The restored, uncut version of Ken Russell’s The Devils includes the footage that censors removed for blasphemy and sacrilege. Its NC-17 rating reflects what the film has always been willing to put on screen: sexual imagery and violence used not as shock for shock’s sake, but as part of a furious satire about religious authority and political power.
The cuts were substantial. UK censors required three minutes to be removed, while US censors required five. Although the excised scenes included nudity and violence, the main objections were blasphemy and sacrilege. Russell believed the footage had been lost for good.
In 2002, film critic, author, and TV presenter Mark Kermode found the cut sequences in the Warner Bros. archives while making a documentary about the film. He and Russell worked on a director’s cut that restored all the excised footage, but Warner Bros. declined to release it. The refusal came 31 years after the film’s original release, when the studio still considered the material too much.
The newly created specialty arm Warner Bros. Clockwork has now restored the film. Russell died in 2011 and didn’t live to see this version. The restored cut makes the history of censorship visible: the recovered imagery isn’t an extra layer of provocation pasted onto the film, but material Russell had tried to include from the start.
That material serves a story based on real events in the walled French city of Loudon, shortly after the Huguenot rebellions of the early 1600s. Cardinal Richelieu, the head of the Catholic Church in France and the villain of The Three Musketeers, wants to strengthen the Church’s hold over rural areas. He tries to persuade King Louis XIII, portrayed here as an absurdly over-the-top foppish hedonist, to tear down the walls of independent cities, including Loudon. But the King has already promised to spare the city, leaving Richelieu and his representative, Baron de Laubardemont (Dudley Sutton), looking for a way to take power from Loudon’s popular head priest, Father Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed).
Grandier is charismatic, but hardly a model of piety. He enjoys his authority and his influence over the city’s women, carrying on affairs with young women without much concern about whether their fathers find out. Meanwhile, the Ursuline nuns live apart from the rest of Loudon in a fortress-like convent, connected to the outside world only by small windows.
The abbess, Sister Jeanne of the Angels (Vanessa Redgrave), is sexually obsessed with Grandier despite never having met him. In her dreams, he takes the place of the crucified Christ as she sensually kisses his wounds. When Jeanne learns that Grandier has secretly married a local woman, she accuses him of consorting with the devil to corrupt her soul.
Laubardemont seizes on the accusation and hires a professional witch-hunter to support it. As Grandier leaves to seek an audience with the King, the Baron and Grandier’s enemies arrange for the Ursuline sisters to accuse the priest of corrupting them. The nuns begin behaving as debauched and sacrilegious as possible, turning the charge into a weapon.
The reviewer describes The Devils as a horror version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail: a broad satire that still takes its events seriously. That combination makes the accusations more disturbing, not less. How could reasonable people believe them? They did, while pettiness, sexual repression, and political corruption played out amid a plague that was taking lives daily. Russell depicts that setting with macabre absurdity.
The film’s outrageous sexual content, including a particularly startling nun orgy in the restored footage, and its harrowing violence all serve its attack on power hiding behind God. Grandier is deeply flawed, and Jeanne is unwell, but the reviewer argues that neither deserves what happens to them. They become unwitting cogs in a larger, unforgiving political game. Reed and Redgrave are exceptionally strong in the film, perhaps giving career-best performances.
The reviewer recalls first seeing an old, censored print and feeling as if the film were forbidden. After watching it multiple times over the decades, they expected the restored version to hold few surprises. It didn’t: even familiar scenes felt newly startling. The full NC-17 cut strengthens the sense that Russell made a defining work of subversive cinema, and the reviewer calls it a masterpiece as it was meant to be seen.
The Devils begins a limited theatrical run on October 16.
