“Sick and kinky”: The BBFC and Ken Russell’s The Devils

The British Board of Film Classification archive provides a fascinating snapshot of moral panic and cultural conservatism around the original release of The Devils. This is a unique cultural time capsule, documenting the first viewing of The Devils and the last time (until a one-off screening in 2004) when the film was seen in Ken Russell’s preferred form. The BBFC in 1971 functioned as moral guardian, passing judgement in high-patrician tones aimed at protecting the film industry from potential prosecution and audiences from works which have a “tendency to deprave and corrupt”, as described by the 1959 Obscene Publications Act (OPA). In the board’s records, disparate voices across the first half of 1971 tell a story of increasing panic up to and beyond the film’s certification: alongside the director and the censors were production company Warner Bros plus a cluster of voices representing a version of ‘public opinion’, a slippery force to which the BBFC has long paid heed.

As was then common practice, before the film’s official submission the BBFC’s head, John Trevelyan, took a preliminary look at Russell’s cut, and his first documented act was to discuss it with Catholic theologian Gene D. Phillips. “As I anticipated, Ken Russell has given us some difficult problems,” he wrote. “I rather think that the Catholic Office will find some of it unacceptable in their terms. It is, of course, brilliant, and it raises the question of whether artistic quality justifies total freedom.” This was familiar territory for Trevelyan, who had successfully shepherded Russell’s adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love through with only minor changes justified by artistic merit. Now, however, fears about blasphemy (which was then still a crime in the UK) compounded those of obscenity.

On this basis some cuts were made prior to its official submission, but the reports produced by three examiners – Audrey Field, Ken Penry and Newton Branch – are revealing for their pearl-clutching value judgement. It is a serious understatement to say all three hated the film. The reports express full-on horror: it “plumbs really filthy depths” with a “relish for the putrid”. The examiners’ own disgust is deployed to second-guess the imagined everyman viewer: “I think the copulation on the ground [between Grandier and Sister Jeanne] is going to give the most violent offence to many people”; “I can see that it is made by people who passionately do not believe in the celibacy of anyone at all”; “There is far too much of the orgy, too much nudity, too much masturbation, scenes of nuns making love to the effigy of Christ on the Cross (fallen to the floor) which seem to me to be prohibitive, objectionable, scenes of two nuns making love to each other.” Penry, across three yellowing sheets of handwritten outrage, “consider[s] this to be a nauseating piece of filmmaking. Whatever the deeper meaning intended by Ken Russell it comes to the screen with such elements of sadism, cruelty, pornography and blasphemy, it will appeal chiefly to the prurient.” Branch went further: “My object here,” he writes, “is to demolish any argument by Ken Russell that his film is a serious work of art.”

Is this the job of the censor as public servant? At question here is the sense we now take for granted that adult viewers should be able to make their own choices about what they see, within the realms of legality. Certainly, the examiners had real fears that the film transgressed the law. Branch had “thought very carefully about this film and it seems to me that the Board will be in trouble if we pass it without severe cuts”, while Penry evokes the spirit of the OPA: “In my opinion the film offends the second general principle of the Board in that it is likely to give offence to a reasonably minded cinema audience.”

The BBFC was then called the British Board of Film Censors, so long lists of suggested cuts follow, from maggots on corpses (“a most disgusting and repulsive shot [that] will make some people vomit before the fun has properly started”) to the plague sequence (“Most repulsive and uncalled-for”). “Shorten syringe sequence – remove shot with bloody tip – remove anal sequence entirely. Remove ‘cunt’ and ‘fuck me’,” the notes instruct. “Remove shots of Mother Superior kissing phallic bone and masturbating with it… The scene where pins are pushed through the tongue of the priest should be either removed or considerably shortened.” Branch wrote: “Any cuts that we make in [Russell’s] grossness and excesses to the bare bone will improve the film. It is thoroughly sick and kinky.” Read now, this listing has the strange effect of spotlighting the most lurid bits, isolated from the political story, as an inadvertent roster of sensational moments for thrill-seeking viewers to target, as well as a checklist for lost-footage detectives.

As a result of these swingeing reports Russell had to cut the film further, but this was not the end of the matter. An undated note from Trevelyan confirms cuts made through a gentlemanly discussion with the director in an ongoing process: “I suggested that he should proceed with the dubbing and submit the film on completion but in an unmarried state so that further alterations can be made.” This was then death by a thousand cuts, not just one guillotine moment of censorship. It was compounded by Warners’ unease: far from defending their auteur’s vision, they further excised their own product in lockstep with the BBFC. Producer Robert H. Solo wrote to Trevelyan: “Just for the private, the following list is the one hastily given to Russell by Warner Bros.” Even beyond the BBFC’s certified version, Warners still required further edits to settle on a film which would acceptably play to the widest possible US audience.

Russell’s response to all this was characteristically combative, first pleading to save what he could on the basis of the film’s seriousness and fidelity. “Despite the fact I have butchered the film at your bidding far and away beyond anything I dreamed of… what remains still just about retains my intentions,” he wrote to Trevelyan. “I did not set out to make a cosy religious drama that would please everyone but a true film about the horror and blasphemy perpetrated against human beings by their fellow men in the name of Jesus Christ… the film has two themes – religious corruption and redemption – the sinner who becomes a saint… I beg you now to leave it as it is – surely if you are happy to allow children to see two hours of commercial carnage in [1970’s Soviet-Italian co-production] Waterloo you cannot seriously believe that my film will actually corrupt anyone over the age of 18.” A later letter, handwritten in hasty, large letters punctuated with more exasperated dashes, goes further:

“Dear John, I have cleared up the shit on the altar, slashed the whipping and cut the orgy in two… the sequence is now much more restrained, no longer self-indulgent and most important of all ‘the Rape of Christ’ concept is strengthened… I hope you don’t feel compelled to tamper with this sequence as it now stands… And if these go – the meaning would also go too! Christ must be debased and be seen to be debased… [T]his sequence is the crux of the movie and should please stay as it is – for England.”

Meanwhile what Russell had cleared from his film’s altar was hitting the fan as a vociferous public outcry, which was simultaneously establishing The Devils as a cultural touchstone. The BBFC has always monitored the vagaries of public opinion, but in 1971 popular outrage could spur censorship decisions. The press piled in within days of the examiners seeing it, including a clip from the tabloid Daily Sketch headlined “Sexy Nuns Film Hits New Snag”: “Vanessa Redgrave’s latest film, The Devils, has run into more trouble. Both the British Board of Film Censors and chiefs of Warner Bros film company are concerned about shock scenes… Vital talks will continue this week with director Ken Russell trying to get the censor’s go-ahead for what is certain to be 1971’s most controversial picture.” For perhaps the first time, the actions of the nation’s censors were becoming a tabloid story.

The three hostile examiners were outranked by the insistence of Trevelyan and BBFC president Lord Harlech that the film be certified in some form. In May 1971 The Devils was passed at X certificate with extensive cuts. But the story did not finish there. Stephen Murphy succeeded Trevelyan as BBFC secretary in July 1971, and was immediately targeted by a letter-writing campaign from the Sevenoaks Catholic Association. “I find it odd that more than half of the people who, without having seen it, have written to condemn the film The Devils, live in Sevenoaks,” he wrote in one reply, and to another correspondent wrote: “Would you be so kind as to let it be known that I shall not be replying to any further letters from Sevenoaks on this subject?” The letter concludes by urging the recipient “to go and see The Devils (it won’t corrupt you!) and see whether you cannot agree that far from being an attack on faith it is a reaffirmation of the belief that, though the Church may from time to time do unworthy, even evil things, in the end there will always be men of faith who will not yield to evil.”

On its release the film was petitioned by the Nationwide Festival of Light, a Christian fundamentalist organisation which, once persuaded that Murphy would never revoke the certificate, targeted local authorities. In the UK these have the power to refuse a local licence, thus effectively banning a certificated film, and The Devils was banned in places including Blackpool, Cambridge, Dundee, Plymouth and Nottingham. Glasgow Corporation town clerk Robert D. Bryson told the trade paper CinemaTVToday that “The film contains matter which, if exhibited, would offend against good decency and would be likely to be offensive to public feeling.” But this was not the only response. There was a hip currency for younger audiences in The Devils. Though set in early modern France, it was replete with the formations of contemporary Britishness, and its dystopic tone was a fitting social response for viewers alienated by Love Story, the year’s smash hit. This may have served to irritate naysayers like Penry, who argued that the nuns looked too much like 70s softcore spectacles for credibility: “I have no personal knowledge as to the shape of nuns under their habits, but I doubt that all look like the ‘Playmates’ of this film.”

The patronising voices of examiners and moral campaigners alike sound quaintly distant; their concerns may no longer be ours. For others, though, contemporary spectacle was exactly the point. As one kooky reviewer wrote in Today’s Cinema in July 1971, foreshadowing responses to the film now: “The Devils is a Happening that assails the senses and batters at the closed doors that protect the placid conscious mind from the turbulences of the subconscious… A mind-blowing trip into the blackest depths of history. Repellent to some, awesomely fascinating to others, it should have audiences (particularly the under-30s) flocking to it like lemmings drawn by a variety of irresistible urges from simply curiosity to a compulsive desire to drown themselves in the flood of erotic nightmares.”

This reads as a 17th-century story cut to the cloth of 1970s radicalism. But it is also a political parable for our own turbulent moment. When it finally achieves its worldwide release this autumn, The Devils will shock audiences, but may not surprise them: its images of women as spectacular pawns for political strategists, despotic rulers casually snuffing out dissenters, and church and state walking in lockstep has a stark new relevance for our times.