Edge of madness: "Ken Russell's The Devils"

Amazingly - one is tempted to go further and say miraculously - 1971's The Devils has been returned to us as Ken Russell's The Devils: the director's cut, complete with the Rape of Christ sequence that became such a hot potato on first run that Warner Bros. felt compelled to purge several minutes from subsequent release prints. This is, in short, the fullest version of the strong meat Russell set before his audience; the caveat remains that it is strong meat, a great British film that nevertheless shows you, with every OTT, in-your-face frame, exactly why certain viewers loathed it so. (If you took against it during the ribald pageantry of its opening five minutes, I can see why you might emerge from the concluding showtrial wanting to see the entire print go up in smoke.) Something about having a name in the title, however, only enhances one's understanding of the directorial control in play here. Seeing this version of The Devils on the big screen, you're struck anew by Russell's extraordinary command and organisation of screen space, the painterly compositions he arrived at with genius cinematographer David Watkin; and while the film teeters on the brink of mania and hysteria from the word go - not least at the level of performance - it's never allowed to lose its head completely, allowing this story to make the points the crusading Russell wanted to make. Whatever your thoughts on this film, it does succeed in gripping us, which means it can't be so easily shrugged off or dismissed: the level of hatred The Devils inspired in 1971 was, in its own way, proof of its effectiveness. The effect remains that of one long, ululated topnote, sustained in such an intense way that it fulfils its maker's purpose as either warning signal or battle cry; were you not to heed it, it could well go right through you and set both your teeth and guts on edge.

Having the complete picture set before us allows for a reappraisal of The Devils' flaws and strengths. On this second viewing, I was struck by just how closely the narrative - sourced from such highfalutin texts as Aldous Huxley's historical account The Devils of Loudon and John Whiting's play The Devils - resembles the kind of penny-dreadful plot the sensation-chasing Russell surely ate up in his youth: sexy priest, the women who fall for him and the functionaries who used those women to bring the priest (and his high-walled empire) down. But Russell succeeded this time in bulking such gossipy misadventures out. There may well have been no greater bulking agent in 1971 than Oliver Reed, found in something like his prime, and invited to embody an imperfect (and, if we're being completely honest, not terribly likable or heroic) man who in no way deserves the fate that befalls him. (In an age where our movie execs insist upon that drab quality relatability, the presence and behaviour of Father Grandier is the foremost sign we're negotiating a work of art that is properly adult.) This once, the actor's judgement was wholly sound: it would be impossible to overstate how important it is for The Devils that Reed never tips the audience the knowing or reassuring wink that would allow us to banish the movie to the outer realms of Seventies camp. Yes, Reed's Grandier is fleshy - fleshy enough, it seems, to have stirred up conflicted emotions among young feminist viewers of the film in 2026 - but he's also plainly flesh-and-blood and thus perishable when he attracts the attentions of the powers-that-be. Against him, Vanessa Redgrave applies some of her rare early Seventies genius to a similarly difficult role - again: a character we could find hateful if she wasn't also so intensely human, a woman at the mercy of her own desires - while the supporting cast is a cherishable repertory of faces like they just don't make today: Georgina Hale, Gemma Jones, Murray Melvin, Roger Sloman, Dudley Sutton.

It's a pageant in itself, then, but one further fortified by still-pertinent themes: state censorship, the rise of fascism, the evils men do in the name of religion. (Immediately, you spot why critics as openly religious as Alexander Walker and Paul Schrader took against Russell's vision so.) Crucially, though, it's never dully literal in articulating those themes, as so many "good British pictures" have been over the years; if it's in your face for a lot of its extended running time, it's never on the nose, which may be one reason it continues to seem so pertinent to the travails of the modern world. When The Devils re-emerged in October 2026, it seemed to speak to the fascism then back in play on the streets of downtown America; with its underlying tension between self-governance and kowtowing to a higher power, it also seemed to be speaking to post-Brexit Britain. (For better or worse, you can bet Russell would have had plenty to say on that unhappy episode.) It could just be that the irrationality, superstition, quack science and mob rule The Devils describes is everywhere nowadays; it's an example of a film finally catching up with a world that often appears unhinged, or a sign of just how far backwards society has slid. Either way, as this gleaming restoration illustrates, Russell constructed his world with uncommon craft: The Devils reappears as the sharpest imaginable rebuke to the notion this director was merely a pedlar of tat and filth. Yes, we get the nuns in various states of undress - it is true the old boy couldn't help himself sometimes - but the second half gains some of its rhetorical force from the sight of the authorities doing terrible things to the young Derek Jarman's next-level production design: the destruction wrought by the State is as much architectural as it is physical. The Devils remains forceful cinema whether you care for it or not: it stands, now intact again, as proof of the power this medium can generate when it's not kowtowing in its turn to banality and mediocrity. Can we do something similarly restorative for Peter Greenaway - another divisive film artist who's spent the second half of his career languishing in exile, reviled in his homeland - before it's too late?

Ken Russell's The Devils is now showing in selected cinemas; a 4K boxset and Blu-ray will be available through the BFI on April 20, 2027.