A friend of mine works at a bar across the street from a movie theater. Whenever there’s a hit, she’s slammed. You Can See Everything is breaking her back. Surrounded by stupor on all sides, dodging taggers and screaming matches, she manages to pick up some movie talk: Resident Evil was a unanimous hit, I Want Your Sex was a dud, and no one saw Digger (although it already has its defenders). Last week she told me Ken Russell’s The Devils, re-released by the brand new Warner Bros. Clockwork in 350 theaters, is getting “mixed reviews.”
Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that a 55-year-old movie isn’t only able to inspire furious feminist screeds but also to bore and confound increasingly addled and impatient audiences. The Devils, based on both Aldous Huxley’s novel (1952) and John Whiting’s play (1960), was a scandal upon its release in 1971: rated X, chopped to bits, and outright banned in many countries, the film remained unavailable in its intended form until just a few years ago. At the dawn of the 21st century, English film critic Mark Kermode promised Russell that he’d find and restore the missing sequences of The Devils, including the infamous “rape of Christ” scene that still manages to blow small minds.
Russell didn’t live to see his “most political film—in fact, my only political film” restored and re-released in America and the U.K., but by the time he died in 2011, there was a cult around The Devils already circulating non-censored bootlegs and clamoring for Warner Bros. to fix whatever they fucked up in 1971. I wonder what Russell would’ve made of the people who reject his film in 2026, enraged that “a woman didn’t direct it.” Shouldn’t Russell have known that female sexual hysteria is off limits for old white men? Especially since he’s already dead—I mean, God is a woman, everyone knows this, hasn’t he talked to her yet? Guess not…
Oliver Reed stars as the irresistible Father Grandier, a proud priest given to temptation who gains control of Loudon when its governor dies; the hunchbacked nun Jeanne des Anges (Vanessa Redgrave) is sexually obsessed with Grandier (along with all of her novitiates) and convinces him to become the convent’s Confessor. Grandier agrees—BAD MOVE! The affairs begin, the nuns become jealous, and powerful relatives of the nun begin plotting Grandier’s demise. A succubus—yes! Satan himself!—has taken hold of the convent in the form of Grandier. The entire city cuts its nose off to spite its face by torturing Grandier and burning him alive, just as the walls of the heavily fortified city are being demolished from outside. The Catholics won’t be safe without Grandier around! What will the Protestants think of next?
The Devils is one of the major accomplishments of 1970s English cinema, with a murderers row of crew members: Russell, cinematographer David Watkin, and production designer Derek Jarman. Russell made many films in this period, one of top of the other, but if any of them can jar a modern audience, it’s The Devils. Audiences in the 2020s are used to flattering pop culture assignments (“entertainments” is too generous and inaccurate a word) like Women Talking, Hamnet, Anatomy of a Fall, and Don’t Worry Darling that are eager to confirm all of their biases and beliefs; The Devils, like most great films of the 1970s, can’t be bothered to tell people what they already know. It isn’t contemptuous of its audience, but it assumes a level of intelligence, sophistication, and maturity in people that simply doesn’t exist anymore in the general public. Banned in one century, slammed in the next, The Devils remains an explosive film.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM