The Devils is Ken Russell’s best and most personal film, a once-divisive 55-year-old horror masterwork based on a 65-year-old play and a 74-year-old non-fiction novel about a 392-year-old French witch trial. As the sold-out crowd filtered into the Walter Reade Theater, Sight and Sound magazine’s new November issue, largely dedicated to The Devils and featuring a beatific Vanessa Redgrave on its cover, is handed to each guest. According to an article in the magazine by critic and Ken Russell historian Mark Kermode, The Devils was “the hottest ticket" at this summer’s Cannes Film Festival, too.
And this all precedes the film’s official theatrical re-release, by the new prestige imprint Warner Clockwork, this weekend. It would be fair to ask: What’s the big fucking deal? It could not be more timely.” Today, Loudun is a commune of less than 7,000 souls just under 200 miles southwest of Paris, below the Loire Valley, in the Viennese department.
It’s in Saumur AOC, an area of France perhaps best known by Americans today, if known at all, for stellar, light to medium-bodied cab francs. But it was once the site of an operatic 17th century tragedy. Loudun was unique in that it was one of the few towns that didn’t get swept up in the Huguenot rebellions, an uprising that pitted French Calvinist Protestants against King Louis XIII’s crown and Cardinal Richelieu’s Catholic church.
Majority Protestant Loudun remained loyal to the government, and its castle walls stood tall. In the early 1630s, though, a demonic possession scandal within a convent of Usruline nuns eventually led to the execution of the perfectly named secular priest Urbain Grandier, which became the pretense for the demolition of the castle and the further consolidation of Cardinal Richelieu’s power. This event became the subject of Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun, a miraculous exploration of history, totalitarianism, religion, society and sex that’s every bit as urgent and animated as Brave New World, from 20 years earlier.
The Devils of Loudun tracks the personal journey of Grandier, a combative egoist whose dick constantly gets him into trouble but who nevertheless becomes a true believer, achieving something like saintly transcendence in his final moments on Earth. He was the architect of his own destruction, brought low by a cabal of enemies composed of former allies and occultist apothecaries. Sister Jeanne des Anges, meanwhile, was a hunchbacked and self-loathing nun who rose to the position of mother superior in her convent and became sexually obsessed with Grandier, eventually accusing him of being an incubus (a charge that became the basis of a trial in which he was accused of sorcery).
Though they knew this was specious, Grandier’s enemies convinced the powers of church and state that getting rid of the outspoken priest was a politically expedient way to consolidate papist control of France. Grandier was found guilty, then tortured and burned at the stake, his charred remains scattered to the four winds. As Huxley wrote, Grandier’s execution was “a political experiment carefully designed to show how far, in this third decade of the seventeenth century, the methods of totalitarian dictatorship could safely be pushed.” Those who know Ken Russell’s exuberant, expressionist work—from Lisztomania (1975) and Altered States (1980) to 1988’s The Lair of the White Worm—might have trouble recognizing The Devils as a product of the same extreme, goofy, stoned and demented filmmaker (despite the fact that it opens with the flamboyant king of France putting on a play as a gender-bending mermaid/deity).
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