The Devils (film)

The Devils is a 1971 historical psychological horror-drama written, produced and directed by Ken Russell and starring Vanessa Redgrave and Oliver Reed. It dramatises the fall of Urbain Grandier, a seventeenth-century Roman Catholic priest in Loudun, France, who is accused of witchcraft after the alleged possessions there, and it gives equal weight to Sister Jeanne des Anges, a sexually repressed nun whose accusations set the case in motion. Russell adapted it in part from Aldous Huxley's 1952 non-fiction book The Devils of Loudun and John Whiting's 1960 play The Devils. United Artists first pitched the project to him but withdrew after reading the finished screenplay as too controversial, and Warner Bros. then agreed to produce and distribute it, with filming largely at Pinewood Studios from late 1970. Its graphic violent and sexual content, often joined to religion, drew X ratings in the United Kingdom and the United States, bans in several countries and heavy cuts in others, and it is widely counted among the most controversial films ever made. Russell nonetheless won Best Director at the Venice International Film Festival and from the National Board of Review.