Cast: Oliver Reed, Vanessa Redgrave, Gemma Jones, Dudley Sutton, Murray Melvin Review by Carol Allen
The reaction to the film’s graphic depictions of orgies, mass hysteria, and brutal torture was one of sheer outrage, leading to widespread bans and heavy studio re-editing. Now rereleased in a magnificent 4K restoration drawn from the original camera negative, just as Russell conceived it, the film not only looks absolutely magnificent but is reborn into a society that doesn’t shock quite so easily. It’s still quite a tough watch, but also a magnificent one.
The film opens with a bizarre, theatrical performance of the birth of Venus staged by King Louis XIII (Graham Armitage) in full drag – a wannabe transexual monarch perhaps? It sets the scene for a film obsessed with the intersection of power, performance, and absurdity.
Based on Aldous Huxley’s non-fiction book The Devils of Loudun and John Whiting’s subsequent stage play The Devils, the plot deals with the persecution and subsequent downfall of Father Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed) in 17th-century France. Grandier is a fierce defender of Loudun’s civic independence against the power-hungry Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue). Grandier’s political enemies find their weapon in the sexually repressed, hunchbacked Mother Superior, Sister Jeanne des Ange (Vanessa Redgrave), who has a mad obsession with Grandier, which sets off a wave of mass hysteria in her convent – hence all the orgies. The state then uses that obsession to frame the priest for witchcraft. As the maverick priest Reed is a commanding figure, strikingly handsome and with a wonderful rich voice with which he delivers Grandier’s defiant speech, while Redgrave gives a shattering, fearless and moving performance as the tortured Sister Jeanne.
Also prominent among the cast is Gemma Jones as the innocent young woman that the supposedly celibate priest marries and Dudley Sutton and Murray Melvin, who lead the torture and ultimately burning at the stake of Grandier – scenes which even in today’s climate are a tough watch. As well as the photography of David Watkin and the costumes )Shirley Russell, at that time married to the director), much of the visual power of the film is down to the sets, designed by the late Derek Jarman in his very first major cinematic role – towering, clinical, white-tiled walls that turn Loudun into a gleaming, modernist asylum against which the story is set.
Although by the seventies I was an admirer of Ken Russell from Women in Love I never saw this film when it was first released. It sounded too extreme to me at the time. I’m glad to have seen it now. This loving restoration reminds us that Russell not only enjoyed shocking us but was also an artist of magnificent and fearless vision.
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