Poe’s Metzengerstein in Spirits of the Dead equal its intensity). Russell’s fire burns with a huge and savage indignation at the political order. And when Madeleine de Brou walks away from the destroyed Loudon the landscape resembles a post-nuclear war world.
The Devils is a beautifully designed film. The sets were constructed by a very young Derek Jarman and echo the sets for Dreyer’s Jeanne D’arc and Lang’s Metropolis. The music is discordantly abrasive but approachable and composed by Peter Maxwell Davies for his group The Fires of London. Ken Russell was distinguished for his use of music and here it’s employed tight and sparingly. The Devils has just enough theological discussion (the dinner scene between Grandier and Madeline) and sufficient sketched in politics between Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Louge) and King Louis XII (Graham Armitage) that comes as a temporary relief from its mainly furious action. The casting is excellent. Ken Russell doesn’t make the formidable presence of Oliver Reed drown out the other actors. However I did feel that Gemma James’s part was too brief. I’d have liked to have seen more scenes of her on screen defending Grandier.
“I have been a man. I have loved women. I have enjoyed power.” This is what Grandier will confess to. Not the fabricated lies he’s accused of. It makes him very human with all his strengths and weaknesses, victimised in the obscenely authoritarian France of the 1630’s that Ken Russell so vividly realises.
- Alan Price
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