Finally acquired the BFI edition of Ken Russell’s The Devils. An intense and beautiful and troubling and thrilling movie. Perhaps one of the finest final shots put to film. Absolutely one of my favorite movies.
This is as a complete a version as will probably ever exist in my lifetime. Warner Brothers has buried this. A religiously and politically a dangerous movie. A frightening examination of corruption, power, and misogyny.
@puffer
I'll have to keep this in mind -- the descriptions I've read of it previously have never really made me think that I wanted to see it.
(To be fair, most of the descriptions aren't very good, and tend to end after 'Nuns! Priests! Sex!' -- which isn't a combination that particularly appeals to me.)
I haven't been much of a fan of Ken Russell, but I watched 'Tommy' recently, and I was really impressed in the ways that Russell's script seemed to extend the ideas in Townshend's music, especially what I saw in the film about the inevitable downfalls of organized religion (Townshend was interested in himself as messiah, while Russell was looking more at society and religion as an institution), so I should probably pay a little more attention to Russell.
@trewhytte @emeb It's a very qualified recommendation. There's a reason it ends up on disturbing movie lists. It's not graphic per se but it has depictions of cruelty and torture. The sexual deviance is the norm for Russell but because it's a convent of nuns terrorized for political reasons into letting their darkest impulses run wild it's especially twisted and strange. The version that is impossible to see has a scene called the Rape of Jesus, in which they tear down a crucifix and, well...
The BFI DVD I just got is the British X Rated cut and is still pretty racy. The US R-rated cut shows up on streaming services and is still very intense, just less bush.
But it's gorgeously filmed. The set is magnificent. Both Lair of the White Worm and Tommy give you a good idea as to its style. But none of the camp of either of those movies.
Okay -- two recommendations for set design. Now I *am* intrigued.
@trewhytte @darkobserver @puffer @emeb The DVD extras are illuminating!
The film is a political indictment of the marriage of church and state, and is based on a 1952 non-fiction book by Aldous Huxley that describes a historical instance of mass "hysteria" that was encouraged by the church/state to distract the citizens from political malfeasance.
The censorship controversy is interesting, as is the phenomenon of how breaking taboos only dilutes future shock value.
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