Why sex is welcome in Derby Cathedral, but the Holy Bible isn’t

Nic Roeg’s art-house thriller from 1973 Don’t Look Now was most famous, or infamous, for its lengthy and explicit sex scene. I think it’s fair to say that the lugubrious (and in 1973 near ubiquitous) Donald Sutherland gave Julie Christie a very thorough seeing-to, involving the first act of cunnilingus in a mainstream movie.

Even after being trimmed a little it still received an X rating, but did well enough at the box office. It was shown again quite recently — in Derby Cathedral, for reasons which quite elude me. In its unedited form. The dean of the cathedral, Stephen Hance, observed that the film would not be showing God ‘anything that He had not seen before’, thus perhaps implying that He had caught the film first time around, on its double-bill release with The Wicker Man — which was also shown in the cathedral.

Hance did not comment on the possibility that God may have seen more than enough of Donald Sutherland in the 1970s, regardless of what the actor might have been munching at the time.