The Devils
Director: Ken Russell. Cast: Oliver Reed, Vanessa Redgrave, Gemma Jones, Dudley Sutton, Michael Gothard,
Murray Melvin, Max Adrian, Georgina Hale, Brian Murphy, Andrew Faulds, Kenneth Colley, Christopher Logue,
Graham Armitage. Screeplay: Ken Russell (based on the novel The
Devils of Loudon by Aldous Huxley and the play The Devils by John Whiting).
Ken Russell's at it with that gonzo hypersensual style of his again, but he has found the perfect (and
outrageously true-to-life) story on which to slather his extreme sensibilities. The Devils
revisits France in the time of Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIII, the first of whom was almost feverishly
Machiavellian in his pursuit of total church-and-state autocracy, the latter one of the more famous and
pathetic puppet monarchs in Western history. Unfortunately for Richelieu, as played by Christopher Logue,
there exist walled-in communities with their own still-functioning systems of self-government, defiant
enclaves against his project of universal authority. One such community is Loudon, a religious community
under the leadership of Father Grandier (Oliver Reed), a charismatic and sanguinary man whose civic
authority is strongly girded in the sexual influence this dark and swarthy fellow exerts on the thoughts
of the people of Loudon, particularly the women. Grandier's popularity has kept the town squarely behind
him and the Loudon city walls impenetrable to outside invasion.
Russell makes clear that Grandier enjoys making potent and unapologetic use of his own carnal appeal,
though even he underestimates the number and fervor of his admirers. Perversely, as befits a Russell
film, many of his most devoted admirers are the nuns of Loudon's convent, led by the hunchbacked,
commanding, but neurotic Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave). Following a Crucible-ish arc more familiar to 20th-century audiences in the contexts of
1950's McCarthyist inquisitions or some more recent public-sphere child abuse scandals, Jeanne and the
Sisters, spurned (as they of course must be) by their revered Father, accuse him of harboring a demonic
spirit and even of possessing their spotless Christian souls. News of the accusations reaches Richelieu's
ever-attentive ears, and he rightly identifies the perfect puncturing point in Grandier's armor.
A courtroom scenario of wild assertions and spectacular displays of behavior inevitably follow, but if
Russell has a single skill as a director—and I belong to the population who believes he has many—it is
his dogged refusal to take his films to the places we expect, at least not in the order or the style we
expect. Ironically, the one predictable dimension of most of Russell's features (which also include the
Tchaikovsky-as-nymphomaniac biography The Music Lovers and the seedy Crimes of Passion,
with Kathleen Turner as a prostitute and Anthony Perkins as her Bible-zealot savior/pursuant) is the
visual delirium that is ostensibly his most outrageous trait. The Devils includes a protracted
sequence of the decadent sexuality and rampant, lusty iconoclasm that arises in Loudon as Grandier's
fall commences that seems as gratuitously over-extended and self-consciously "daring" as the infamous
nude-wrestling match between Reed and Alan Bates in Russell's Women in
Love. Elsewhere, however, The Devils is an admirably realized effort, wild enough to
portray the different hysterias of religion, sex, and political power that intersected so combustibly at
that moment of French history, but never spinning out of Russell's control.
All of the actors in the picture acquit themselves well as obvious mediums of Russell's stylized and
allegorical takes of the characters in his own screenplay, adapted from a novel by Aldous Huxley and a
play by John Whiting. Redgrave's Jeanne, an exterminating angel who assaults and destroys what she most
loves, captures both the passion and the perversion of the character, and interestingly, the actress
often associated with tonier period pieces or more contemporary political dramas ranks The Devils
in her autobiography as, together with Tony Richardson's The Charge of the Light Brigade, "the two
greatest accomplishments of the postwar British cinema." (That Redgrave stars in both pictures will not
be lost on her detractors, nor her fans who, like myself, admire the bravado of this inimitable actress
as much as her more palatable virtues.) Also look for Gemma Jones, the sapphire-eyed actress who
played Emma Thompson's mother in Sense and Sensibility, as the ingenue who seems uniquely capable
of winning Grandier's loyal affections.
Still, for all of the performers' exertions, the camera and the sets of The Devils—the
latter a dazzling super-structure of scintillant white brick, designed by future Edward II and
Caravaggio director Derek Jarman—are, as the cliché goes, the real stars of the film. If
17th-century France had not existed in the way it did, Russell would have had to invent it to accommodate
his own lavish impulses and baroque imagination. Then again, maybe our cultural image of 17th-century
France exists as it does because Russell and other artists have produced of it such ripe and indelible
portraits. Like Reed's Father Grandier, Russell can be arrogant, libertinish, even heretical, but his
hold on our attentions, and perhaps more importantly on our minds, never flags in The Devils. The
movie, like a demon, possesses us. Grade:A–
Awards:
National Board of Review: Best Director (Russell; also cited for The Boy Friend)