I’m an ardent fan of Ken Russell, yet I always considered “The Devils” to be a transgressive novelty: a voluptuous exercise in extreme blasphemy and extreme horror. No doubt: It’s both those things. Yet I didn’t think it was anything more than that. (For me, that was enough.) When the film came out, in 1971, it was at the cutting edge of a movement of extreme cinema that was rising up, like an X-rated beast, out of the swamp of the counterculture.
Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” and Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs” were both released in 1971. John Waters was already at work inventing punk and other filthy things — his revolutionary midnight movie “Pink Flamingos” would come out in 1972, the year that would also bring the dawn of the slasher film, with “The Last House on the Left.” At the time, these were movies that spat in the face of eveything decent and respectable. They were skeevy and violent and dangerous.
Just going to see one of them could feel like an antisocial act. To say that the culture has now caught up with them doesn’t mean that the films themselves are any less dangerous than they were. I was honestly shocked to see that “The Devils,” which has been given a full-scale restoration and re-release by a division of Warner Bros. called Warner Bros.
Clockwork, is a movie that’s now drawing crowds. In its opening weekend, it played in 350 theaters and made nearly $2 million. That isn’t the sort of thing that tends to happen with once-scandalous art films from half a century ago.
When this restored — and newly uncut — version of “The Devils” premiered at Cannes, I figured it would end up playing at a few theaters and, in essence, become a streaming release. I never imagined that crowds would be flocking to it. But when I saw it two weekends ago (in a packed theater), I could feel the excitement, and the relevance.
More than I would ever have guessed, “The Devils” is a movie that now speaks to our time. The relevance begins with the fact that it’s a fantastic film (much more so than I thought), something that wound up being obscured by all the nasty controversies that engulfed it. The movie is set in 17th-century France and centers on a Roman Catholic priest, played with searing brilliance by Oliver Reed, who is living the life of a libertine.
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