"People like me sometimes get eye-rolled for being among the admittedly large number of people overly nostalgic for the movies of the 1970s. But it's easy to explain why the period appeals: The notion that films were much more commonly made for actual grown-ups then is borne out simply by noting that the big Christmas releases for 1971 were as follows: A Clockwork Orange, Dirty Harry, Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, Polanski's Macbeth, and savage satire The Hospital."
"But one movie released a few months earlier managed to cause more offense and general repulsion than all the above-noted, not just in the U.S., but around the world. That was Ken Russell's The Devils, a U.K.-U.S. coproduction. It was a costume drama, like the director's prior Women in Love and The Music Lovers, but with a considerably more incendiary (in both the literal and figurative sense) theme."
1970s cinema often aimed at adult audiences rather than a one-size-fits-all teenage median, as shown by the provocative holiday releases of 1971 such as A Clockwork Orange, Dirty Harry, Straw Dogs, Macbeth, and The Hospital. One film released earlier, Ken Russell's The Devils, generated exceptional international outrage. The Devils adapted Aldous Huxley's account of 17th-century French accusations of sorcery and politically exploited nun hysteria used by Cardinal Richelieu to eliminate a rival cleric. Huxley's droll, disdainful tone contrasts with Russell's leering grand guignol. Russell professed devout Catholicism and described the film as explicitly political about brainwashing and state power.
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