Ken Russell's French-set film The Devils is back on the big screen as part of this year's BFI London Film Festival, where it plays on Friday and Monday ahead of a wider global release that commences in the US. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this hell-freezes-over moment: not only are Warner Bros.—the studio that for so long seemed intent on burying the film—behind this re-release, but The Devils has been restored in 4K and cut to Russell's specific instructions (he worked with the film's original editor, Michael Bradsell, to reinstate long-lost scenes that had fallen foul of censorship). Fifty-five years on from its initial run and 15 years after its director's death, the result is the definitive version of a work that—even in its previously truncated forms—stands as the blazing apex of Russell's career.
Russell's 1971 shocker, set in 17th-century Loudun, centres on Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed), a rakish and arrogant secular priest who finds himself in deep trouble when Sister Jeanne des Anges (Vanessa Redgrave), the abbess of the local Ursuline convent, accuses him of sorcery. These baseless claims prove most convenient for several influential individuals who are scheming to remove Grandier from his dual posts; the priest is also Loudun's acting governor, and has so far thwarted Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue), who wishes to destroy the city's walls on the rationale that such fortifications provide a bedrock for further Protestant uprisings. Grandier is therefore a political heretic who is tried as a religious one, with the Catholic church he's served for so long gleefully facilitating his terrible, fiery end.
While basking in the magnificence of Ken Russell's The Devils—note the possessive title credit, which serves to differentiate this edit from the cut versions—it is easy to forget that, from the 1980s on, Russell had fallen out of fashion, and those championing his work were few and far between (it didn't help that The Devils, the main exhibit for those coming to Russell's defence, was a tricky title to track down). But less than six months after Russell's death, the BFI, having somehow secured the rights from Warner Bros., released The Devils as a double-disc DVD that led to renewed interest in both the film and its maker. While this edition was the UK theatrical version, the missing scenes had been broadcast in a 2002 documentary, resulting in several fan edits that aimed to reproduce Russell's original vision.
Yet back in 2004, Russell and Bradsell had pieced together their own reconstruction of the film, and this served as the basis for this new restoration, which was completed using the original camera negative. There's something bittersweet about the whole venture: while Russell lived to recreate his greatly preferred cut of the film—a situation that was obviously unthinkable prior to the recovery of the excised footage—he died with the assumption that it would never be given a fittingly wide release. In my book on the film, my adamantine stance was that The Devils works perfectly well without the restored scenes—a heresy seemingly greater than anything that transpired in Loudun—and, up until now, it has had no other choice. If this is your first time with this unique, shattering film, prepare to be blown away.
Darren Arnold
