‹ Back

(Review) THE DEVILS: Holy Men, Unholy Acts, and One Very Horny Convent

By. Professor Horror 

 

THE DEVILS

By. Professor Horror

This film is based upon historical fact. The principal characters lived and the major events depicted in the film actually took place.

The first time I saw THE DEVILS was probably in 2004, on a bootlegged DVD that pieced the movie together from various copies and even documentaries about the movie. None of the sources were the best quality, but the gritty, grainy look only added to the savagery and the absolute disregard for anything holy. Sitting among a small group of friends, I heard constant exclamations of disbelief, gasps, and groans of discomfort. All my friends had been raised Catholic, so I was not nearly as scandalized as they were, but I still appreciated the film’s complete disregard for polite society. At the time, that Frankenstein’s monster of a copy was the only way to see the film, because Warner Bros. and the British censors demanded heavy cuts, and the MPAA demanded more for American theaters. Now, in the year of our Lord 2026, THE DEVILS has been restored in 4K from the original camera negative and cut to Ken Russell’s own specifications, ready to shock and seduce a new audience.

From the first scene, the movie plays with sex and sexuality and lets us see how religion and secular royalty are forced to comingle. King Louis XIII (Graham Armitage) stages an elaborate tableau of the Birth of Venus for Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue) and the assembled court, playing the goddess himself in drag with little more than silver shells over his nipples and groin. A bit over the top (and almost resembles a Monty Python bit), but…because he is the King, everyone must love his performance. The tableau is a pageant of desire, performed by a man who rules by divine right, and it sets up the film’s habit of turning sacred things into theater. While church and state might not necessarily see eye to eye, there is a level of respect they extend to each other because they understand the other must exist. This forced harmony is depicted with high key, low contrast lighting and a palette of extreme whites and extreme blacks. The color and lighting scheme makes it seem everything is (supposedly) in the open, and nothing seems to hide beneath the surface. The secular ruling class focuses on sex, and the religious order focuses on prayer and piety. But the harmony is the trap. When the dance ends, Richelieu asks for a France where church and state are one, and Louis seals the deal with a casual “amen.” The frame is so clean and so bright that it feels like there’s nothing to hide, and that’s the trick. Power doesn’t need to hide when it can put on a show. Everything is as expected…until it isn’t.

Loudun is a fortified town whose walls stand between Richelieu and total control. After the death of its governor, Father Urbain Grandier (played by the incomparable Oliver Reed) becomes the town’s de facto leader. He is a priest, a womanizer, and the only man in Loudun willing to defend its walls against the Cardinal. He is no saint, though. He has seduced and abandoned women in town, and his sins are very real…just small and human compared to what’s coming. His latest feud, though, is the one that costs him…and it starts in Vanessa Redgrave’s pants (or to be more specific, her nun’s habit).

Apparently, men deciding how women should behave isn't limited to seventeenth-century France. Pleatherface takes that particular nightmare into the American suburbs with THE STEPFORD WIVES, where the promise of domestic perfection conceals something considerably more sinister.

Redgrave plays Sister Jeanne, the hunchbacked, sexually repressed prioress of the local Ursuline convent. She has barely spoken to Grandier, so her lust is built almost entirely from fantasy. Redgrave plays her character with a twitchy, wounded intensity, and the film never lets us decide whether she is a victim of her repression or its most dangerous product. Her longing is the one thing in that convent that is real, which is exactly why Richelieu’s men are able to use it. Everyone in Loudun seems a bit horny for Grandier, but Jeanne finds what he does to her loins so dangerous that, to stop her lust for him, she sets out to destroy him. When he declines to become the convent’s confessor and she learns he has secretly married Madeleine (Gemma Jones), her desire curdles into accusation. She claims he has bewitched her, and the other nuns follow. The film makes clear that Richelieu’s men, the Baron de Laubardemont and Father Mignon, did not need much of a push because a scandal was exactly what they needed to take the walls.

To understand why THE DEVILS landed like a thunderclap in 1971, you need a little history. For decades, American movies lived under the Hays Code, the Production Code adopted in 1930 and enforced with real teeth from 1934 by Joseph Breen’s Production Code Administration. It was named for Will Hays, the studio lobbyist who fronted it, and it was shaped heavily by Catholic advisors and backed by the Legion of Decency’s threat of boycotts. The Code policed nudity, “sex perversion,” and lustful behavior, and it forbade films from ridiculing religion or portraying clergy as villains. Making fun of those in power wasn’t quite as formally banned, but the studios learned the lesson, and for nearly forty years mocking church and crown was something a mainstream film simply did not do. The Hays Code stranglehold finally broke in 1968, when the Code was replaced by the MPAA ratings system. That gave filmmakers permission to embrace the debauchery that had been bottled up for decades, and Russell used it to tear into both institutions at once. However, even then…the establishment pushed back. The Catholic Church condemned the film and tried to get it pulled from Venice, and the studio sliced out whole scenes. So, the film’s own history repeats its plot. Just as Richelieu silences Grandier to protect his image, the Church, the studio, and the censors cut and condemned THE DEVILS to protect theirs, and it took more than fifty years to undo the damage.

Back in Loudun, the film shows two groups living inside that same performance. Those born into nobility and those who chose to devote their life to religion are both so far removed from everyday normal life, but which one is more deprived? The court is deprived of consequence because Louis can play Venus in front of his entire government and be applauded for it. Plus, a life where nothing is ever refused leaves nothing to want except more power (which is why Richelieu’s plan sells so easily). The nuns are deprived of nearly everything else, including touch, choice, and privacy, and the film suggests that deprivation doesn’t kill desire so much as bottle it. THE DEVILS asks what happens when people who committed to holiness are handed a holy excuse, and the answer is that they descend quite quickly into extreme hedonism. The exorcisms give the nuns a script, an audience, and divine cover, so acting out becomes an act of faith, and the more extreme the performance, the more sacred it looks. That hysteria is both genuine release and performance, and it is welcomed because it serves the men in charge. So which group is more deprived?

Be warned that THE DEVILS earns its reputation. The convent sequences, where the exorcism devolves into a communal frenzy of naked, writhing nuns, play like a fever dream that spirals out of the exorcists’ control. Restored footage that once vanished entirely from the film makes these scenes feel more like a ritual than a spectacle, with religious devotion becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from sexual gratification. The final scene (built around a charred bone) is an image I won’t spoil, but it is the film’s bleakest joke about where devotion goes when it has nothing left to worship.

Modern audiences may not be as scandalized as those in 1971 (or maybe they will be. I'm still not Catholic, so perhaps I'm just not the audience to be shocked and appalled), but there's still plenty to appreciate in the story, the performances, and the sheer craft of the thing, from David Watkin's cinematography to Russell's unapologetic theatrical excess. Reed gives one of his greatest performances as Grandier, a swaggering, smirking priest whose faith is the one thing the film never doubts. He is guilty of almost everything except what he's charged with, and when accused of consorting with the Devil, he can only bellow the best defense a womanizing priest has: "Satan's Boy, I could never be!" Redgrave is equally magnetic and frightening as Jeanne, making her desire pitiable and monstrous at the same time. Together, their performances expose the absurdity of a system that condemns private human failings while celebrating cruelty committed in the name of God. The restoration premiered in Cannes Classics, and Warner Bros. Clockwork opens it in select North American theaters on October 16 for a one-week exclusive engagement. This new version runs about three minutes longer than the previous "uncut" cut and draws on the edit Russell privately assembled in 2004. It is now rated NC-17, the modern descendant of the X that once branded it. I haven't found an announced physical media release, but after more than fifty years of censorship and suppression, THE DEVILS is finally getting another chance to offend everyone on the big screen.

Religion doesn't need a convent full of possessed nuns to make someone feel like an outsider. In her CARNIVAL OF SOULS essay, Bee Delores explores how the film's isolation and expectations of conformity can be understood through a queer reading, where being different becomes its own kind of haunting.