One of the most controversial films of all time, Ken Russell‘s The Devils, is finally on its way to cinema screens in its director’s cut form. Russell’s much-debated film stole the show at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where the uncut iteration finally made its debut in 4K some 55 years after its initial, badly compromised release.
The re-issue comes courtesy of the new speciality movie label Warner Bros Clockwork, and follows decades of wrangling to get Russell’s shocking vision onto screens where it belongs. Russell’s director’s cut made an appearance in 2002, but since then, Warner Bros has been reluctant to release it. Here is the teaser trailer.
Now, the tide has turned, and pretty soon, fans and newcomers can experience the licentiousness, political chicanery and bold production design (from Derek Jarman, no less) that makes the film so memorable. Long championed by leading UK film critic Mark Kermode, The Devils is adapted from the Aldous Huxley book The Devils of Loudun and its subsequent stage adaptation.
Oliver Reed gives a career-best performance as 17th-century French priest Urbain Grandier, whose sexual appetites and defiance of the influential Cardinal Richelieu make him a target for the authorities. Protesting against the destruction of the walls of the city of Loudun, Grandier is also lusted after by the perverse and hunchbacked Sister Jeanne (a memorably twisted Vanessa Redgrave), and before long, erotic hysteria has overtaken the local convent. This prompts several of the film’s most unhinged sequences, which still have the power to shock today.
When Grandier is dragged in front of a kangaroo court, ostentibly to try his libidinousness, but in reality to persecute his political motivations, it marks a clash of church and state with one man’s entire soul at stake.
The Devils is being reissued in 4K in UK cinemas on October 16th.
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