The Devils is here in a restored director's cut, every inch of nudity and blasphemy on full display.
It was a bomb hurled from the barricades of 1971. Russell's need for nudity seems a trifle silly, but he was breaking barriers that needed to be broken. Vanessas Redgrave's acting, with only a wedge of her face, and various contortions of her robed body, left me breathless. Oliver Reed was already past his prime, his rugged beauty besotted by drinking.
The second viewing revealed more to me, such as realizing that the citizens outside the iron gate denouncing the torture were the town's Protestants, at some risk to their lives. Many things were compressed to visual representation rather than speech. Smashing pagan art and toppling bookshelves in Grandier's home compresses intolerance into key gestures.
The sets by Derek Jarman make The Devils look a bit like Fritz Lang's Metropolis. The white tiles and white stones and the compression of city walls, cathedral, convent, and town square into one set viewable at one wide angle shot, gave it a stage-play atmosphere, the plague scenes especially claustrophobic.
Alexandre Dumas wrote up the Grandier story twice, first in his series of historical sketches called Celebrated Crimes, and then in a novel about Grandier. It was Celebrated Crimes that first taught me about the Borgia Family, and about the Cenci. The Catholic-Huguenot struggle is also given in agonizing detail. Dumas also set some episodes of The Three Musketeers amidst the effort to tear down town and city walls throughout France, with Cardinal Richelieu as one of the key villains. A key plot turn in Three Musketeers involves the use of a pardon-in-advance written and signed by the Cardinal, whose words have stayed in my head since the age of ten: "The bearer of this has done what he has done, by my order, and for the good of the State."
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