Ken Russell's masterpiece The Devils now on iTunes

I’ve already professed my love for the work of Ken Russell in these pages, and still have more of my interview with “Unkle Ken” to come in this format and on the Funhouse TV show. In the meantime however, it has been brought to my attention that his masterpiece The Devils has finally been made available in this country in a sorta, kinda, near-to-complete version.

The film is owned by Warner Brothers, which is still, to this very day, scared of putting it out in its complete form, for fear that it will outrage Catholics and other dogma-loving Xtians. The truth is that the film is one of the finest explorations of religious hypocrisy ever, in any art form, and if someone is bothered by it, then they need to double-check their own religious beliefs. The documentary made for British television about the controversy surrounding the film constituted the first time that the censored “Rape of the Christ” sequence had been shown publicly (the same night the docu was shown the film was aired in its entirety). In that documentary a Jesuit notes that that scene is about blasphemy taken to the very limit, but the sequence that Russell intercut it with — in which Oliver Reed performs the ceremony of the mass with his lover and offers her the sacrament of communion — redeems the “Rape” sequence, showing what constitutes real faith as opposed to hypocrisy.

So the good news in this instance for U.S. viewers is that The Devils is finally available to be seen in its restored version. The bad news is that it is missing part of the “Rape of the Christ” sequence (which is what I assume takes it down three minutes from 111 to 108 minutes), and is only being made available by the oh-so-skittish Warner folks as a digital download on iTunes. No DVD, no Blu-Ray, none expected.

It’s very interesting to consider that of all the films that caused moral outrage at the turn of the Seventies, the rest of the pack — A Clockwork Orange, The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, Deep Throat — have all been perennially available on American home media on VHS and then DVD. The Devils thus validates itself by being so hard to locate (the best complete copy that has thus been circulated is of that single airing on British cable TV). It obviously has as much to say to our own era as it did back in 1971. Religious hypocrites will never go away, and they hate to be called out on their utterly ridiculous, offensive, and dangerous behavior (some might hit the nail through the palm with “un-Christ-like”). So check out the Russell film through the download, or through the bootlegs (I’m sure it’s circulating on Bit Torrent and Rapidshare, as the British cable TV version was up on YouTube in its entirety for a few months at one point), or when it appears at a local repertory theater. It’s a dynamic work that continues to say a lot about the publicly pious.

Here is where I found out about the iTunes download. Thanks to the great “Movie Irv” for passing this on. UPDATE: As of today, 7/8/10, the film has been pulled, and according to online sources, was up for less than a week. It was indeed missing the entire "Rape of the Christ" sequence, but supposedly was a crystal-clear restoration of the film. C'mon, Warner Brothers, what are you so scared of?

NYC's MTA has slowed down service until soon nothing will be running at all….

No, the title doesn't refer to New York becoming a Warriors or Streets of Fire-type landscape in an "alternate future" (although I often speculate on how easily that could happen). I just feel compelled to return to the topic of NYC's dreadful little tin-cans of horror, although I can’t really add much to what I’ve said in past blog entries.

Except, of course, to note that the MTA is crying poverty once again, as they always are. Now we know they lie on a regular basis, so it’s lovely to find that, just this week, as they took a whole bunch of completely necessary bus lines out of commission (stranding many riders in the outer boroughs — the lands the MTA is most apathetic about) and discontinued two subway lines, that the service has been absolutely awful. Worse than ever, and that’s saying something.

Perhaps the goal here is to re-establish that the citizens of NYC are dependent on them. Creating the wonderful fictions (which do indeed occur in real-life, but several of them in one day on the same two or three train lines — wow, what a coincidence!) of “police actions,” “track fires,” signal problems,” etc, etc, ad nauseum, must be exhausting, but they’re surely wanting to raise the fare, since none of the people who run the MTA take the damned trains and buses in the first place.

It's often been noted that cops should be forced to live in the communities they serve, just so they would know exactly what life in that neighborhood is like, and so they can’t escape to the suburbs at day’s end and think of the people who live in their precinct as “the Other.” I think the same should be true of the MTA. And while we’re at it, why not stick the tiny billionaire who bought himself a third term onto a subway running from Brooklyn to Queens, or the Bronx to Manhattan, or an outer borough to fucking anywhere. Have them ride the Frankenstein creations they’re responsible for on days like the past few, when a really sprightly tortoise could outrun a subway train in this town. Just an idea.

The movie/TV/music stuff continues above, but I must give complete credit to the source for the images seen above. They came from the the Remixed Metre blog, who says he got them from the Gothamist website, but I could only retrieve them from his site. So there.