THE DEVILS Movie Review

The Devils of Loudun

Oy. For those too young to remember, there was, once upon a time, an outlandish movie director named Ken Russell. It's been a decade or so since he's caused anything resembling a stir, but for the nearly 20 years beginning with 1969, the unveiling of a new Ken Russell movie was awaited with anticipation, fear, and a fistful of Dramamine. His historical epics in particular took more than a few liberties with traditional textbook versions of the facts, and students who wrote book reports based on movies like The Devils discovered that they should have stuck with Cliff's Notes. Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun is the ostensible source material for Russell's brightly colored, unapologetically vulgar portrait of the 17th-century French town that was purported to be stuffed to the rafters with sexually degenerate nuns, tortured priests, demonic pacts, and countless varieties of murder. The only thing they didn't do in 1634 was photograph all of these lewd and disgusting goings-on in leering, widescreen Technicolor close-ups, but Russell has thoughtfully served history by doing that job himself. The Devils would be genuinely offensive if it weren't so patently stupid, but it's so hilariously overwrought that you just can't bring yourself to despise it; it's a movie Ed Wood might have made if his goal in life was to be a big-budget pornographer. Vanessa Redgrave and Oliver Reed both survived Russell's onslaught (though Reed claims that Russell wanted to actually pierce his tongue in one close-up, but Reed dodged that indignity by convincing Russell that as an actor, his tongue would come in handy in the future).The film's one genuinely striking element is the production design, which marked the first screen credit of director Derek Jarman.

NEXT STOP … The Music Lovers, Savage Messiah, Lisztomania

1971 (R) 109m/C GB Vanessa Redgrave, Oliver Reed, Dudley Sutton, Max Adrian, Gemma Jones, Murray Melvin, Michael Gothard, Georgina Hale, Christopher Logue, Andrew Faulds; D: Ken Russell; W: Ken Russell; C: David Watkin; M: Peter Maxwell Davies. National Board of Review Awards '71: Best Director (Russell). VHS WAR