It’s not an exaggeration to say that, in my book, The Devils finally breaking out of the Warner Bros. vault, and being fully restored in 4K, is the biggest movie news of my lifetime. It’s hard to explain to those who are just seeing it now but, when I first heard about The Devils in the early 2010s, it was more than an obscure movie. It was a Holy Grail. It was the movie that Ken Russell snuck in underneath Warner Bros’ nose, part prank and part rebellion against all kinds of authority—divine and otherwise. It was so blasphemous that the studio censored then shelved it. Conventional wisdom at the time, at least among video-store clerks shooting the shit on slow afternoons, is that it would never, ever come out, at least not in its uncut form.
But here we are, months after The Devils premiered at Cannes, screening with its infamous, controverisal “Rape of Christ” sequence intact for the first time ever. I first saw the movie on VHS in a heavily censored American R-rated cut, and I have seen it in various assemblages with different scenes reinserted at various levels of quality over the years. But, at TIFF and NYFF as this new restoration made the festival rounds, watching Warner Bros. Clockwork’s new and miraculously intact 4K—renamed Ken Russell’s The Devils to indicate the finality of its presentation—felt like watching a whole new movie.
The controversial scenes that were swiftly cut and then restored piecemeal over the last 55 years make the movie work better thematically and structurally—it’s true. But what really blew me away on this viewing was the depth and clarity of the images, as Russell fills every frame of The Devils with fleshy, farcical baroque excess that would make Hieronymus Bosch blush. “The Devils is complete flamboyance. Everything about this film is hyper stylised and over the top… and every ounce of style is matched in substance,” Slig001 writes.
But what is the movie actually about? Fair question, especially given my casual mention of something called the “Rape of Christ” in that previous paragraph. Russell often said The Devils was about brainwashing; I think it’s furthermore about the cynical deployment of religion to gain political power. It’s based on true accounts of a trial that took place in France in 1634, in which a priest was executed on charges of witchcraft after making some powerful enemies by deflowering the noble maidens who came to him for “Latin instruction.” Oliver Reed plays that role here, and he is utterly convincing in it: Every woman in this movie goes absolutely feral just by looking at him, including a sexually repressed abbess played by Vanessa Redgrave in one of cinema’s all-time great villain turns.
Using Aldous Huxley’s non-fiction The Devils of Loudun as a conduit, Russell breaks down the hypocritical structures of organized religion, brick by brick. That’s really what makes The Devils an incendiary masterpiece, one whose transgressive greatness is captured in Noen’s review: “Blasphemy, lust, collective madness, everything is laid bare for all to see, with the conviction of someone who knows they are committing an unforgivable artistic crime … Its explicit content, not only of sex and violence, but of thought, has become intolerable for a world that, ironically, has never got rid of the flames of the Inquisition.” Amen.