Ken Russell has made a reputation for himself as a provocateur devoted to over-the-top spectacle. He has called The Devils his only political film; it has certainly been his most controversial. The film is adapted from Aldous Huxley’s novel based on the mass possession of a group of French nuns in the 1630s. The actual events appear here as the collision between religion-inspired sexual hysteria and an absolutist government. The controversy stemmed primarily, of course, from the mixture of religious and sexual imagery; even after being censored, the film was rated “X” upon its U.S. release. Recently, the censored material was rediscovered, but Warner Brothers has yet to sanction the making of a new print or the public exhibition of this footage.