An assault on the senses and emotions, Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), is possibly the most controversial and devastating film ever unleashed on mainstream cinema audiences. The director’s cut, with some eight minutes finally restored, received its first international public screenings at the Brussels International Festival of Fantastic Film (BIFFF) in 2006. A DVD release was promised for later that year by Warner Bros. So, what’s happened, guys?

When first shown and for many years after, the (much-mangled) film was subjected to almost as much vilification as that inflicted upon Father Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed), the worldly, charismatic priest of Loudun, France, who in 1634 is unjustly accused of witchcraft by a group of sexually obsessed nuns, led by the hunchbacked Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave). The situation is ruthlessly exploited by the power-hungry Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue) – control of Grandier’s town is all that remains for Richelieu to wrest rule of the country from King Louis XIII. As a result, the devout priest is humiliated and tortured, but refuses to confess. Hell, as the original tagline put it, will hold no surprises for him.

When the predictable howls of outrage, Christian pressure-group vilification and local council bans finally gave way to objective study of the film, a curious (but by no means unique) thing happened… damnation, as exemplified by the critics of the time such as Alan Frank and Philip Bergman, who would seemingly have burnt Russell at a stake fired by all the copies of the film, became near-canonization. Contemporary critics as respected as Repo Man director Alex Cox and Mark Kermode now cite The Devils among their top ten. And it was Kermode who led a lengthy search through Warner Bros’ vaults for a key scene (frenzied nuns ravishing a life-size effigy of Christ on the cross) which was then restored; the subsequent Russell-approved cut was shown at London’s National Film Theatre in 2004, and is the version that will hopefully find its way onto DVD very soon.

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