Thursday, March 1, 2012

Ken Russell's The Devils (1971), apropos of decadent Pre-raphaelites



Could not find Ken Russell Dante's Inferno in youtube

Your suggestion makes perfect sense: At the BBC Russell had his own "pre-raphaelite" company: Oliver Reed, Max Adrian, Murray Melvin, Christopher Logue (the one-time socialist poet). Iza Teller, and Judith Paris among others -names frequently found in the cast listings of his feature films. Russell is a music lover, who manipulates anachronism with almost baroque splendor (for which his work has been called "bizarre," "outlandish," "sick").

You get a good idea of Russell's bombastic style with The Devils, his 1971 film, banned by 17 local authorities in England. It attracted many scathing reviews. Judith Crist called it a "grand fiesta for sadists and perverts." Derek Malcolm called it "a very bad film indeed." However, The Devils won the award for Best Director-Foreign Film in the Venice Film Festival.