362. THE DEVILS (1971)

“There was no better director to learn from. He would always take the adventurous path even at the expense of coherence.”–Derek Jarman on Ken Russell

Must See

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Gemma Jones, Dudley Sutton, Michael Gothard, Murray Melvin

PLOT: Father Urbain Grandier is the charismatic spiritual and political leader of the independent city of Loudun; Cardinal Richelieu wants him replaced because he refuses to allow the city’s walls to be torn down. Sister Jeanne, Mother Superior of the town’s convent, is tormented by sexual dreams about Grandier. When Sister Jeanne confesses her fantasies to a priest, Richelieu’s men hatch a plot to frame Grandier as a warlock, and the entire convent is whipped into mass hysteria, becoming convinced they are possessed by devils.

Still from The Devils (1971)

BACKGROUND:

  • Father Grandier and Sister Jeanne, among many other characters in the film, were real people. Grandier was burnt at the stake in 1634 on accusations of practicing witchcraft.
  • The Devils was based on John Whiting’s play “The Devils of Loudun,” which itself was based on Aldous Huxley’s novel of the same title.
  • Ken Russell’s original theatrical cut ran 117 minutes, after the British censors removed an infamous 4-minute sequence known as “the rape of Christ.” The U.S. distributor cut an additional three to six minutes of sex and blasphemy out so that the film could be released with an “R” rating in the States, and that release became the standard version and the only one released on VHS. The longer director’s cut was not seen until 2004, thanks to a restoration effort led by . Russell’s director’s cut has never been issued on home video; the X-rated theatrical cut is the most complete version currently available. Portions of the “rape of Christ” scene are preserved in a BBC documentary called “Hell on Earth” (included on the BFI DVD).
  • A young designed the sets. This was his first feature credit.
  • The Devils is included in Steven Schneider’s “1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die.”
  • The contemporary arguments over the film became so heated that Russell himself attacked critic Alexander Walker on live television, hitting him on the head with a copy of his negative review.
  • Warner Brothers has steadfastly refused to release the movie on DVD, but they did eventually sublicense it to the British Film Institute for overseas release.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Even with the “rape of Christ” scene excised, what sticks out in The Devils are the scenes of possessed nuns, some with shaved heads, whipping off their habits and cavorting in the nude, writhing, self-flagellating, jerking off votive candles, and waggling their tongues in an obscene performance. For a single, and singular, image that encapsulates the themes and shock level of The Devils, however, try the vision of Vanessa Redgrave seductively licking at the wound in Oliver Reed’s side when she imagines him as Christ descended from the cross to ravage her.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Crocodile parry; Christ licking; John Lennon, exorcist

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Nobody, but nobody, shoots a nun orgy like Ken Russell. Aside from a dream sequence or two, The Devils is a historically accurate account of a real-life medieval witch hunt—but Russell emphasizes only the oddest and most perverse details, so that the movie itself becomes as hysterical and overwrought as the frenzy it condemns. Truth, in this case, is at least as strange as fiction.


Original U.S. release trailer for The Devils

COMMENTS: Viewed from a great distance, The Devils is a classical story, one that (without the explicit blasphemy) might have constituted a Shakespearean tragedy. Urbain Grandier begins as a flawed man, vain, and with a powerful weakness for women (he confesses at trial that he’s “the world’s greatest sinner”). These flaws earn him enemies, and give them a way to entrap him. Yet the randy priest also has powerfully sympathetic qualities: he is an uncompromising orator and leader, concerned with the good of his town, a man of conscience willing to stand up to corrupt authorities at the risk of his own life. As the film progresses and the threats increase, he answers the call and grows more and more virtuous, until by the end he is a true Christ figure, persecuted by Pharisees who re-enact a cruel mockery of the Passion on him for purely political ends. He endures the Inquisition’s tortures, refusing to falsely confess to being an incubus and trusting God will reward him for his suffering. It is a universal story of redemption, persecution, sacrifice, and courage, with truly despicable villains aided by sadly tragic dupes.

On his DVD commentary Russell asserts that “you can’t invent the most fantastic things, they actually happened.” So, following Aldous Huxley’s historical novel about the Loudun hysteria, he focuses on the strangest, most distant archaic details of the account to create a heightened nightmare, a medieval landscape inhabited by grotesques. Most notable is the twisted Sister Jeanne, a hunchbacked, repressed spinster trapped in a convent (there are literally bars on the window to keep men out). Georgina Hale, as one of Grandier’s hopelessly adoring conquests, wears white pancake makeup and green lipstick; the effect is theatrically absurd, but Russell assures us this was a fashion at the time and that he picked up the detail from Huxley. In the movie’s background, the plague is ravaging Loudun, and at times we see piles of corpses which the main characters barely acknowledge. Oddly, some of the most outrageous, hardest-to-believe incidents may be the most factual: Russell based his orgies on Huxley’s accounts. Exorcists of the day really did use forced enemas as a means of cleansing evil spirits. (Huxley referred to Jeanne’s exorcism as the equivalent of a “rape in a public lavatory.”)

Not all of Russell’s ornamentation is so accurate. He begins the film with a shot of high decadence as Louis XIII prances around on a gilded stage in a clamshell bikini, having cast himself as Venus in a performance for Cardinal Richelieu. (Russell takes courtly rumors of Louis XIII’s bisexuality and turns the monarch into a flaming homosexual, a choice which might be more controversial today than the blasphemy). Russell said he wanted a clean-looking, lived-in city as opposed to the typical gray and mossy look of medieval towns on film. But the impressive architecture of Derek Jarman’s Loudun, with all the buildings uniformly cast from white brick and tiles, is far too modern and minimalist to be realistic; it’s a mythic, fairy tale town. A pair of quack doctors wear bizarre goggles with leather snouts and apply cures straight from Russell’s imagination, fighting poison with poison by placing hornets under glass jars to sting plague victims. Russell takes a mention of Louis XIII taking potshots at captured Huguenots and transforms it into a fantastical slapstick burlesque sequence where the King dresses up prisoners as blackbirds and hunts them while sitting on his outdoor throne. Richelieu was probably never wheeled through a massive library containing intelligence on heretics and undesirables on a pushcart operated by nuns. Russell’s most blatant anachronism may be Father Barre, the shaggy exorcist with tinted granny glasses (à la John Lennon) who acts as much like a rock star as a priest. The Loudun exorcisms were indeed conducted publicly—that was part of the strategy to discredit Grandier and whip up public sentiment against him—but they probably didn’t include quite so much nun nudity.[efn_note]Roger Ebert’s scathingly sarcastic contemporaneous review of The Devils included the line, “Russell fearlessly reveals [that] all the nuns, without exception, were young and stacked.”[/efn_note]

Of course, it’s the sacrilege, even more than the pubic hair, that really got The Devils into trouble. And yet, its crystal clear throughout the movie that Russell (himself a Catholic) is not on the side of the blasphemers, nor was he shocking viewers without a larger purpose. Sister Jeanne’s visions—her degraded, literal vision of what it means to be a “bride of Christ”—are corrupt from the beginning, a product of the unnatural vocation she’s been forced into. The powers that be, Richelieu and his flunky, the Baron De Laubardemont, show no piety whatsoever; they are only concerned with consolidating power, and are willing to use any means to secure it. The fact that it’s the clergy, the Establishment, who are the blasphemers makes for an obvious political statement. Grandier and his wife are the only true Christians in the film. The action often cuts back and forth between the Father’s speeches or private devotions and the depraved performance art demonstrations by the exorcists to drive that point home. The Church as a political entity perverts morality; only in the lone, conscientious individual can it be found intact. This message jibes perfectly with the last act of the New Testament. The true devils wear starched white collars. If some think he drives this position home with a needlessly explicit lack of subtlety, then Russell might counter that they themselves are worshiping a false idol of propriety. After all, the nuns’ wild naked revelry is pagan and intoxicating, and this is what probably is most unnerving to the bluenoses—abandoning yourself to the devil looks like fun.

The Devils was made in a boundary-pushing year that also saw the release of the somehow-less-controversial A Clockwork Orange. Today, in the age of Antichrist, it seems strange that Russell’s movie outraged the public so easily. It’s easy enough for the timid to ignore a movie with disturbing content when they’re not interested in it. What’s stranger is Warner Brothers’ continuing shyness about releasing this film. It’s sad that the controversy, which should be as dead as the furor surrounding Clockwork and other transgressive works of the era, is still keeping people from seeing The Devils today. Copies of Two Thousand Maniacs and other torture-based exploitation films aren’t hard to come by. The message, one guesses, is to put whatever vile and degrading imagery you want on film, just don’t dare link it to religious hypocrisy. Whether you think that The Devils is great art or not, it is seriously intended. The amazing sets, high production values, epic scope, camerawork, Peter Maxwell Davies’ avant garde score, and Oliver Reed’s Shakespearean performance are all signifiers of High Art, and the message is essentially moral. The only possible objection to the film are its lapses of good taste; and these in themselves are valuable. Ken Russell’s most delirious and excessive movie is not something a true fan of the art form would want to miss out on. I’m not sure The Devils is an unqualified masterpiece, but it’s awfully close. And even if you don’t view it as an artistic triumph, it’s an unforgettable event.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Russell has become increasingly obsessed with madness—which is dangerously like a kind of madness in itself. Now, in The Devils, he has made a delirious fresco about the insanity of the witch hunts in 17th century France. It is a movie so unsparingly vivid in its imagery, so totally successful in conveying an atmosphere of uncontrolled hysteria that Russell himself seems like a man possessed.”–Jay Cocks, Time (contemporaneous)

“…like a David Lean remake of Pink Flamingos.”–Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

“…its writer-director’s most outrageously sick film to date, campy, idiosyncratic, and in howlingly bad taste…”–Halliwell’s Film Guide

IMDB LINK: The Devils (1971)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

BFI Screenonline: Devils, The (1971) – The British Film Institute’s page has basic info, a short essay by Micheal Brooke, some production stills, a link to a short account of the censorship scandal, and two film clips (available to subscribers in the UK only)

The Devils (1971) – Overview – Turner Classic Movies has an entry on the film, with a long synopsis and background notes

Ken Russell interview: The last fires of film’s old devil – 2011 interview with Russell in The Guardian on the occasion of The Devils revival

‘The Devils’: Why Ken Russell’s Crazy, Sexy, Heretical Shocker is a ‘Masterpiece’ – “The Wrap” report inspired by Richard Crouse’s book “Raising Hell”

Possession in the Grand Siècle: The Devils – An article about teaching the film in French history courses that outlines Russell’s deviations from historical fact

We Don’t Go Back #38: The Devils (1971) – Article/review by Howard Ingram, with some interesting footnotes on witchcraft and censorship

Derek Jarman’s Renaissance and The Devils (1971) – Abstract for an article from “Shakespeare Bulletin” on the influence of The Devils on Derek Jarman’s future career

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Raising Hell: Ken Russell and the Unmaking of the Devils – Book length study of the film’s production and aftermath by Richard Crouse

HOME VIDEO INFO: Although Warner Brothers stubbornly refuses to release The Devils to American home video audiences, they did (finally) sublicense the movie to the British Film Institute in 2012. If you are in Europe or have an all-regions DVD player, the BFI’s two-disc release is one of the finest and most complete editions of just about any film on the market. Clocking in at 107 minutes, it’s not the complete director’s cut with the “rape of Christ” (Warner balked at going that far), but it is the original X-rated theatrical release, with a few extended scenes not available on Warners’ VHS release. It begins with an optional 2-minute introduction from film critic and Devils champion Mark Kermode. Kermode hosts a commentary track featuring Russell, editor Michael Bradsell, and Paul Joyce (director of “Hell on Earth”). Disc one also hosts two trailers (British and American versions) and the early Russell short “Amelia and the Angel” (1958). “Amelia” is a 25-minute black and white fable about a little girl who loses the angel wings she needs for a school play, with no dialogue besides a narrator. This short feature shows Russell, then newly converted to Catholicism, in a pious mood, and although it’s fairly conventional it includes a few scenes of magical realism/surrealism that prefigure the direction the director would take in the future.

Disc 2 hosts additional featurettes, starting with the 50-minute BBC documentary “Hell on Earth: The Desecration and Resurrection of ‘The Devils'”. This doc is itself notorious as being the only place you can see a few minutes of out-of-context footage from the “rape of Christ” sequence. The 20-minute “Director of Devils” is a contemporaneous American mini-doc about the film and attendant controversy, made by Warner Brothers as a marketing tool. It includes some interesting footage of Peter Maxwell Davies conducting the orchestral score, intercut with the final product. Rounding out the supplements are seven-and-a-half minutes of behind the scenes footage narrated by Michael Bradsell and a 12-minute Q&A with Russell from a 2012 screening. And if that’s not enough, the set comes with a 40-page booklet with essays on the film, Russell, Reed, Redgrave, and Jarman, along with a detailed record of the cuts demanded by censors and the studio. If you’re a Devils fan, you could not ask for much more (the uncut rape of Christ, sure, but given that that’s off the table…)

Occasionally, other DVD offerings pop up that claim to contain the complete and uncut version, but they always seem to disappear from the market quickly, and cannot be verified.

The Devils has not been licensed for Blu-ray or VOD presentation. Despite fan petitions and complaints, Warner has shown no interest in exploiting this still-controversial property, although you never know what might happen in the future.

(This movie was nominated for review by “lo-fi jr.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

20 thoughts on “362. THE DEVILS (1971)”

  1. Before “The Devil’s” was released it was screened for the head of the Catholic Film Board in New York. The priest who held that position saw the full director’s cut and hailed it as a masterpiece, claiming that to excise the “rape of Christ” sequence was to take the heart out of the film. He also said that although the film portrayed blasphemy it was not in itself blasphemous, and that it was an important cautionary tale that deserved to be seen. I cannot agree more. This is in fact my favorite film. My wife is a Catholic and I wanted her opinion on this. She was not offended, but extremely impressed and more than a little disturbed. She told me “I’m glad I saw it but I never want to see it again.” As for me I’ve probably watched it 50 times or more and I find some new and brilliant detail with each subsequent viewing.

    1. I’m Catholic, as was Russell (a convert, no less) and agree it’s anything but blasphemous. I would be bold enough to say even that it’s inherently Catholic. That aside, IMO, this along with his Mahler, are his most intensely personal films

  2. I’m very glad this made the list — “the Devils” was one of the movies that set me on the course to ending up with the 366 crew here. Thank goodness for the days of browsing a video rental store, with all the compelling VHS boxes on display to pique one’s curiosity.

    I’ve read Huxley’s “the Devils” and a section of it might explain the odd scene of Richelieu being carted around the massive library. Apparently the good cardinal suffered horribly from anal fissures, making his life a misery and doubtlessly prompting him to avoid sitting down at all costs. (This is alluded to as well, perhaps, in the opening bit of Louis prancing on stage — the bitter-looking Richelieu shifts continuously in his seat, and it may well not be out of impatience.)

    I’m reminded of the ever-in-pain Marat, who also seemed to try to distract himself from his ailments through the brutal consolidation of power.

    But as for the movie, I’d say it is Ken Russell’s finest (and defining) movie. For anyone truly interested in the film’s story, Aldous Huxley’s original book and Richard Crouse’s dissection of the production and release are both absolute must-reads.

    1. I agree — and have awaited eagerly, too, for the Certification (though necessarily for fewer years).

      I’m curious, however, about the “Recommended” labeling; would it slip into “Must See” if a good copy of the whole movie were available? I’d say this is (at least) on par with “Bronson”, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, and “Adaptation” (among others) for 366’s most coveted rating. (Admittedly this is a tricky area.)

    2. I debated giving it a “must see,” but I think what’s done is done, for the moment. Let me sleep on it at least. I will say I’d rather upgrade something later than downgrade a rating. And no, it doesn’t have anything to do with the complete movie not being available. I’m just much more conservative about using the highest rating than I was in the early days of the site.

    3. There’s a bootleg “director’s cut” and the BFI certificate X R2 DVD. The bootleg has the Rape of Christ and in fact restores everything not in the certificate X version except a brief shot of Sister Jeanne masturbating with Father Grandier’s charred femur at the very end of the film. The boot is a slightly more powerful film but a rather washed out and slightly cropped print. The BFI X cut is very nearly as good as the full cut and the print is gorgeous, really shows off Russel’s dense visuals and Jarman’s amazing production design. Obviously I’m biased but I think everyone with an interest in great cinema should see this film at least once.

    4. I suspect everyone who’s commented here is biased — but reasonably so. “The Devils” is probably in my personal top ten films I’ve ever seen (I haven’t made a concrete list in years, though).

      Perhaps we can start a movement called, “One World, One Region”. That the (rather) arbitrary region divisions continue to exist in this hellah-streaming digital world strikes me as an unfortunate anachronism. And if there’s a market for art that a content owner refuses to provide (I’m looking at You, Warner Brothers), I’d even go so far as to suggest that some government enforcement hammer should come down on them.

  3. Outstanding pick, definitely worthy of the Final Five! I only saw it once, about 40 years ago, give or take, but once seen, never forgotten. Now if we can just get a proper freakin’ blu ray release of this…

  4. This movie has a lot of context for me in my personal life.

    I saw this movie when I was 14, on VHS. My dad would essentially let me rent anything at the video store. I loved horror movies. Of course I had already seen things like the Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby and The Sentinel. The Devils was indeed in the HORROR section. The VHS cover it had in my local store was actually quite boring. It’s just a close cropped picture of Vanessa Redgrave talking to the bowl cut haired priest through the convent bars. So I was strictly renting it based on the title alone and the synopsis on the back. Of course only the words “possessed nuns” would stand out to a young teen who loved horror!

    I was Catholic. At 14, I was just starting to understand I was gay. Needless to say these two things are an existential crisis for young gay people. There is deep friction between how you feel inside and what society tells you. There is great internalized anguish in how to RESOLVE yourself. Needless to say, at this age also, your mind is mature enough to start seeing all the great hypocrisies and falsehoods that exist in the world; from things you see on TV, what you were taught in church, to lies your own parents tell you!

    Now imagine popping in this tape expecting a horror movie – a’ la the Omen – and instead be treated to a foppish king prancing around after emerging from a staged diorama of the Birth of Venus! Without having even having wrestled with my own sexuality and coming out process – within 20 minutes I implicitly understood that the director was a gay director. Within thirty minutes – right after Vanessa Redgrave’s astounding dream sequence, when her hump is exposed to a laughing crowd – I understood that WAS watching a horror movie!

    This movie proved invaluable to me. As a fantastic film that taught me the secret boundaries that could be found on my video store shelves. As my first true exposure (at least one that I recognized) of a gay aesthetic permeating the visual and storytelling language of a film; and as a expansion of my own conception of what a true horror film could be.

    Within two months I had rented every Russell film available in the video store: Altered States, Crimes of Passion, Tommy, and Women in Love (needless to say the nude wrestling scene was informative for me also!).

    Also, my initial exposure to Russell introduced me to the interesting work of Derek Jarman – another gay director that helped shape my own conceptions of gayness, especially in the context of the arts.

    Films effect people for all kinds of reasons and of course we all have movies we love or are our favorite movies. I only share this personal story of identity as an expression of how the film has affected me in personal ways beyond just an appreciation of its content. What I found in the spaces between was important to me. Even the subplot of Father Grandier secretly marrying his wife against the doctrine of his own church had significant meaning to a gay teen who couldn’t even imagine the thought of gay marriage when it was more than illegal – it didn’t even exist as a concept!

    That’s no small thing for a hysterical movie about possessed nuns!

    I too, have waited a long for this film to be reviewed. Excellent write up. 366 says Recommended. Someone else says Must See. Are you sure you don’t want BEWARE!

    1. That’s interesting, Mike. My thought was that King Louis as a drag queen would be an offensive stereotype by today’s standards, especially since the film uses homosexuality as a shorthand way to signify the decadence of the aristocracy. It was a different time, however, and it didn’t occur to me that nearer the time of release it might be viewed as empowering, since you didn’t see ANY gay characters onscreen at the time.

    1. Slammin’.

      And I thought that Russell’s handling of the “Louis” character was rather telling. The real (and obvious) enemy in the film is Richelieu (and his lackey), representing religion as a means for oppressive authority.

      The devil-may-care sensibilities of Louis set him apart from the evil machinations, and even set him up as a voice of reason during the mass possession scenes undone by the phony relic.

      I’d argue that Russell wasn’t really remarking either way about Louis’ lifestyle. Apart from the Huguenot pot-shots (a scene I think Russell eventually regretted anyway), Louis is presented as a stand-up, if eccentric, character who is keen on honoring obligations (keeping Loudun’s walls up) and subverting the creeping religious power-grab.

  5. Hey, Gregory J. Smalley

    Your observation is astute on both counts. Russell using homosexuality as a shorthand for decadence is surely intended, but in a way he is using it to mock the church right from the opening scene. In some ways Grandier, the Bishops, Cardinal and Nuns in their robes and accoutrements are as much in drag as anyone else. One of my favorite scenes in the movie is when the King arrives, carried into the middle of the frenzied debauchery/exorcism with his relic of Jesus’s blood (which is actually empty) and exposes the entire hysterical sham for what it is. At that moment he becomes the cleverest character in the room, seeing through the entire plot.

    Some PC gays today might consider him a stereotype, others like myself, as FABULOUS!

    When I was coming up even finding information on homosexuality was like following breadcrumbs. You have to imagine it pre-internet. I literally went to the library when I was a sophomore in high school to find periodicals and articles on the topic using a microfiche machine and card catalog. Not until the late-80s did magazines start universally using the word gay. Every news article I read used the term “the homosexuals” or “Steve Johnson, a homosexual…”

    So truly, Russell movies were like revelations.

    I’ve never been an advocate of an organization like GLAAD essentially counting representation in movies (“how many gay characters do the networks have in this year’s fall line-up? How many gay characters were featured in movies this year?’) It’s ridiculous to me. That said, this concept of representation in film IS important, and it had such a huge boost in entertainment conversation this year with the likes of Black Panther and Crazy Rich Asians.

    For me though, as an education, Russell gave me for first true understanding of all the facets of CAMP beyond the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Camp plays such a huge role in the context of gay culture. In some ways this type of cultural representation is more important than the new millennium’s need to constantly sort people by mere labels and numbers.

    There’s so many directors I love. But I think Ken Russell is the most underrated, misunderstood and even maligned director ever. It’s expressed by his shoddy treatment on DVD and his near absence on Criterion (one film!).

    But 366 Weird Movies is a champion!

    I apologize if I mucked up this thread with some of these off-topic personal recollections and identity politics relating the film and Russell’s importance to me.

  6. “Richelieu was probably never wheeled through a massive library containing intelligence on heretics and undesirables on a pushcart…”

    This probably related to something remarked on in Aldous Huxley’s book (which I’d argue isn’t a novel, but more an interpretation of fairly established historical fact) concerning Richelieu’s bedevilment with anal fissures.

    What better way to prevent unpleasant application of pressure than have such transport when in motion? (Also, Richelieu’s pained grimaces in the open scene, and the self-adjustments in his seat are better explained by this physical ailment than the on-stage performance; this scheming Cardinal needs the king’s support, and probably wouldn’t so blithely risk offense.)

  7. I have quested and sought after this movie for years, trying to find an official cut or hosted on whatever streaming services I’m currently using, with no luck. Finally found a copy hosted on Eroti.ga and settled for it:

    https://www.eroti.ga/the-devils-1971-ken-russells-cult/

    My apologies for the sketchy site link, but it’s The Devils, what are you going to do?

    Damn glad to have finally seen it. Immediate top fifty favorite at least. Honestly, I’m just not that shocked by this because I’ve seen almost everything by Ken Russel and his hobby horses are very familiar to me. Plus, if you were raised by hyper-religious snake-handlers as was I, this movie hits very different. As wild as this movie is, it’s almost a documentary compared to the depths of craziness going on in cults right now.

    1. I’m gonna go ahead and say that that is a “NSFW” site. Normally, I would indeed be watching “The Devils” at work, and hang the consequences–it’s Culture. Some links there, well, less-so.

      From my understanding, I’ve seen the excised bits, within context of the overall, and found it to be a case of severely diminishing returns for the Outrage–>Merit equation. The British X-rated is more than adequate for all but the completist, and it only takes a B-region blu ray player to watch a cleaned up version on.

      The only way to get the proper film would be, perhaps, to cajole the Robin Hood investor-types into buying up Warner Brothers so as to demand the release of the copy in their vaults.

  8. This showed up on the Criterion Channel on January 1st, 2024. It’s 108 minutes, with the Warner’s logo at the beginning, so from what I can tell from the descriptions here it’s still a censored cut (I haven’t seen any other versions though, so I can’t be sure). Any news of a US disc release?

    I admit as an atheist I find blasphemy inherently uninteresting but as others have mentioned, this actually quite a moral film. I gather it would be more compelling with the cut scenes restored.

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