Sex, sacrilege and censorship: why Ken Russell’s The Devils was damned
When the film director Ken Russell died in 2011, one obituary described him as ‘the apostle of excess’ and ‘the wild man of British cinema’. Some of the most notorious scenes in his filmography included the nude wrestling match between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in the DH Lawrence adaptation Women in Love, the terrifying and hallucinatory strangeness of Altered States, and the Grand Guignol excesses of his Bram Stoker adaptation The Lair of the White Worm.
Yet nothing came close to his 1971 film The Devils for controversy and outrage. To this day, there is no legal means of seeing the complete film that Russell made, a state of affairs that director Guillermo del Toro describes as ‘a true act of censorship’.
How, exactly, did Russell manage to push the envelope so spectacularly and horrifically to create what critics have called ‘one of the most important works of post-war British cinema’?
After the Oscar-winning reception of Women in Love – and, more crucially, its box office success – Russell was, for a brief moment, the hottest director in Hollywood. He was given carte blanche by various producers and studios to make whatever he was interested in. While his Tchaikovsky biopic The Music Lovers was a commercial and critical failure, it was The Devils that was a far more interesting and unusual prospect, steering Russell in a career direction that he had not yet explored.
He had been inspired by Aldous Huxley’s non-fiction book The Devils of Loudun, an account of alleged demonic possession and mass hysteria in France in the 17th century.
Huxley pulled no punches, at one point describing the forced exorcism of a nun as ‘the equivalent of a rape in a public toilet’. Russell, himself a practising Catholic, said: ‘I was knocked out by it – it was just so shocking – and I wanted others to be knocked out by it, too. I felt I had to make it.’
It had been adapted for the stage by John Whiting in 1960 in his play The Devils, but Whiting’s premature death in 1963 meant that Russell was able to synthesise Huxley’s book and Whiting’s drama into a self-penned screenplay, which he then presented to his studio United Artists.
It revolved around the character of the worldly priest Urbain Grandier, who finds himself caught up in the sexual and political shenanigans of Loundun during the reign of Louis XIII, and who was eventually burnt at the stake after being falsely accused of having consorted with the devil and corrupted a local order of nuns. It was perfect Russell material: controversial, dynamic, sexually charged and precision engineered to attract major actors, excited by the prospect of working with the enfant terrible of British cinema.
Russell’s regular collaborator Oliver Reed was cast as the charismatic Grandier. As his foil, the hunchbacked nun Sister Jeanne des Anges, Russell initially wished to cast Reed’s Women in Love co-star Glenda Jackson, but the Oscar-winning actress turned down the role, saying that she did not want to play ‘any more neurotic sex-starved parts.’ She was replaced by Vanessa Redgrave.
The rest of the actors were mainly up-and-coming young thespians such as Gemma Jones, Murray Melvin and Dudley Sutton, and Russell hired the then-unknown Derek Jarman to devise the film’s unforgettable production design. Jarman, who had only previously worked on stage productions, envisioned Loudun as a gleamingly modernist, white-tiled hell on earth, in which all manner of sordid and disgraceful matters could ensue.
The first suggestion that The Devils would prove intensely problematic came in the reaction of United Artists to the project. Although they had distributed such controversial (and Oscar-winning) films as Midnight Cowboy and Women in Love, they cavilled at the thought of the film’s extreme sexual and violent content and refused to finance it. Before the project could collapse, Warner Brothers, then fresh from distributing Nicolas Roeg’s similarly envelope-pushing Performance, came on board, and filming began in August 1970. It was a difficult shoot, with Russell accused of autocratic and inconsistent behaviour.
He seemed to change his mind from day to day as to whether he was making a political satire, a Grand Guignol horror or a straight historical drama, and this frustrated Reed, in particular, who ended the film’s production virtually estranged from Russell. As the avant-garde composer Peter Maxwell Davies said of the director: ‘He gets under people’s skin…we had a couple of damn good rows.’
Nonetheless, Maxwell Davies remained impressed by Russell, whose no-holds-barred attitude towards cinema was one that he respected and admired. His own note for the film’s memorably atonal score was ‘it has to sound as if it’s taking place in a public toilet…it begins to have a resonance that you want to get out of, with a slight sense that you don’t want to stay there too long.’
To this end, Russell created exorcism scenes that were heavy both on nudity and sexual content, showing the hysteria and depravity that the nuns had embraced. The single most notorious example of this was the so-called ‘Rape of Christ’ scene, which took place at the climax and depicted the nuns defiling a statue of Christ. It is still intensely shocking and disturbing to watch today – arguably more so than anything in the recent Cannes shocker Benedetta.
At a time when the most popular films at the box office included the likes of the sitcom adaptations On The Buses and Dad’s Army, the level of provocation that it offered was almost unimaginable. Along with a scene towards the end when the Redgrave character masturbates with the charred bone of her would-be lover Grandier, who has been graphically burnt at the stake after being tortured, there seemed virtually no possibility that the film could be released uncut, even with an X certificate. Russell had gone too far, even by his own standards.
This excess was soon picked up in the press, even during production. Headlines screamed ‘To The Devils With This Repulsive Film’ and ‘Movie That Shocked Even The Film Men.’ The actor Dudley Sutton caustically said: ‘As soon as you produce a woman’s tit on film, people go mad…they start closing sets, locking doors and they become prurient.’ Perhaps inevitably, one newspaper story about the rumoured nun nudity was entitled simply ‘Hell’s Belles.’
Aware that he might be faced with an unreleasable film, Russell showed an early version to the film censor John Trevelyan, in order to get a sense of what the BBFC would find unacceptable. Trevelyan, who said of his role that ‘we are paid to have dirty minds’, nonetheless had asked for cuts to the nude wrestling scene in Russell’s Women in Love, and there seemed little hope that the artistic integrity of The Devils would result in its being released uncensored.
At the first, unofficial screening, Trevelyan remarked to his colleagues that ‘it will be a very difficult film for you to see.’ He then had what Russell called ‘a very friendly conversation’ with the director, in which he said ‘I’m going to have to cut your best scene, but don’t take it against me, because that’s my job.’ It was suggested that, had the film been released with the ‘Rape of Christ’ scene, it would have been liable to prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act, which would have placed both Warner Bros and the BBFC in both moral and legal difficulty. The presence of the League of Decency in the United States, antennae twitching at anything that could have been interpreted as anti-religious, raised the possibility of the film simply not being distributed at all in its current form. Cuts had to be made.
To take out the film’s thematic climax was anathema to Russell. Its depiction of unrestrained and sexualised hysteria, juxtaposed with Grandier performing communion, was crucial to his conception of The Devils. Without it, much of the point and the impact was lost. Although Russell had only shot the script that he had written, Warners were as aghast as United Artists had been. (He commented ‘it hit them between the eyes, or perhaps between the legs.’) It was in vain that he argued that the shock and horror that the film engendered was a testament to its artistic integrity. The scene was removed, along with several other minor edits, and was believed to be lost for decades.
The bowdlerised film was received with mixed critical reactions, and was banned in Finland. Alexander Walker, the influential film critic of the Evening Standard, despised it, and he and Russell had a heated conversation on the BBC over perceived inaccuracies in his damning review. When Russell said ‘I don’t make films for the critics, I make them for the public’, Walker sneered ‘The public isn’t all that grateful, especially in America.’ Russell responded ‘Then go to America, and write for the f****ing Americans’, before hitting Walker over the head with a rolled-up copy of the Standard. This led to massed complaints from the public, not for Russell assaulting Walker, but for his swearing before doing so. Life had once again imitated art.
Despite Walker’s comments, the film proved to be a reasonable financial success, and won the prestigious Best Director award at the Venice Film Festival. Yet it continued to frustrate those who had been involved with it, not least Russell, who maintained that the censored version of The Devils was not the film that he had intended to make.
It therefore proved a revelation that, in the early 2000s, the film critic Mark Kermode discovered the surviving footage of the censored scenes, which was then shown publicly for the first time in the 2004 documentary Hell on Earth: The Desecration and Resurrection of the Devils. Even by the standards of what had been shown in cinema in the intervening three decades, the Rape of Christ scene retained its power to shock. When Russell watched it again, he sardonically commented ‘I can’t imagine why they cut it, save that it’s one of the most mind-blowing scenes ever censored.’
The obvious next step would have been for Warner Bros to release an uncut and restored version of the film, given the continued interest in Russell’s vision. Yet despite numerous reissues of The Devils on both DVD and streaming formats, the only edit of the film that is currently available remains the censored theatrical cut. From both a cinematic and social perspective, this is a considerable pity.
Although Russell’s film does not have the profile of such similarly controversial films as The Exorcist and A Clockwork Orange, its depiction of evil is every bit as unflinching. Now would seem the time to allow adult audiences to watch The Devils, 50 years after its original release, and make up their own minds as to its intentions and integrity. As Sutton said, ‘I don’t understand this ludicrous idea that you can control what people see, what people think, what people read….you end up with Nazi Germany.’
At a time when the iniquities of cancel culture are in full swing, it is surely right that Russell’s vision of another age retains its place as a sinister warning from history. If it is ever released in its full version, The Devils should rightly be regarded as a disturbing classic, rather than the compromised but fascinating work that is currently available. For the sake of cineastes everywhere, let us hope that someone, somewhere, can see sense. Otherwise, we’ll all be damned.