Ken Russell was never one for subtlety.
His most persistent image may be that of Ann-Margret wallowing in a deluge of baked beans and his greatest crime against the filmgoing public may be forcing them to hear Jack Nicholson sing. The British director had a handful of obsessions (sex, violence, tortured genius) and wore them all proudly on his sleeves. If there was a top, he would go over it; if there was good taste, he would violate it; and if there was a point to be made, he would beat you over the head with it.
But he was also a man of great talents and singular vision. With almost no exceptions, his movies were personal projects. When he set out to direct The Devils — based on Aldous Huxley’s disturbing account of actual events in 1634 France — he determined, as he always did, that he was going to do it to his satisfaction, not to the demands of the studio or the desires of the public.
If you only heard about the resulting 1971 film for the first time a few weeks ago, that’s why. Russell’s ridiculously provocative script for The Devils lost him studio backing, and even when it found a home with Warner Bros., they cut out some of its most polarizing scenes. It was fairly well received at the box office, but critics loathed it and censors prevented it from being shown in its entirety. A long-promised revival, complete with the missing scenes and topped off with a gorgeous 4k restoration, cropped up 55 years later, long after Russell himself was too dead to appreciate it. A new generation of fans is hailing it as a rediscovered classic.
The Devils is set in central France following the Rohan Wars. Loudon is one of the few cities that escaped the violent conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, thanks largely to its isolation and its massive, impenetrable walls. Local priest Urbain Grandier hopes to preserve the city’s independence, but power-hungry Cardinal Richelieu has designs on it. He contrives to frame Grandier for witchcraft, with the aid of local nun Sister Jeanne des Anges, who is sexually obsessed with the well-meaning but dissipated priest.
That’s the bare bones. But the flesh is everything in a Ken Russell film, and here, the flesh is undergoing constant, undeniable turmoil. It heaves. It gasps and screams and cackles. It lusts. It sweats, bleeds, burns, rots, develops buboes, vomits, orgasms, and yearns. All of this is hugely, riotously visible on screen, and The Devils benefits not just from being seen in a theater, but from its meticulous high-def restoration: you can not only see everything, you can hear it in wild shouts of madness and moans of pleasure, taste it in sanctified bread and befouled sacrament, smell it in the alluring funk of bodies and the sickly sear of burning bones.
This all plays out in a Loudon that is a living object on the screen, so cleverly designed and perfectly realized that it makes the city’s ultimate downfall all the more tragic. All great films are collaborative projects, and The Devils shows not only Russell but his colleagues at the top of their games: Derek Jarman, who would become a fascinating avant-garde filmmaker himself, designed the sets. The nunnery overseen by Sister Jeanne is a twisting labyrinth of clean white brick that protects and isolates the women within in the same way the walls of the city protect the citizens from the outside.
David Watkin’s cinematography is pristine, earthy, crystalline, unforgettable. The costume design, by Russell’s then-wife Shirley Ann Russell, is equally striking; even barely glimpsed extras in the background look exact and natural. Watkin and Russell occasionally introduce anachronistic elements: King Louis XIII’s camp drag look, Father Barre’s oversized cuffs, John Lennon glasses, and big guns. Immersive historical fidelity is disrupted by rock star hair, gaudy modern costumes — and the alien present intrudes on the past.
Of course, it’s a Ken Russell film, so you’re going to get a lot of Ken Russell content. Are you going to see a pair of scientists, their judgments perverted from toadying to power, have a sword fight with a crocodile? Will you encounter actors who look like they need to leave the set early because they have a gig booked at the Whisky a Go Go later that night? Is someone going to receive a forced enema? Will every single one of the nuns eventually take their clothes off? Will you finally get to see the long-rumored deleted scene referred to in whispers as “the rape of Jesus”? Comrade, will you ever.
If this doesn’t seem like your bag, I don’t blame you and won’t try to convince you. Russell, as noted, is a real love-him-or-hate-him director, and this was the movie where he really decided to go for it. He wasn’t the only one; the acting is so intense and passionate that it’s just this side of comical, and some scenes are so chaotic and frenzied that you wonder if, like Werner Herzog in Heart of Glass, he kept the cast in a state of hypnosis. Vanessa Redgrave, in the role of Sister Jeanne, is particularly compelling, all wide eyes and affected laughter and barely concealed hysteria, losing her immortal soul because she’s so horny for a man she’s never met.
As visually stunning as The Devils is – and it’s a rebuke to the flat, under-lit, clinical feel of the average 2026 studio film – it offers vast pleasures elsewhere. There are moments of quietly intense emotional impact from the beginning to the end: Grandier’s realization that his decision to live up to his godly ideals comes too late; his wife Madeleine’s rejection at the nunnery by a bitter Sister Jeanne; the agonies of the true believer Mignon; even the barely humanizing moment when the torturer Father Barre realizes that none of the mob howling for Grandier’s blood takes his faith seriously and in fact looks at him as a clown.
But you’re asking: What about the politics? What is there in The Devils for a Marxist? Reader, it is my sad duty to inform you that politically, it’s pretty much a wash. There’s plenty for a contemporary viewer looking for parallels to the current crisis: a jaundiced view of religion; an image of perverse and degenerate elites that resonates even more now than it did in 1971; judges whose court raiments intentionally invoke the Ku Klux Klan; reactionary factions jockeying among themselves for power; armed thugs roaming the streets of an occupied town, their faces hidden, accountable only to their corrupt masters.
None of this was intentional, except in the way that this sort of struggle appears in cycles throughout history. (Someone should write a book about that.) Corey Atad, in Defector, says it’s “about the elite roots of fascistic social contagion,” and he’s not wrong. At every turn, those striving for power (the church authorities) crash headlong into the real power (the aristocracy). The king is an inbred, bored cretin taking potshots at dissidents he dresses up in costumes to hunt for sport. Both in its content and its ability to portray savage, brutal, libidinously poisoned elites indulging their worst tendencies even as the world they think they control shrinks and strangles them, The Devils’ closest rival is Pier Paolo Pasolini’s even more infamous Sàlo.
Still, while I believe The Devils is a masterpiece, from a strict ideological angle, there’s no there there. Pasolini’s film is expressly political and informed by his open Marxist politics; Russell insisted that The Devils was his only truly political film, but aside from a general portrayal of the corruption of power and some vague gestures toward “freedom,” you won’t come away from it thinking about politics much differently than you did when you went in.
Or will you? Where, in this film about the moral rot of the church and the aristocracy, is the working class? It is present everywhere you look, and yet strangely invisible in many ways. It is seen in the faces of the local baker and hotelier as the king’s right-hand man boasts about his plans to seize their businesses and assets once the aristocracy retakes the town. It’s seen in the rough joy of Loudon’s soldiers as they gleefully raise their weapons against aristocratic interlopers who threaten their beloved Grandier, and then in their sheepish, defeated postures as they ultimately turn on him once they realize that if his life isn’t forfeit, theirs will be. And most of all, it is in the faces of the dead and the dying, in piles of bone and ash, in corpses swaddled in white, looking oddly pristine as the living remain a mess of filth and color.
The vulgar men of power in Sàlo revel in their squalor, oblivious to the doom that is coming for them as Hitler’s puppet state begins to collapse. So, too, do The Devils’ king, his nobles, and their hangers-on. They encourage the debasement and destruction of the people they consider less than human, not knowing that in only a short century, the working class will rise up and put an end to the terror of “hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heartbreak” (as Mark Twain wrote of the French Revolution) with a terror of their own. That is the nobility’s tragedy, and their tragedy is our victory.
The Devils is a magnificent movie that deserves to be seen, in all its outlandish and offensive glory, on the big screen closest to you; it has earned the enthusiastic new audience it is receiving. But if it has a political lesson, it is only this: The dead sit up, and if an outrage is great enough in its injustice, they will make sure it is remembered.