CHRISTOPHER WOOD: THE DEVILS TAKES HOLD OF OLYMPIA FILM FESTIVAL >>>

“This film is based upon historical fact,” an opening title card sternly informs viewers to the sound of rumbling drums. The next shot reveals an empty stage, on which a scantily clad man emerges from a giant seashell. His audience: from the looks of his blood-red robe, I assume a member of papal authority. And the actor is â€" who else? â€" the French king. To quote L.P. Hartley: “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”

They sure do.

For its last night, The Olympia Film Festival dug up The Devils, a controversial work by UK director Ken Russell. Adapted from an Aldous Huxley novel, its graphic depiction of 17th century Europe shocked audiences upon its release in 1971. (The same year, in fact, that filmmaker Stanley Kubrick unleashed his eyes-widening British dystopia, A Clockwork Orange.) Both films present us with scoundrels finding themselves brutalized by the system, and both contain powerfully subversive content that continues to surprise nearly four decades later.

Devils takes place in Loudon, a hamlet rife with plague and religious hypocrisy. The polished white brick walls that fortify the village only magnify the evils within. Formidable Brit actor Oliver Reed plays the lead. I remember Reed as the gravelly Bill Sikes in Oliver!, and he gives another spellbinding performance this time as Father Grandier. Sporting his own Snidely Whiplash ‘stash, Grandier sees no problem with hearing confessions from his many female admirers one minute and bedding them the next.

Even the nuns whispering inside the convent across town lust after this priestly playboy, particularly Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave). Don’t let her pristine habit fool you â€" behind her angelic face beats a heart of evil. Her sexual fantasies of Grandier show him walking on water and enduring crucifixion. In a word: cuckoo! Redgrave cackles like a witch and lurks around the cloister like Quasimodo. (A humpback none-too-subtly demonstrates her seriously skewed view on reality.) Her mad obsession ultimately leads to his execution and Loudon’s destruction.

Every scene has an unrelenting intensity. In more ways than one Russell’s work is truly a cinema of the sensual, the camera magnifying every spasmodic jerk of Jeanne’s neck, every tear on Grandier’s face so that we come to almost feel these marks of pain and longing as well â€" The Devils is in the details.    

I could go on and on about the mass graves brimming with plague-ridden victims, Grandier fighting off noblemen with a fake alligator, that very disturbing exorcism scene, ALL those naked nuns, and that much-missed Middle Ages pastime, flagellation. But why dwell on the past? From the safety of a theater seat I will gladly visit Hartley’s country, but I sure wouldn’t live there.