“The Devils” has returned.
Ken Russell’s controversial cult classic, first released in 1971, has been a source of never-ending controversy and consternation. Based, in part, on a true story (along with 1952 non-fiction book “The Devils of Loudun” by Aldous Huxley and John Whiting’s 1960 play “The Devils”), it stars Oliver Reed as Urbain Grandier, a real-life 17th-century Roman Catholic who was accused of witchcraft after he refused to acquiesce to King Louis XIII, who was attempting to consolidate power. Vanessa Redgrave plays Sister Jeanne des Anges, a hunchbacked nun who is obsessed with Grandier and, when she claims that Grandier has bewitched her, becomes a pawn in a much larger play.
It’s a movie that is both beautiful and intentionally outré, climaxing with an “exorcism” that had audiences and studio executives clutching their pearls 55 years ago. And ever since its original, highly contested release, the movie has only been intermittently available – it’ll pop up on the Criterion Channel for a month, say, before disappearing again – and never in its full, uncut glory.
Until now.
Clockwork, a new division of Warner Bros. Pictures (now, both a part of Skydance), is releasing the film into North American theaters, in a newly restored, completely unedited version, raw enough to earn it an NC-17. It’s astounding and one of the biggest theatrical events of the year – the unholy resurrection of a movie that was thought to be lost to the sands of time.
And to think – much of it had to do with the work of Mark Kermode, a British film critic, who began his quest in 1995.
That’s when Kermode was sent by Sight & Sound to interview Russell. They were doing an issue on film censorship and the magazine knew that Kermode was a big fan of “The Devils.” (He first saw it in 1979 on a double bill with “The Exorcist.” “If you know anything about my film obsessions, you can imagine that was quite the evening,” Kermode quipped.) Kermode asked Russell about the history of the movie – how after reading the book and the play, Russell could see the film in his head, how the movie faced problems with censors in the United Kingdom and later in America.
Before he even submitted the movie to British censors, he met with John Trevelyan, who was the chief censor at the BBFC (British Board of Film Censors). Trevelyan told Russell, “Okay, you’re going to have trouble with this. There are things in this that are going to have to come out.” They started, in Kermode’s words, “horse trading,” agreeing to reducing some of the more extreme moments – “a shot here, a shot there.” But there was more discussion about the movie’s centerpiece, a sequence in the cathedral where the nuns “go completely mad and there is this pantomime of blasphemy.” The sequence is intercut with Grandier “taking mass very quietly by a lakeside.”
“For Ken, this sequence was absolutely central because he said that the way the story worked is there’s two stories going on. One of them is Grandier, who starts out as a womanizer, who discovers during the course of the movie, that he actually has a calling and that he wants to serve God. He wants to serve the people of Loudun,” said Kermode. “The other is the church being used as a political tool in order to discredit Grandier, because what they actually want to do, is to take down the walls of Loudun, so that Loudun is no longer self-governing. And they use this pantomime of blasphemy and demonism to create a sideshow, a distraction.”
And these exorcisms really happened – they were happening twice a day for months. “People traveled from Paris to come and watch this pantomime of blasphemy,” said Kermode. For Russell, asking to cut this sequence was enough to cut the heart out of “The Devils.”
As Russell described, the original, uncut version of the sequence, Kermode was rapt. “Ken describing a sequence in a film is like watching the film. It’s like he had the power of the way he would describe it,” said Kermode. Russell told him that it was some of his best work. At the end of the story, Kermode asked, “Well, what happened to it?”
Russell said that the last time he saw it was in a reel beside the editing desk. Kermode made a promise that he’d find it. Over the years Russell and Kermode would become friends and they would frequently screen “The Devils,” sometimes in its X-rated British form and sometimes in its truncated American release (which Russell referred to as “damaged goods”).
“The more that happened, the more it lit this fire of we must find this thing and we must restore it,” Kermode said. He wasn’t an archivist. He said he’s never even been into archives. But he is “an annoying journalist” so he started making calls. He started frequenting the Warner Bros. offices in England. “They were very kind to me. And they were like, Here comes Mark again, looking for the missing footage from ‘The Devils,’ which everyone knows is lost. And this went on for some time,” said Kermode.
In the early 2000s, Kermode was working with Russell on a documentary about the film called “Hell on Earth” (watch it below; it played on Channel 4 before a 12:15 a.m. airing of “The Devils”). A few years earlier, Kermode had made a documentary about “The Exorcist” that had included previously unseen footage, including the infamous spider-walk and a scene towards the end of the film between Karris and Merrin on the stairs. It was enough to prompt William Friedkin to go back into “The Exorcist,” put the scenes back and re-release the movie as the hugely successful “Version You’ve Never Seen.” Kermode wondered if the same thing was possible – could they locate the missing footage and could that discovery lead to a definitive re-release of “The Devils?”
Kermode was determined and “ramped up the searches.” He kept hitting dead-end after dead-end. Until, one day, he was at the Warner Bros. offices in London. He asked a “very nice guy” named Tim if he could see the logs – where was this stuff? Was it in America? Was it back in the UK? As it turned out, there was a ton of material in a holding facility near Heathrow. And they had “logs of where stuff was shipped from and I started going through shipping logs.” He started going through them, reel after reel. And then he came across a real that had a label on it – C Cut 89.
“Now, I am very anally retentive and I remembered that when the BBFC officially cut ‘The Devils,’ they officially cut 89 seconds out of it. They didn’t actually; they cut a lot more than that out, but it was pre-cut before they did the final cut. And this 89 thing jumped out at me.” Kermode said. He asked Tim, the very nice guy, if he thought that reel could contain the cut sequences. Tim, as nice as he was, said no.
When Kermode asked why, Tim said, “Well, for a start, that tin has always been there. If there was anything in it, we’d know about it. I mean, believe me, people have been looking, so I know it isn’t.” Kermode said to Tim, “Look, I tell you what, if you call it in, and it isn’t anything, I will leave you alone and never bother you about it again.”
“He thought this was too good an offer to refuse,” Kermode joked.
At the time, Kermode had young kids and was buying diapers in the store. Tim called him and told Kermode that when he opened the can “it had that vinegary smell, which means that it’s starting to decompose, but it also means that the can hasn’t been opened for a long time.” Tim said he’d sent the film to be treated and washed. The second thing Tim told Kermode was that “I did look at the first few frames and all I can tell you is there’s a bunch of nuns and a bloody great crucifix.”
Kermode hung up and called Russell immediately. “Ken, I’m standing in the nappy department of Mothercare and I think we found the Holy Grail,” Kermode told Russell.
Soon enough Kermode was at Warner Bros. with Mike Bradsell, who was the editor of “The Devils” and Paul Joyce, who was directing “Hell on Earth” (who would later go on to oversee the reconstruction of “The Devils”). They squeezed into a tiny room and started playing the reel. Bradsell looked at the footage and went, “My God, I recognize the edits.” When Kermode asked him what he meant, he said, “No, I physically recognize the edits. That’s the reel.”
The small group watched the footage, mouths agape.
“It’s got two complete, slightly different assemblies of that central sequence. It’s got the sequence at the end of Grandier’s charred femur, and it’s also got other stuff that was taken out during the vague whittling down process – a bit of naked nun stuff and there’s some stuff of the mummers’ plays which the BBFC had objected to because the BBFC were worried about everything,” Kermode said. “We said, ‘Okay, fine, this is great. We can use this for the documentary.’”
The team reconstructed the sequence, which Bradsell integrated into the film (using bits of the score because there was no soundtrack) and showed it to Russell.
“The most astonishing thing was, it was exactly as he had described it. It did exactly what he said it did. He had remembered it perfectly, but he hadn’t seen it since 1971 and it was mind-blowing. We caught it all on camera, it’s in the documentary, Ken watching it for the first time,” Kermode said.
Years later, he had programmed a season at the BFI Southbank (formerly the National Film Theater) in 2004 and they wanted to end the season with a screening of the British X-rated cut of “The Devils.” Because they had been working on this project, they wondered if they could get it done in time to end the festival. They ended up finishing a version and “it just plays so well.” Still – the transfer was rough, it was on a digit-beta (“you get that digital fuzziness”), although he hoped to use the response to that screening to mount a proper restoration.
“There just wasn’t any enthusiasm for it. I kept thinking, Why isn’t there?” Kermode said.
His guess was that, at the turn of the century, Sight & Sound did one of their polls of the greatest movies of all time, where they turn to journalists and filmmakers to rank their top 10. Kermode was one of two people to put it on their list; the other was “Sid & Nancy” filmmaker Alex Cox, who had shown the X-rated cut on the BBC in 1997.
“In the 20 years between then and now, the reputation of ‘The Devils’ grew. Guillermo del Toro was talking about ‘The Devils’ to people who had never seen ‘The Devils’ because it had been out of circulation. I mean, it disappeared. It vanished,” Kermode said. “People were talking about it and filmmakers started saying, Oh, this is a really important film because it had been very badly treated when it first came out, badly cut by the BBFC. But also not defended by the studio because when the BBFC said, ‘We want to make all these cuts,’ the studio went, ‘Yeah, we want to make them too.’ Ken didn’t have anyone fighting his corner and it took all this time for the reputation of the film to build.”
Russell died in 2011, but when Christian Parkes and Spencer Collantes started Clockwork, they were told that they would have access to the archives. What would they want to do? And they said, “We want to do ‘The Devils.’” (Clockwork did not return our request for comment.)
“They’d hate me saying this but they’re hip, they’re young, they had their ear to the ground. They’d had brilliant success elsewhere,” said Kermode. They were both veterans of NEON, which has quickly become one of the coolest and most important distributors and producers in Hollywood, responsible for “Anora,” “Parasite” and “Triangle of Sadness,” among many others.
Collantes and Parkes approached Kermode in Berlin.
“The way that I think about it is that the film was waiting for its moment. It was waiting for the moment, and but it did take two young, smart, cine-literate guys who are brilliant because they love film but they also understand the film,” said Kermode.
Collantes and Parkes told Kermode that he wanted to have the movie ready to debut at the Cannes Film Festival. Kermode asked, “Cannes 2027?” They said, “No, Cannes in May.”
“I went, ‘It’s February,’” Kermode said.
They had started working on the British X-rated version but they needed the 2004 template that Kermode and the “Hell on Earth” team had assembled. For a film that, for decades, had been cursed, it felt like there was something else at play when it came to rescuing it.
“People talk about the Movie Gods. This whole thing about that reel of film, it had been it had been there all the time, but it had just been mislabeled. And if I wasn’t such a ridiculously nerdy fool who went, ‘Oh, 89 clearly refers to the 89 seconds.’ And if I hadn’t been so annoying that Tim was willing to call this tin up that he knew didn’t have anything in it because it would at least get me out of his office. That wouldn’t have happened,” said Kermode. “And then if Spencer and Christian hadn’t walked into Warners and said, ‘We’re doing this new label and one of the first things we’re doing is The Devils,’ it’s hard sometimes not to believe in the Movie Gods.”
When Kermode finally saw the restored version at Cannes, he cried. He cried because he had made a promise to Russell that he had no business making, that had finally come true. He thought of something that Russell’s wife Lisi had told her after Kermode screened the cut in 2004. Russell told his wife, “I’ve got my rhythm back.” Lisi told this story on stage at Cannes and Kermode nearly burst into tears. When someone asked him later if he was depressed that it was all over, Kermode said no. “I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders,” Kermode said.
And, yes, it’s Kermode’s understanding that now that “The Devils” has been freed from hell it will have the usual digital and physical media releases. It has escaped obscurity and it will not be going back.
Now that it’s over, though, is there another lost film that Kermode wants to rescue? As it turns out, there is.
“I don’t think this will ever happen. I would really like it if they could do a proper reconstruction of ‘Exorcist III,’” Kermode said. He acknowledged that there’s a reconstruction on the Blu-ray (that Kermode did a commentary track for) that flips between the 35mm of the film and the video cassettes that director William Peter Blatty had of the dailies from the original shoot. Kermode had worked with Blatty on a release of the screenplay for “The Exorcist III,” under its original title “Legion,” back in the 1990s. Just like “The Devils,” he has a template.
“When they were trying to do the reconstruction this time they couldn’t find any of the elements. Morgan Creek couldn’t find any of the film elements, so they did the reconstruction from the videotape. And even with just the videotape stuff, Brad Dourif’s original performance is just amazing,” Kermode said.
He’s somewhat of a believer, especially after his extraordinary experience with “The Devils.” He has seen too much to totally give up hope. Not that he’ll be the one leading the charger.
“Somewhere that film exists. Nothing is lost really. It’s just mislabeled and somewhere it’s there. And at least there is a template for it. But it’s somebody else’s battle. I’m afraid because these things take years to come round,” Kermode said. “I would love it if somebody could find that material and put that movie back as it was. I love Bill Blatty as a director. ‘Legion’ is a far superior film to ‘The Exorcist III.’”
The devil, as always, is in the details.
“The Devils” is in theaters this weekend from Clockwork and Warner Bros.
The post How Film Critic Mark Kermode Helped Resurrect Ken Russell’s ‘The Devils’ — NC-17 and All appeared first on TheWrap.
