The Devils
The first words heard in The Devils are ‘His Majesty’s triumphed again!’ The ‘HM’ in question is Louis XIII of France (1601-1643), played by Graham Armitage as a 17th century Frank N. Furter. The King enters in skimpy Venus on the Half-Shell drag, centrepiece of his own spectacle. Later, Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue) slyly urges a crackdown on walled provincial towns but can’t get Louis to concentrate. The Catholic King is busy having Protestants forced into Disneyish crow costumes and set to run across his lawns while he takes pistol pot-shots at them – an atrocity staged as entertainment and party game. With screaming archness, Louis turns to camera and delivers an anachronistic punchline (‘bye-bye blackbird’) as another Huguenot bleeds to death in his lake.
An opening caption stresses that unlikely as it seems, The Devils depicts actual historical events. By 1971 this rough patch of French history had long since passed into legend thanks to Alexandre Dumas. In addition to his Musketeers novels, which cover the reign of Louis and the schemings of Richelieu, Dumas wrote a play about the Loudon hysteria Urbain Grandier (1850). Freddie Fox’s performance as Louis XIII in Paul W.S. Anderson’s The Three Musketeers (2011), is scarcely less bizarre than Armitage’s camp turn*. Of course, the Majesty who has ‘done it again’ is also director Ken Russell, mocking his public image as mad ringmaster, staging spectacles which yoke high culture (classical music, historical events) to Chaucerian bawdiness and Peckinpah-like brutality. Russell tweaks noses by telling the story of a proud, lusty, defiant visionary destroyed by lesser men, billing the movie as ‘Ken Russell’s film of The Devils’. His name is repeated to almost comic effect in the credits. Like Urban Grandier (Oliver Reed) preening before punishment, it’s hard not to think Our Ken was slyly asking for it. Like Mother Jeanne of the Angels (Vanessa Redgrave) projecting her fantasies onto Grandier, critics and censors bristled with excitement and outrage at the mere idea of Russell supervising orgies of naked nuns and tableaux of obscene blasphemies. The Devils was duly acclaimed, martyred and suppressed but its reputation has survived and risen.
Louis murders his naysayers but Russell could only stretch to sloshing Alexander Walker – then critic of the Evening Standard and a definite ‘anti’ on the film – about the head with a rolled-up newspaper on live telly. To rub it in, The Devils was a major commercial hit in 1971. It did particularly well in Italy, inspiring a filone of ‘nunsploitation’ films which ran to burning Florinda Bolkan at the stake in Flavia, la monaca musulmana (Flavia – High Priestess of Violence, 1974). Russell and Warner Brothers fell out over cuts made to the US release while the director and the BBFC had back-and-forth over versions available in the UK. Referring to an often-deleted sequence as ‘the Rape of Christ’ probably didn’t win over many suits and censors. Only now, after decades of campaigning, has something close to Russell’s preferred The Devils appeared. The ‘director’s cut’ seems politically of the moment. The motor of the plot is the Cardinal’s Trump-like desire to pull down the walls of Loudon and use the bricks to build a new town to be named Richelieu. Russell omits a telling detail from Huxley which also resonates across the centuries – courtiers couldn’t stand to be in a room with the ailing Cardinal because he smelled strongly of shit and rot.
In 1632, Urbain Grandier, a priest in the walled city of Loudon, was accused by Jeanne of the Angels, Mother Superior of an Ursuline convent, of using sorcery to seduce her. In all likelihood, the two had never met, though Grandier had refused her request that he become confessor to the order. Grandier, whose real name would be too on-the-nose for a fictional character who was urban and grand, had a reputation for high living. He carelessly cultivated enemies – for instance, impregnating the daughter of the town prosecutor, turning an ally into an implacable foe. He argued that Loudon should keep its walls, resisting Richelieu’s attempt to centralise power in the wake of the French Religious Wars. Baron de Laubardemont, ordered to make an example of Grandier, conspired with the priest’s enemies and seized on Jeanne’s accusations as grounds for trial. Father Barré, a professional exorcist, was called in to perform a public expulsion of devils from the Mother Superior. However, this spectacle increased an appetite for such entertainments and more nuns heaped accusations on Grandier while exhibiting symptoms of demonic possession. Most commentators assume Grandier’s arrest, trial, torture and execution were at the behest of powerful enemies in church and state and that the accusations of diabolism against him were baseless. He’s gone down in history as an innocent unjustly accused, though juries are still out on Gilles de Rais and Elisabeth Bathory — convicted in strikingly similar circumstances and remembered as monsters.
The case inspired many historians and writers. Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudon (1952) is a thoroughly-researched, clear-sighted account of superstition and hysteria manipulated for political ends**. Like Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953), based on the Salem witch trials, Huxley’s book had additional resonance in the era of ‘the McCarthy witch hunts’. The Devils of Loudon inspired John Whiting’s stage play The Devils (1961) and an opera by Krystztof Penderecki. Russell’s script cites Whiting’s play and Huxley’s book as sources. He makes the same decision Whiting does – to dramatise only the first half of Huxley’s Devils, climaxing with Grandier’s execution. Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s film Matka Joanna od Aniołów (Mother Joan of the Angels, 1961), which transfers the story to mediaeval Poland, concentrates on the later life of Jeanne in parallel with the second half of the book. Huxley contrasts worldly Grandier with sincere Father Jean-Joseph Surin, who took part in the exorcism and remained Jeanne’s confessor. Surin was tormented by crippling psychosomatic ailments tantamount to possession, possibly arising from guilty realisation of his part in the killing of an innocent man; Kawalerowicz has his ‘Father Suryn’ become an axe murderer. Russell didn’t consider making The Devils, Part II to tell Surin’s story but Warner Brothers greenlit The Exorcist (1973) which stands as a thematic sequel and pro-church rebuke to The Devils. In William Friedkin’s film, exorcists are good guys, a possessed girl is an innocent and the Devil is so real he ‘does commercials’. A hero priest isn’t murdered and martyred by church and state, but sacrifices himself to save a soul. In The Devils, exorcisms and executions are noisy, orgiastic displays which draw tourists just as Russell’s reputation for outrage tempted ticket-buyers. Russell knows he is condemning and indulging in a kink at the same time. you’d be hard pressed to find Friedkin, William Peter Blatty or anyone else connected with The Exorcist owning up to any catering to the public’s prurient interest in staging its spinal tap, crucifix masturbation, vomiting, swearing and contortionism … all of which have their equivalents in The Devils.
Warner Brothers might have thought they’d get something like the Academy Award-festooned A Man For All Seasons (1966) – also with Vanessa Redgrave, also based on a play, also a historical religious-political-Royal courtroom drama winding up with a martyrdom – out of a project they picked up after it stalled at United Artists. Had anyone in the hierarchy seen any earlier Ken Russell films? Warners eventually deemed The Devils a ghastly spectacle, which is absolutely what Russell wanted. It’s as much a comic charade as grim history lesson: its vision of 17th century France was influential on Richard Lester’s Musketeers films, which also rely on Oliver Reed to underplay as the least exaggerated character in a parade of grotesques. Given Reed’s on and off-screen reputation for excess, this is a funny idea in itself. Initially, Russell cast Spike Milligan in the crowd, but cut him out when he realised that though the comedian played a straight dramatic role, audiences would laugh as soon as his goonish face popped up. Ironically, Milligan’s dialogue was given to Dudley Sutton, who brings an air of comic menace to de Laubardemont, the dandy cynic in charge of Grandier’s (and Loudon’s) destruction and quite often gets laughs playing off Reed’s intensity. Grandier’s enemies are played for horrid laughs. Theatrical grandee Max Adrian*** gurns and giggles as much as future sit-com regular Brian Murphy in their double act as quack doctors and freelance torturers. Russell saw the film as political rather than religious or pornographic, which doesn’t mean he didn’t sneakily identify with Father Mignon (Murray Melvin), who has a crafty wank during one of the nuns’ mass freak-out sessions.
Just as Russell was not interested in making a respectable heritage film, he wasn’t inclined to make a horror movie – not even a serious one like Matthew Hopkins – Witchfinder General (1968). Nevertheless, The Devils is influenced by and was influential on horror cinema. Shaggy-haired, Lennon spex-sporting Michael Gothard called in from Scream and Scream Again (1969) to play a rock God exorcist, giving a better showing than the actual rock stars Russell would cast in decadent spectacles like Lisztomania (1975). Russell picks up on Huxley’s perception that Barré’s first attempt at exorcism (subjecting Jeanne to a hot water enema) was ‘an experience that was the equivalent, more or less, of a rape in a public lavatory’. Production designer Derek Jarman makes the Ursuline convent and the defiant walls of Loudon out of the white bricks used in public loos, all the better to highlight blood, vomit and other spillages. When Jeanne orders an errant sister to scrub the convent from top to bottom, the place already seems pristine and spotless. That will change. Redgrave – who took the role after Glenda Jackson refused to play another sexually demented woman for Russell – is striking in her Nosferatu-ish early appearances as Jeanne, wimpled head kinked down on one shoulder, stern as a tyrant but given to bursts of manic tittering.
The Devils is about a real man beset by caricatures, who becomes heroic when everything is taken from him. As a ‘stations of the cross’ march to martyrdom movie, its shares DNA with A Man for All Seasons and a many other history films which end with beheadings but also ‘ritual sacrifice’ horror pictures like The Wicker Man (1973). Loudon is an enclave of religious tolerance and busy commerce whose walls shut out the view of the mouldy skeletons of persecuted Protestants tied to wheels elevated beside the road****. Similarly, the hero fatefully ignores envious glances directed his way. In a tiny, telling moment, gorgeously-robed Grandier leads a procession, with two children scurrying in to lift his train out of the mud. Mignon, whose own robes have to trail through filth, gives a sly look of suppressed outrage and envy that he isn’t privileged to have such handy cherubs. At the stake, Mignon gives the condemned man a ritual kiss only for the crowd to howl ‘Judas Judas’ at him as if he were Bob Dylan going electric. Grandier dumps Philippe (Georgina Hale) when she falls pregnant but feels deeply enough about widow Madeleine (Gemma Jones) to go through a heretical form of marriage with her. The spurning of Philippe, lifted directly from Whiting, is brilliantly written and played. When the ‘ruined’ girl reaches out for the hand of her formerly kindly seducer, Grandier says ‘there – like touching the dead, isn’t it?’ Whiting and Huxley think enough of Philippe to care about her plight – forced into a loveless marriage. Russell puts Hale in clownish make-up and has the silly, knocked-up girl become a spiteful wretch … all the while idealising Madeleine, to the extent of having her walk away under the end credits as sole untarnished survivor of the mess (in real life, Madeleine took Option B for cast-off lovers and became – yes – a nun).
Reed gets an arc as the smug, self-indulgent player stands up for his city. Grandier has all the trappings of wealth and luxury stripped from him, with his books torn, sculpture smashed and curly moustache shaved. Despite ‘the question’ (torture) and cajolements, he refuses to confess to crimes he has not committed, going to the stake a political martyr (and repentant sinner) rather than a justly convicted sorcerer. In a less controversial film, Reed’s performance would have had guaranteed awards nominations. Russell doesn’t give Redgrave anything like material of this quality, which might be another reason why Glenda Jackson passed. Huxley and Whiting stress a terrifying passage where, witnessing all the horrors she’s let loose, Jeanne recants and tells the simple truth that she made it all up … only for the exorcists to insist that this is the Devil talking through her. Jeanne’s courage evaporates as she falls back into playing the hits — the familiar lies and displays of demoniac activity. This incident is in The Devils but gets lost in the chaos. For the woman’s side of the story, you have to go to book, play or Matka Joanna od Aniołów. Sœur Claire de Sazilly, one of the nuns of Loudon, was Cardinal Richelieu’s cousin; if she appears in The Devils, she’s not identified by this significant connection. The Ursulines are a chorus line out of an epic sex film, forming an acrobats’ pyramid to peer through windows to get a look at the passing parade, then screeching, stripping, carrying-on and cavorting like hippie chicks on acid at a happening. A popular theory has it that the sisters of Loudon were affected by eating bread infected with an ergot which forms a natural hallucinogen. Russell doesn’t make anything of this: his nuns cavort in states of undress under director’s orders, just as the originals did what the authorities and the crowds wanted. For Russell (a devout Catholic, as it happens), the possessions were all an act. He illogically gives King Louis a prime bit of business Huxley ascribes to an unnamed nobleman and Whiting to the King’s cousin Henri de Condé. A visitor lends the exorcists a box containing a most holy relic which will instantly drives out devils when pressed against a possessed person’s flesh. After the success of this stratagem, the vistor opens the box to revealed that it’s empty … and the possession resumes as before. ‘What sort of trick have you played on us?’ asks Barré. Pointedly, the King replies ‘Reverend, sir, what sort of trick are you playing on us?’
The Devils remained and remains controversial – overly damned, overly praised. Which must have delighted Russell, who skipped on to a cheerful musical, The Boy Friend (1971)*****. Derek Jarman, already venturing into film direction, made The Devils at the Elgin (1974), an 8mm cut-down photographed off the screen at the Elgin Theater in New York, silent but generally synchronised to Nico’s cover of The Doors’ ‘The End’. This was no more radical a revision and co-option of The Devils than those created by censors, distributors, bootleggers and restorers over the years. There is a considerable literature on the film and its travails have been covered in many documentaries, from ‘Russell’s Progress’ (Omnibus, 1971) to Hell on Earth (2002). Almost all nunsploitation films, down to Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta (2021), feel obliged to refer to or lift from The Devils. Caligola (1979) is so indebted to imitating Ken Russell’s approach that it verges on fan fiction. Bizarrely, the (terrible) Looney Tunes sequel Space Jam 2 A New Legacy (2021) includes Sister Jeanne along with other Warners-owned characters (the droogs, Pazuzu, Batman, Beetlejuice, King Kong, Robocop) in the crowd (how kids must have laughed at the reference). On any level, The Devils is a considerable film … all the more so for having to compete with imagined versions of the movie which exist as phantoms in the minds of its detractors and admirers alike.
*In a DVD commentary, Russell described Armitage as ‘a leading transsexual’, suggesting a Warholian pick-up rather than a character actor who had a long career (without noticeable gender realignment) in everything from The Dick Emery Show (1971) to The Redemption: Kickboxer 5 (1995).
**A key passage from Huxley – which Whiting dramatises but Russell drops – notes that ‘The nuns were far gone in hysteria, but never so far gone as to forget which side their bread was buttered. Throughout the possession, as Dr. Legué has pointed out, God, Christ and the Virgin were constantly blasphemed, but never Louis XIII and never, above all, His Eminence [Cardinal Richelieu]. The good sisters knew well enough that, against Heaven, they could let off steam with impunity. But if they were rude to the Cardinal . . . Well, see what was happening to M. Grandier.’
***Adrian played Father Barré in the first production of Whiting’s The Devils. That cast also included Richard Johnson (Grandier), Dorothy Tutin (Jeanne) and Diana Rigg (Philippe).
****A still of one of these corpses was the fold-out pin-up of Monster Mag # 6.
*****Twiggy, star of The Boy Friend, is an extra in the court scenes of The Devils. Glenda Jackson, refusenik of The Devils, came back as ‘the Star’ of The Boy Friend.
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