Is Ken Russell’s ‘The Devils’ the Hottest New Release of the Fall?

This did not spare The Devils from oversight, meddling, and suppression from its financiers, as well as the era’s British and American censors. United Artists initially pitched the property to Russell based on John Whiting’s 1961 play, which debuted on Broadway in 1965 with Jason Robards and Anne Bancroft. The studio subsequently balked at the screenplay Russell produced, though it was later bought by Warner Brothers. During filming, newspapers reported that Russell was shooting sacrilegious porn, setting off alarms that The Devils would be legally dicey and financially ruinous. Ultimately, critics rejected the film; protesters, of course, picketed. The finished film would gain cult status by word of mouth but remained unavailable in most formats and was rarely screened.

The main bone of contention was “The Rape of Christ,” a climactic scene in which one nun face-fucks the phallic nose of a claymation Jesus while others are sent into a frenzy by a Ziggy Stardust witch hunter. This is cross-cut with a scene in which Grandier takes communion on the bank of a lake, juxtaposing the power of personal faith with its perversion at the hands of religious institutions. “Ken was a Catholic,” his wife Lisi Russell told the audience, “and he didn’t like his beautiful faith being tampered with by anybody.” The sequence was cut from the film, which led Russell to describe what landed in theaters as “damaged goods.” But when Kermode was working on a documentary about The Devils in the 1990s, he stumbled upon the footage, once lost to time, that facilitated its restoration. Russell would finally get to see his film as intended in 2004, screened from a DigiBeta tape seven years before his death.

Though that cut was shown once and never distributed, Warner Clockwork’s vital restoration will hit theaters this weekend, with a physical media release presumably in the offing. The film, Clockwork president Christian Parkes told me, “should be discussed in the same conversation as the work of other master filmmakers of that era: Coppola, Scorsese, Friedkin, Kubrick. For decades, it’s been the stuff of legend, whisper, and conspiracy. That [Warner Clockwork] has been able to democratize the film in its definitive form will give everyone the ability to see it and rightfully judge for themselves.”

As The Devils ends, the walls of Loudun are detonated and the martyred Urbain Grandier urges his constituents to fight tyranny and protect their independence before he is reduced to memory and ash. Gemma Jones, as Grandier’s widow Madeline de Brou, scales the rubble and stumbles out into the barren French countryside, leaving the city behind her in a wide shot. Ken Russell’s frame desaturates and the film stock takes on sepia tones. It is a statement, and an evergreen warning, not to view this ancient world as so different from ours.