Movie-lovers!
.jpg)
Welcome back to The Deuce Notebook—a collaboration between MUBI's Notebook and The Deuce Film Series, our monthly event at Nitehawk Williamsburg that excavates the facts and fantasies of cinema's most infamous block in the world: 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. For each screening, my co-hosts and I pick a title that we think embodies the era of 24-hour genre-hopping, and present the venue at which it premiered...
This month, we welcome one of our favorite Deuce-regulars, Screen Slate contributor Madelyn Sutton, who’s taken the helm and commandeered us down a merciless spiral of nunsploitation… Check out her piece below for your fill of nuns gone wild!
—The Deuce Jockeys
Vanessa Redgrave in Ken Russell's The Devils (1971)
Naughty nuns: the appeal is obvious. Cloaked in the magnetic mystery of her thick twill tunic, the solid walls of the cloister, and the impenetrability of her spirituality, the nun is a walking embodiment of the original injunction against looking. This regulated interiority has made of the nun a powerful figure of fantasy from the earliest days of organized Christianity, and on into the present day. What better medium could there be for plumbing her tantalizing depths than film—an all-seeing eye whose very nature is to reveal, and to capture in the visible world the signs of the ineffable?
The Song of Bernadette (1943) lead Jennifer Jones, a very thirsty nun
The family-friendly cinematic investigations of these dark and devoted corners finds its most wholesome expression in the reverence of Henry King's The Song of Bernadette (1943) or the moral righteousness of Robert Wise's The Sound of Music (1965), Haylee Mills' innocent insouciance in The Trouble with Angels (1966), or even Whoopi Goldberg's pop-music posturing in the 1992 summer blockbuster Sister Act. But the underside of the veil has produced a plethora of dirty books and lascivious pictures as well—after all, the more unspoilt the bride of Christ, the greater the temptation to explore her uncharted territories, a sort of violent male manifest destiny capable of the most deliciously sinful proportions. (It's worth noting that a little ditty called The Nun's Story is thought to be the first stag film with a cum shot; efforts to find much information about this particular film are complicated by another with the same title, released in the same decade, starring none other than the incorruptible Audrey Hepburn.) On the silver screen, this trend found particular popularity in the 1970s and 1980s in the rich and raunchy sub genre known most euphoniously as nunsploitation.
The origin of the subgenre is generally mapped to the success of Ken Russell's 1971 still-censored masterpiece, The Devils. Though Eriprando Visconti's The Nun of Monza—based on the true story of Sister Virginia Maria, who bore two children fathered by a local aristocrat in the 17th century—premiered in 1969, for one example, The Devils' much-publicized “X” rating and high-art bonafides (the cast, a best director win at the Venice Film Festival, the Aldous Huxley source material, et cetera), as well as its box office success (grossing nearly $11 million worldwide) most effectively ignited the exploitation flame.
In line both narratively and tonally with the 1952 Huxley book The Devils of Loudon: A True Story of Demonic Possession, Russells' film follows the perils of pride and popularity for the handsome priest Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed), whose career overlapped with the growing threat of Protestantism to the Catholic church's political dominance in 17th century-France. A well-known seducer of various important men's daughters, Grandier was the unwitting object of the local Abbess' obsessive affections; Suffering from severe scoliosis and an even more severe horniness, Sister Joan of the Angels (Vanessa Redgrave) conspires with the convent's confessor and her ever-thirsty sisters to prove that Grandier consorted with the devil and bewitched the innocent nuns. In a bid for control of Loudon and at the behest of the Cardinal and the King, Grandier's inquisitors eventually find him guilty and sentence him to burn at the stake—but not before the sadistic exorcist Father Pierre Barre comes to town, applying rituals, relics , and enemas with abandon, unleashing in the process a frenzied performance of erotically-tinged possession from the cloistered collective.
The power of cock compelled them (The Devils)
“There are performing nude Lesbians, spikes driven through tongues, castrations, closeup of a man burning to death, flagellations with spiked chains, vomiting and other unspeakable acts too ghastly to look at, much less write about,” wrote Rex Reed in the New York Daily News, August 10, 1971; it took him over three weeks from the film's premiere at The Fine Arts cinema to muster the fortitude to describe The Devils' many delights. After moving to the Little Carnegie theater on October 1, this “freak show in an insane asylum that