The devil's in the detail
Ken Russell's The Devils: Q&A with Dr Brian Hoyle
Ken Russell's infamous 1971 film The Devils is returning to UK cinemas with an uncut 4K restoration.
Censored for 55 years, this marks the first publicly released version of the film as intended by the filmmaker. We've got a special Dundead Halloween screening on Fri 30 October and the film will continue in DCA Cinema in November.
Ahead of that, we caught up with Dr Brian Hoyle, Senior Lecturer at the University of Dundee, to talk about the film's controversial history, what to expect from this new restoration and why it's considered Ken Russell’s defining masterpiece.
As you may expect from the reputation of the film, this article contains discussion of themes that some may find disturbing.
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Please introduce yourself and tell us about your history with The Devils.
My name is Dr Brian Hoyle, and I am Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Dundee.
Like most people who were not around in 1971 to see The Devils at the cinema, I first saw it on a substandard copy. I think I first became aware of Ken Russell from shows like Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Spitting Image, who did parodies of his work.
Flash forward a few years to 1993 or 94. I was living in Hong Kong and of all the strange and unlikely things, I saw a Japanese LaserDisc with the words “Ken Russell Collection” in the corner. Lo and behold, it was The Devils. You could not remove the Japanese subtitles and, as is often the case with Japanese releases, all full-frontal nudity was digitally blurred out. In the case of The Devils, that meant a lot of blurring. It was not the easiest copy to watch.
I then got hold of a Warner Bros VHS. The blurring was gone, but it was an old “pan and scan” version, cropped from the original 2.35:1 down to 1.33:1. Half the picture was missing.
It was not until 1995 when the filmmaker and presenter Alex Cox showed it on BBC as part of his Forbidden Weekend that I was able to see something like a proper version. The opening and closing credits were in the right ratio, the rest was cropped to 1.85:1. But it was certainly a move in the right direction. It also contained a few minutes I had not seen before.
I later worked out that the Japanese LaserDisc and the first British Warner Bros VHS featured the American cinematic cut, which had a further three or so minutes removed so that Warner Bros could get their desired “R” Rating. Cox showed the version that was passed with cuts and a “X” rating in 1971 by the British Board of Film Censors. That version ran around 111 minutes and, until now, was the most complete commercially available version. That’s the version Warner Bros put out on video in the mid 90s and reluctantly let the BFI release on DVD in 2011, the year Russell sadly died.
That BFI DVD was the best copy you could get and at least it was in the correct aspect ratio, but it was still a bit underwhelming. You knew there was a lot more work that could have been done on the restoration, and I don’t just mean putting back the censored footage.
The film showcases the work of artists at the peak of their craft, including visual artist Derek Jarman as production designer in his feature film debut. Can you talk about the design of the film and what this adds to the experience of it?
Critics were not kind to The Devils, but even the most excoriating reviews reserved praise for Derek Jarman’s extraordinary sets. Jarman writes about his experience working with Russell in his first volume of memoirs, Dancing Ledge, where he argues that ‘there was no better director to learn from, as he would always take the adventurous path even at the expense of coherence’.
Russell’s adventurousness extended to hiring Jarman, who had studied stage design at the Slade, but had never designed a film. Russell, however, was happy to take a chance on an inexperienced designer because he saw in Jarman a kindred spirit who shared his desire to not make The Devils look like your typical period piece.
They wanted to stress that Loudon was an ultra-modern city which they compared to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. But when they saw that the moulds for stone walls at Pinewood Studios would have made the city look old and crumbling, Jarman went back to his drawing board. He and Russell had been intrigued by a sentence in the Aldous Huxley book the film was based on in which the author compared the public exorcism of Sister Jeanne to ‘a rape in a public lavatory’. So, they asked for everything to be covered in a façade of white tiles.
Jarman would never work on another film of this scale. The main set alone cost £93,000, three times the cost of Sebastiane, Jarman’s directorial debut. But it is intriguing to see what he does with the resources at his disposal. The set for Cardinal Richelieu’s archive is probably worth the price of admission alone and that is only used in one scene.
But The Devils is not a masterpiece of design because of its scale. It is a masterpiece of design because it is so inventive. Look at the way the low arches and quadrant arches in Sister Jeanne’s cell seem to mock her hunchback. And there are some cracking zero budget ideas as well, like taping a couple of quids worth of coloured gels together to create the impression of light coming through an off-screen stained-glass window.
I have some photos of Jarman’s mother visiting him at Pinewood that are a great document of his amazing work and the sheer scale of his sets.
The film caused controversy on its release in 1971, what was the reception from censors, critics and audiences at the time?
I’d like to write “mixed”, but the truth is that Anglophone critics largely lambasted it.
Perhaps the most famous attack came from Alexander Walker, who wrote that it did little more than depict the "masturbatory fantasies of a Roman Catholic boyhood." When Russell and Walker were invited by the BBC to debate the film on live television, Russell rolled up a copy of The Evening Standard and hit Walker over the head with his own review.
But Walker wasn’t alone. Vincent Canby slated it in The New York Times and Roger Ebert wrote a very sarcastic review that is far from his finest hour as a critic. Time Out may have just given the rerelease five stars, but their original review, by Tony Rayns, strikes the keynote when it argues that the film is “overwrought” and “more of a camp review than a cathartic vision”.
But Russell bashing has always been a popular sport amongst British and American critics. Audiences, however, were drawn to his films. Some people would have gone to see it because it was controversial, but Russell’s work for the BBC in the 60s and his one-two-three punch of feature films - Women in Love (1969), The Music Lovers (1970) and The Devils (1971) – really did offer something different. He often joked that if he had been an Italian director called “Russellini”, the British critics would have loved him. Russell’s work is very visual but also has an operatic quality, it doesn’t give a damn about realism (British cinema’s preferred mode) and is very flamboyant.
The Italians really did like him too. The Devils won the Pasinetti Award for Best Foreign Film at the Venice Film Festival in 1971. That prize is awarded by a jury of Italy’s leading film critics. And given that it is about their nation’s history, it is perhaps not surprising that the French also flocked to the film. But I think they also liked seeing a British film that in no way conformed to their stereotype of British people, and British films, as being staid and repressed.
I also know that Russell took a lot of comfort from the fact that Gene D Philips, who was both a great film critic and a Jesuit Priest absolutely loved the film.
The Devils was banned by 17 councils across the UK. What happened here in Dundee?
A little-known fact about British film censorship: when the BBFC (formerly the British Board of Film Censors, now the British Board of Film Classification) give a film a certificate it is not written in stone. It is a recommendation and the final say goes to local councils. They have the right to change a rating if they see fit.
In the case of The Devils, they bowed to public pressure and elected to ban the film. Dundee was one of three Scottish City Councils, along with Glasgow and Dunfermline, to do so.
The ABC on the Seagate advertised the film in the local paper on Sat 8 January 1972. This is a solid six months after the film was put on general release. It would have done the rounds in London, Manchester, and so on before getting booked up here. It will have also had six months to gain its infamous reputation.
Some people saw the advertisement and clearly contacted the council. On Mon 10 January 1972 minutes of a Dundee City Council meeting reference “very strong complaints” and that the manager of the ABC has been told that the film might “offend against good taste and decency and would be offensive to public feeling” and he was not to show it until the council had seen it.
The next day a “special meeting of the police committee” is held and eight men enjoy “a private showing” of the film. They voted five to three in favour of proceeding with the ban.
We're excited to be screening this new 4K restoration, which was a hot ticket at Cannes Film Festival and features footage that even Ken Russell believed had been lost forever. What can audiences expect from this new restoration and what are you most looking forward to about watching it on the big screen?
The newly restored version of The Devils lasts around 114 minutes. This is three minutes longer than the “X” rated version released in cinemas in 1971. The most important addition is the so-called “Rape of Christ” sequence.
Russell had originally submitted a cut of around 117 minutes to the BBFC. His discussions with head censor at the time, John Trevelyan, were cordial and constructive. Russell agreed to around three minutes of cuts that he thought improved the film and this controversial sequence. As he wrote in a letter to Trevelyan:
I have […] cut the orgy in two – this […] has achieved several things – the sequence is now much more restrained, no longer self-indulgent and most important of all ‘The Rape of Christ’ concept is strengthened and its idea that the true atonement for Christ’s sacrifice is the mass as celebrated by Grandier – clarified.
He then added:
I hope you don’t feel tempted to tamper with this sequence as it now stands – at best there can only be a couple of shots in question and if these go – the meaning would also go too! Christ must be debased and be seen to be debased. At the risk of being boring I must say again that to me this sequence is the crux of the movie and should please stay as it is…Ken Russell
Despite Russell’s plea, further cuts to this sequence (and one later in the film involving Vanessa Redgrave’s Mother Superior) were demanded by the BBFC before they would consent to an “X” certificate. Russell was clearly reluctant to make these cuts, but the BBFC would not budge and there was no way that Warner Bros would allow a £2,000,000 production to not be granted a certificate.
For a long time, Russell would tell anyone who asked that the cut footage was nothing special. But the above letter proves he didn’t mean that. It was a way of rationalising the cuts. He also thought the footage was lost, so there was no point dwelling on something he never thought would be restored.
But when the missing footage was found in 2002 Russell’s enthusiasm was unbridled. Warner Bros, sadly, did not share his excitement. They would not allow the rediscovered footage to be put back in and they refused to allow a Blu-ray release.
I first saw Russell’s cut of The Devils around a decade ago and I must agree with the director, the film is stronger with the lost footage reinstated. The juxtaposition of the blasphemous hysteria of the nuns and Oliver Reed’s Father Grandier quietly observing a solemn mass is both masterful and really is the crux of the movie. And while I am sorry that Russell did not live to see this, I know how thrilled he would be that his cut of The Devils is finally getting the treatment it deserves.
I am also seriously jealous of people whose first experience of The Devils will be an uncut 4K restoration on a big screen, not a pan and scan, digitally blurred Japanese LaserDisc with burned in subtitles.
