Restored by the Lithuanian Film Centre and newly released on Blu-ray by Deaf Crocodile, The Devil’s Bride (Velnio Nuotaka) is a 1974 film that combines folktale and freak-out elements. Written and directed by Arūnas Žebriūnas, it begins by quoting a Lithuanian legend about angels who rebelled in Heaven and descended to Earth as devils. Well, that’s a common legend in the West as well.
Then comes The Devil’s Bride‘s opening shot, as pretty as a widescreen picture: an elaborate golden frame surrounds a hippie-looking God on a red throne atop a green hill flanked by breathtaking mountains. The camera dollies in and the image comes to life as scads of male and female angels in white robes and halos swarm up the mountain, raise their arms, and sing choruses of praise to elegant little dance moves.
Then they break for fruit and wine at a long table. Except that whenever God wakes from a catnap and rings the bell above his throne, they drop what they’re doing and rush back for another chorus.
It’s a living, but one rather weedy ginger-haired fellow with a goatee seems dissatisfied as he sneaks some grapes. This is Pinčiukas (Gediminas Girdvainis). He must be the troublemaker who catalyzes revolution, for soon everybody throws off their robes to reveal orange go-go dresses (on the women) and tuxes with bowler hats (on the men), and everybody’s wining and writhing in saucy caresses. Even a few men are kissing each other, which seems eye-opening for a film of the 1970s Soviet Union.
On one hand, ideologically correct films celebrated revolution and mocked theology. On the other hand, this slapstick licentiousness goes rather far for prim Party censors, plus it mocks authority!
The Devil’s Bride is surely one of the most bizarre films from the Iron Curtain, and that region had a surprising number of bizarre films. Žebriūnas could make the thing because he was adapting a well-known Lithuanian novel, Kazys Boruta’s Whitehorn’s Windmill (Baltaragio malûnas, 1945).
True, that novel was banned because (we surmise) “deals with the devil” was considered retrograde and can be understood as criticism of Soviet Russia, which took over Lithuania after WWII. However, the novel was republished and rehabilitated in 1962, a few years before the author’s death. By contrast, Mikhail Bulgakov wouldn’t publish his devilish The Master and Margarita in his lifetime, and its radical brilliance didn’t emerge in any form until 1967.
Also, Žebriūnas was known for films for and about children, and perhaps this comic fantasy of a likeable impish trickster sounded like a nice fairy tale for kids. Um, yes, although Whitehorn’s Windmill is not like that. Well, we’d never say The Devil’s Bride isn’t a family film. It’s light and good-natured and devoid of anything graphic, and it’s as hallucinatory as anything this side of Teletubbies.
Another major Lithuanian artist on the project is composer Vyacheslav Ganelin, who founded the acclaimed free jazz Ganelin Trio in the fertile year of 1968. He’s still active in Israel, and a May 2025 master class with him is posted on YouTube. Ganelin used Boruta’s sprawling, tragic fantasy novel as the basis for what he called a “rhythm opera” rather than “rock opera”, and when you hear one phrase, you should think of the other.
“Rock” probably sounded too Western and decadent. His score, with lyrics by Lithuanian poet Sigitas Geda, is clearly influenced by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar, a 1970 concept album that got staged and then filmed in 1973 during that era of grandiose concept albums and rock operas. The Devil’s Bride is sung all the way through, with the actors lip-synching to pre-recorded singers as in Bollywood films.
The Devil’s Bride‘s Dionysian Visual Extravagance
Very much influenced by his 1970s moment, Arūnas Žebriūnas combines Eastern European cinema’s tradition of highly active camerawork in historical films with some of the go-for-broke frenzy we associate with films by Ken Russell and Richard Lester. The style tosses in reverse footage, repetition, non-linear edits, and any wacky idea that comes to mind.
Appropriately for a story celebrating the joys of inebriation, The Devil’s Bride is a showcase of Dionysian visual extravagance, thanks to luminous and kinetic photography by Algimantas Mockus and the warm, green, woody, fairy-tale village designs by Filomena Vaitekuntenés. Everything was shot in Lithuania, except for the mountain sequence, which was shot in the Caucasus. Similarities to the opening of Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music (1965) are probably intentional, if subversive.
At a mere 76 minutes, The Devil’s Bride speeds like an out-of-control carriage, of which there’s more than one in the story. The first 15 minutes alone stage the heavenly revolution, then fallen angels plunge into a village lake, then the miller Baltaragis (Vasilijus Simčičius) falls in love with laughing blonde Marcelė (Vaiva Mainelytė) while nouveau devil Pinčiukas hypnotizes him into signing away his future child, then homely sister Ursule (Regina Varnaite) tries to cast witchy spells against it, then Marcelė dies in childbirth and, one edit later, her daughter has grown up as Jurga (played by the same actress). No time is wasted in this head-spinner.
The strapping more-or-less hero who falls in love with Jurga is Girdvainis (Regimantas Adomaitis), who’s forever riding his carriage out to the windmill and coming upon supernatural mishaps. He bears an uncanny resemblance to Richard Chamberlain in Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers (1971), only lustier. He also resembles the hard-headed, chariot-driving lout who sings “Bring Me My Bride” in Richard Lester’s film of Stephen Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966).
Boruta’s novel was so well-known that even though Žebriūnas and Ganelin reinvented and condensed it, Lithuanian viewers probably always knew where they were in the story. That’s more than can be said with confidence for western audiences of The Devil’s Bride.
As film historian Michael Brooke declares in his highly informative commentary, bewildered viewers commonly just stay with the spellbinding imagery even though “they don’t know what the flippin’ blimey is going on.” As he puts it, narrative and psychology have been made subservient to music and choreography, much like many filmed rock operas or music videos. Brooke fills in every gap and makes a second viewing highly clarifying, although even a first viewing is followable as a surreal and tonal treat.
Slapstick business with the picturesque windmill can’t help but call to mind a famous incident from Miguel de Cervantes’ 1605 novel Don Quixote. Soviet audiences of 1974 would surely have been familiar with Grigori Kozintsev’s celebrated 1957 Russian film version, so Žebriūnas was drawing another classic parallel to The Devil’s Bride for cultural bona fides.
Žebriūnas’ career in Lithuania’s film and television encompassed children’s dramas and fantasies such as the first feature of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince in 1966, the same year Konrad Wolf made a version for East German TV. Žebriūnas also made a 1982 mini-series of Irwin Shaw’s 1969 novel Rich Man, Poor Man, which had already been a hit US mini-series in 1976; one wonders how they compare. He passed away in 2013 and is clearly among the many Eastern European filmmakers who deserve to be better known elsewhere.
For more context, the Blu-ray offers interviews with Monika Edgar, Žebriūnas’ daughter, and film critic Ieva Šukytė on the place of The Devil’s Bride in Lithuanian cinema. A Deluxe Bonus Edition throws in more material. This release is consistent with Deaf Crocodile’s commitment to releasing some of the wilder and more fantastic cult film obscurities from Eastern Europe.