Controversial Director Ken Russell Dead at 84

Ken Russell, the controversial and iconoclastic British filmmaker who brought The Who's Tommy to the screen, helped win Glenda Jackson her first Oscar, made nude male wrestling safe for the moviegoing multitudes, famously clobbered a critic with his own review and faded into an obscurity almost as uncompromising as his cinematic visions, has died following a series of strokes. He was 84.

Best regarded for the decade-long run that commenced with Women in Love (1969, for which Jackson won an Oscar and co-stars Oliver Reed and Alan Bates tussled clotheless) and concluded with Altered States (1980, which featured William Hurt hallucinating his way through his film debut), but perhaps most notorious for the oversexed, highly stylized instinct that found him exiled to the creative fringe since the early '90s, Russell's legacy remains as unsettled and tormented as the characters who populated his work.

No film likely characterizes that struggle more evocatively than The Devils, Russell's 1971 madhouse glimpse at a 17th-century French town torn asunder by religious zealotry, sexual obsession, demonic possession and political turmoil. The Devils was banned, censored and/or cut haphazardly to within an inch of its life, causing the flummoxed filmmaker to thwack one of his critics on live TV with a rolled-up newspaper (coincidentally, no footage of that moment exists today either) and only recently making its way to the culture in anything resembling Russell's original vision. Here's what appears to be the fullest version available online, which is decidely NSFW even without the infamous bone-masturbation scene at the end:

Or just sample a bit of the climactic madness here:

The New York Times has a very good obituary of Russell here. RIP.

[Photo: Getty Images]

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