Prompted by Andy Hazel's coverage of this year's Cannes where a 4K restoration was shown. Written and directed by Ken Russell (new to me) who worked off a play that John Whiting derived from Aldous Huxley's novel The Devils of Loudon (1952). In two sittings. Highly rated at IMDB due to infamy.
Notionally it's about some power plays over the small town of Loudon, France in 1634 but really it just sinks into the mire at the crossroads of sex, violence, Catholicism, witchcraft, possession, hysteria and so on. Vanessa Redgrave (Howard's End (1992)) leads as a hunchbacked sexually-repressed Mother Superior in a cloistered order of Ursuline nuns. She gets a bit fruity like Peter O'Toole in The Ruling Class (1972). The main plot point has her accuse Jesuit-educated town/religious leader/straight man Oliver Reed (The Big Sleep (1978), Lion of the Desert (1980)) of supernaturally seducing her. This suits the agents of Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue), mostly embodied by Dudley Sutton and Michael Gothard, just fine. Iconoclastically and against his better judgement Reed marries Gemma Jones after impregnating the daughter (Georgina Hale) of the town magistrate/prosecutor (John Woodvine).
But really the plot comes in small bursts in between many cracked, demented scenes of debauchery of one kind or other. The style and choppy editing reminded me of John Boorman's overheated efforts (Zardoz (1974), Excalibur (1981)) though the cinematography is a lot poorer with lots of overexposure. (I can't imagine a restored version would be much better.) The overlong outro presaged Braveheart (1995).
Roger Ebert: zero stars and a supercilious review; it must have been the only time he didn't cut a movie with this much nudity some slack. He saw it at Cinema Theater in Chicago. Vincent Canby: of little substance. Wikipedia has all the details.
