Word: grandiere
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...intensity, or "sex in the head" as Huxley had it, echoing D.H. Lawrence. "As heroic passion, it is one of the last infirmities of noble mind. As imagined sensuality, it is one of the first infirmities of the insane mind." But it is an infirmity intense enough to destroy Grandier and reduce the walls of Loudun to rubble...
...Russell's film script is based on both Aldous Huxley's sardonic history The Devils of Loudun and a play by John Whiting. It presents the Jesuit Father Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed) as a sexually profligate and politically dangerous priest who threatens the intricate schemes of the insatiable Cardinal Richelieu. To gain control of the walled city of Loudun-thus crushing a steadfast fortress of independence in France -Richelieu and his minions engineer a trial at which Grandier stands accused of inducing hysteria in a convent of Ursuline nuns...
...Huxley's historical essay and John Whiting's play The Devils. The libretto sketches the facts surrounding the torture and execution of a Jesuit priest in a 17th century French provincial town. Sister Jeanne of the Angels, prioress of St. Ursula's Convent, asks Father Urbain Grandier (sung by Baritone Andre Hiolski) to become the cloister's confessor. When the worldly, sensual priest declines the offer, Sister Jeanne has a series of hysterical sexual hallucinations that soon infect other nuns in the convent. Eventually, the sisters accuse Grandier of indecent and immoral behavior, which...
...role of the raving Prioress should rightfully contrast with the sane and balanced Grandier, but Anne Bancroft still overplays it. Her Prioress believes too completely in her demoniac possesion, so we miss that nether-land between consciousness and unconsciousness in which the real Soeur Jeanne acted. Miss Bancroft also plays the unpossessed sequences with an overflowing wholesomeness, while Huxley discloses her character as both bitter and shallow...
Worst of all, the crispness called for by Whiting gets covered with grease in the slick tone of this production. Even the playwright's brilliant stage directions, where the sinister plotters enter an act on the left side of the stage while Grandier and his friends remain on the right, are overdone by the use of blue and red filters on the left-side lighting. Whiting has embodied a psychological truth, but Cacoyannis turns it into a device...