DIRECTOR: Ken Russell
Before he became a director, Derek Jarman was a production designer. His greatest achievement was designing the extraordinary white-brick modernist interiors for the Ursuline convent in Ken Russell’s 1971 movie The Devils.
Set in 1634, during the reign of King Louis XIII and his bulldog Cardinal Richelieu, in the fortified French city of Loudun, the film dramatizes the real historical case of mass hysteria, political persecution, and religious manipulation that led to the execution of the priest Urbain Grandier.
Oliver Reed plays Grandier as a sensual, intellectually confident priest who secretly marries a young woman, Madeleine, played by Gemma Jones, and resists Cardinal Richelieu’s plan to demolish Loudun’s city walls. In the seventeenth century, the French Religious Wars, which peaked during the collapsing Valois monarchy of Catherine De Medici and her three sons, had largely subsided. Remember, the Edict of Nantes was signed in 1598! However, fortified towns were still seen as sanctuaries for French Protestants, also known as Huguenots
Vanessa Redgrave plays Sister Jeanne of the Angels, the hunchbacked, erotically tormented Mother Superior of the Ursuline convent. She becomes obsessed with Grandier after glimpsing him through a window. Her sexual repression mutates into visions, fantasies, and ultimately accusations.
DEBASEMENT AS AN AESTHETIC
Jeanne claims Grandier has bewitched her. Other nuns, swept up in hysteria, imitate her behavior. The convent erupts into convulsions, orgiastic frenzies, blasphemous rituals and even a public exorcism. These scenes, choreographed like grotesque pageants, are Russell’s most infamous cinematic legacy. However, they’re so over-the-top and bereft of emotional weight that you end up looking, instead, at Jarman’s spectacular minimalistic backgrounds. What Russell did to Glenda Jackson in The Music Lovers, he does to Vanessa Redgrave here. It’s not every director who can say that they have pushed not one, but two of the greatest actresses of their generation to the edge of humiliation – it’s debasement as an aesthetic. And Ann-Margaret was next on the list!
Richelieu’s agents seize this opportunity. Grandier is arrested, tortured, and put on trial for witchcraft. The trial is a foregone conclusion: a political execution disguised as religious purification. Grandier is burned alive in a public spectacle. Jeanne watches, both horrified and aroused, realizing too late that her accusations were manipulated.
The city walls are demolished, the true goal all along. The final image is of Madeleine leaving the destroyed city.
LOUIS XIII’S HUGUENOT SHOOTING PAGEANT
Gay monarch King Louis XIII was a big fan of the lute, which he started playing for his mother, Maria de Medici, at the age of two. He also loved ballet and was both a formidable dancer and choreographer. To Russell, this was like slop to a pig, and he wastes no opportunity, opening the film with a little theatrical devised by a highly effeminate, almost naked Louis in Birth of Venus attire, accompanied by his male Corps de ballet to an audience of cross-dressing queens and a bored-looking Richelieu, played by British poet Christopher Logue.
When we next meet King Louis XIII (played with exquisite, foppish cruelty by Graham Armitage), he is staging an outdoor theatrical spectacle for his court.
The “entertainment” is a grotesque pantomime:
· A group of Huguenots is dressed in blackbird costumes — black feathers, beaks, wings.
· They must cross an obstacle course on a grassy field.
· As they run, Louis XIII stands with a musket and shoots them down one by one.
· The court applauds.
· A troupe of performers sings “Bye Bye Blackbird” (anachronistic on purpose — Russell uses it as Brechtian commentary).
· The king preens, poses, and treats the massacre as light entertainment.
· Finally, the king turns to the camera and, breaking the fourth wall, Armitage, in his best Kenneth Williams voice, says:
BYE, BYE BLACK BIRD!
It is one of Russell’s most viciously satirical images of state power as camp cruelty.
REALITY CHECK: For all of his faults, there is no historical evidence the King Louis XIII indulged in such murderous behavior.
By early 1971, Ken Russell had become the Preston Sturges of the New Hollywood with a stock company of players traveling from film to film under the guidance of a benevolent yet sometimes tyrannical master. Among them were his then-wife, Shirley Russell, costume designer supreme; the aforementioned Derek Jarman as production designer; David Watkin as cinematographer; and composer Peter Maxwell Davies. Jarman, Watkin and Davies were gay, as were most of the people who worked in Russell’s orbit, although he himself, by all reports, was straight. Theatrical, flamboyant and camp, but straight! Can you believe it!
The Devils was one of two relatively good movies that Ken Russell made in 1971. The other, released later that year, with most of the same cast and crew, was The Boyfriend, which is just coming up as Queer Film number 49. Although he had a long and varied career, 1971 was his peak year.
With Georgina Whale as Grandier’s mistress, Michael Gothard as the exorcist, Dudley Sutton as the court emissary Baron de Laubardemont, Max Adrian, John Woodvine, Brian Murphy and Murray Melvin as the petulant Father-Canon Jean Mignon.
Screenplay by Ken Russell based on Aldous Huxley’s 1952 non-fiction novel The Devils of Loudun and John Whiting’s play The Devils (1961).
Cinematography: David Watkin
WARNER BROS.
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