And Ken Russell has really done it this time. He has stripped the lid of respectability off the Ursuline convent in Loudon, France. He has exposed Cardinal Richelieu as a political schemer. He has destroyed our illusions about Louis XIII. We are filled with righteous indignation as we bear witness to the violation of the helpless nuns; it is all the more terrible because, as Russell fearlessly reveals, all the nuns, without exception, were young and stacked.
It is about time that someone had the courage to tell it like it was about Loudon, a seemingly respectable provincial town beneath the façade of which seethed simmering intrigues, unholy alliances, greed, fear, lust, avarice, sacrilege, and nausea. The story has gone untold for too long. Aldous Huxley wrote a book about it, and John Whiting wrote a play about it, but only Ken Russell has made a movie about it.
And make no mistake. The Devils has a message for our time. For we learn from the mistakes of the past. We live in a time of violence, and it is only by looking in the mouth of the Devil that we can examine his teeth. In a time when our nation is responsible for violence on a global scale, it is only by bearing witness to violence on a personal scale that we can bring the war home.
I don’t know about anyone else, but frankly, I left the Cinema Theater feeling like a new, a different, and, yes, a better person. The poisons of our political system had been drained from me. I entered the theater as an unwitting participant in the atrocities of our time. But believe me, that’s all behind me now. It took courage for me to go see The Devils, just like it took courage for Ken Russell to make it.
And it took courage for all those folks to congregate in the lobby and lounge of the Cinema Theater before, during, and after the performance. They were ordinary people—kids, students, young folks mostly—you might find living next door. And yet they had gone out into the night to see for themselves, so that the martyrs of Loudon might not go unmourned.
Now they spoke quietly among themselves of the atrocities they had witnessed, or hoped to witness soon. Listening to them, I felt we could all sleep a little sounder from now on. If the movie industry had more hard-nosed, tell-it-like-it-is artists like Ken Russell, Loudon might never happen again.
The Devil’s Rain
(Directed by Robert Fuest; starring Ernest Borgnine; 1975)
I walked into The Devil’s Rain a few minutes late and thought maybe I’d stumbled onto a Sergio Leone Western.
Vast empty spaces baked under the midday sun. There were distant whistles and moans on the sound track, the desert shimmered, and there was eerie music sounding vaguely like the wails of a short-winded harmonica player. A ghost town stood starkly outlined in the wasteland, and the steeple of its church reached for the lowering sky. All that was missing was Clint Eastwood shooing flies.
But, no, here came a new Chevy. At the wheel, one of the men of the Preston clan. His mission: To track down a cult of the Undead, test his faith against their satanist ceremonies, and rescue his kidnapped mother.
She’d been taken in the latest chapter of a feud going back 300 years, when men of the Preston family stole the book all of the Undead had signed with blood. Until the chief satanist (Ernest Borgnine) could get the book back, he wouldn’t truly control the souls under his command.
But he doesn’t just want the book. No, he wants the Prestons, too: He won’t rest until all of them have embraced Satan and given him their souls. Then they’ll be able to spend eternity standing outside in the devil’s rain.
But . . . what is the devil’s rain? This is a question frequently asked in The Devil’s Rain and, believe me, frequently answered. Picture it this way: All the good things of life are on one side of a sheet of plate glass, and you’re on the other, and it’s raining on your side, Bunky. You pass the time by scratching the glass and pleading to be allowed back in.
All of this would be good silly fun if the movie weren’t so painfully dull. The problem is that the material’s stretched too thin. There’s not enough here to fill a feature-length film. No doubt that’s why we get so many barren landscapes filled with lonely music and ennui.
There are, however, a few good scenes, especially those in which Ernest Borgnine appears. He wears his official satanist suit, all red velvet and quite a contrast to the hooded black robes of his disciples. They have empty eye sockets, and when you shoot them, it turns out they’re full of a milky green substance that looks like gelatin that didn’t set.
Borgnine occasionally disappears in great puffs of smoke, only to reappear as the devil himself, complete with goat’s horns, a beard, and fierce eyes. One imagines Borgnine reading the script and telling his agent: “This is a part I must make my own!” He works up a fine fiendish cackle and a passable obscene growl and goes out in style, falling down a manhole into Hell.
Then there’s a big explosion, the devil’s rain starts to fall, and the Undead all start to melt. Five minutes later, we’re wondering if they’ll ever finish. The filmmakers apparently spent a lot of money on the special effects, and to justify their investment they have the Undead melt, and melt, and melt, until if we get one more shot of green ooze, we’ll feel like an exorcised popsicle. If only they’d melted just a little, just enough to give us the idea.
But, no, we have to wait about five minutes for the surprise ending, in which guess who doesn’t have sense enough to come in out of the devil’s rain?
Diary of Forbidden Dreams
(Directed by Roman Polanski; starring Marcello Mastroianni, Hugh Griffith, Roman Polanski; 1976)
There’s probably a level of competence beneath which bad directors cannot fall. No matter how dreary their imaginations, how stupid their material, how inept their actors, how illiterate their scripts, they’ve got to come up with something that can at least be advertised as a motion picture, released, and forgotten.
But a talented director is another matter. If he’s made several good films, chances are that sooner or later someone will give him the money to make a supremely bad one. I wonder how much Carlo Ponti gave Roman Polanski to make Diary of Forbidden Dreams. Ten cents would have been excessive.
This is a movie so incredibly bad that I ask you to ponder the following facts. Even though (a) it stars Marcello Mastroianni, Hugh Griffith, and Polanski himself, and (b) provides us with almost ninety minutes during which the attractive Sydne Rome wears little more than a table napkin, and (c) is almost exclusively concerned with that surefire box-office winner, sex, it (d) was completed in 1973 and has not been released until now because almost every distributor who saw it fled the screening room in horror, clutching at his wallet.
The movie’s original title was What? That is reportedly what Carlo Ponti said (in Italian, no doubt, and appropriately embellished) after Polanski showed it to him. In its original version, it looked like the work of a madman, of a crazed cinematic genius off the deep end. Ponti, in desperation, had all of Polanski’s outtakes printed up (outtakes are versions of a shot that the director decides not to use). With the aid of skilled editors, Ponti attempted to substitute various outtakes in an attempt to construct a film that resembled, well, a film.
No luck. When Polanski makes a bad movie, he does it with a certain thoroughness. Even the shots he didn’t use were bad. And so here we have it, Roman Polanski’s Diary of Forbidden Dreams. It concerns (I think) the adventures of the young and shapely Miss Rome, a hitchhiker who stumbles upon a bizarre country villa that also functions as a private hospital.