Yeah, I know there’s a new Ghostbusters out this week, and I will be getting to that soon. But it’s also my Spring Break this week, and that means I’ll have time to catch up on older stuff I haven’t seen yet for one reason or another. Combine that with the fact a lot of stuff on my Watchlist is leaving The Criterion Channel very soon, and that means trying to find the stuff that I really wanna see while I still can. Case in point, The Devils, a movie that was controversial when it came out and gained an X-rating and is probably still controversial today. I haven’t really seen anything from director Ken Russell, but I know the guy’s reputation for movies that are, to put it bluntly, a little crazy.
I opted for The Devils because I saw someone asking why there was a nun from this movie among the many, many characters watching the basketball game in the second Space Jam, and that someone was wondering who put a character from The Devils in a kids movie.
Here’s what I knew about the movie going into it: the mother superior of a convent would be tempted by the raw sexuality of a priest in Medieval France. That is basically true. What I didn’t expect was the way the movie opened with what looked basically like a drag show where a man in what looked like a skimpy bikini was doing a show for a bored cardinal that recreated Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Oh, and the man in the bikini (Graham Armitage) is the King of France while the bored cardinal is Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue). Those two characters are more background presences, but the scene does set a mood for what is to follow. And what is to follow is kinda crazy.
The basic plot is this: Father Grandier (Oliver Reed) is the priest of the town of Loudon, and with the death of the governor, he’s basically running things. Grandier has some ideas on how faith works, and he’s hardly a model priest, but he is the movie’s main force for good. There’s also a convent in town, run by the hunchbacked Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave). As explained later in the movie, most of the nuns there are, for one reason or another, noble women with no real path to marriage, so they get sent to this convent where they need to pray but otherwise avoid contact with the outside world. They are, in a nutshell, not the most devout of nuns and may do a whole lot of things if given license to do so. Sister Jeanne is having some really, let’s say, bizarre sexual fantasies about Father Grandier, and while Grandier isn’t exactly the sort of man to keep it in his pants, he hasn’t had any real contact with the nuns in the convent. But he is making enemies, and when a well-meaning priest let’s slip that the nuns seem to be having sexual fantasies involving Grandier, that’s enough for Richelieu’s forces to send in a witchfinder (Michael Gothard whose name my spell check wanted to change to “Got hard” and that seems to be somehow appropriate for this movie). It’s not so much whether or not Grandier can beat the charges. It’s more about how far people will go to get what they want.
So, as I more or less said above, this movie is kinda nuts. There’s a discordant soundtrack, the king goes places in a flimsy disguise that somehow works (my guess is most people don’t know what the king actually looks like), there are all kinds of masked crowds watching the proceedings perhaps in an attempt to amuse themselves, and the nuns, having been declared possessed, seem to spend all kinds of time running around naked and doing all kinds of sexual things. The sets are all, let’s say, distinctive, and while the movie never comes right out and say it, the suggestion here is that Grandier’s conviction happens because he angered the wrong people, and it has absolutely nothing to do with his ideas on religion. His religious ideas don’t exactly help his cause, but he is the only one really standing up for the people of Loudon against greedy nobles, power hungry cardinals, and quack doctors.
And yet, there’s something about Reed’s central performance. Yes, most everything about this movie is over-the-top, and while I doubt it would necessarily get anything higher than an R rating today, there’s something like a normal performance coming from him and his love interest played by Gemma Jones. His character has some ideas on the role of the priesthood and marriage that would probably get him kicked out of the church all by itself, and his callous disregard for a local young woman he knocked up don’t make him look all that good, but he’s also a hell of a lot better a person than the majority of characters in the movie, whether its religious zealots who are sure there are possessions going on or people using that as an excuse to punish someone who they don’t like for much more secular reasons or just Sister Jeanne who is an outright hypocrite, punishing nuns for things she is doing much more explicitly. I am not sure I am anxious to try more of Russell’s work, but I’ll say this much: it’s awfully distinctive and not for everybody.
Grade: B
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