You know the main thing I got from Ken Russell's movie, The Devils? The movie was about a case where a large gaggle of nuns fell victim to demonic possession. Oliver Reed plays a priest who is put on trial for witchcraft. At one point, the prosecutor reads to the court love letters Reed's character had written.
How's he going to get out of this one, I thought. He's supposed to be celibate, isn't he?
Oliver Reed brushes it off. Love letters aren't a crime. He was a young fellow when he wrote them. How is that evidence of anything?
I saw The Devils in a university classroom one night probably around 1980. It was before home video had taken over. University groups would show movies every weekend. You could get in for a dollar or a dollar fifty, or free if you got there late after they stopped selling tickets.
Ever since then, I stopped seeing the otherwise ordinary sex lives of clergy as news. When 20/20 or ran a long story on a priest who had a secret family, I wondered how a man having a wife and children was news. Why was a TV network enforcing Catholic church discipline on its priests?
How was it news that a gay priest was hanging around in gay bars? At one point during the PTL Club scandal, Ted Koppel grilled Jim Bakker about claims he was gay. Bakker finally said that, even if he were, how is that an issue? If he was gay, good for him.
The press does that less than they used to.
I didn't realize how controversial the movie was. Even Roger Ebert gave it "zero stars". Wikipedia reports that in 2010, Warner Bros. made it available on iTunes then pulled it three days later.
It's now available on Filmstruck which is shutting down November 29th. See it while you can.
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