Warner Bros.’ new specialty label, Clockwork, will send Ken Russell’s The Devils into theaters on October 16, marking the first public cinema release of the director’s full cut more than 55 years after the film was made. A teaser released Monday shows footage from a new 4K restoration drawn from the original camera negative, with sound remastered from the surviving 35mm magnetic tracks.
Starring Vanessa Redgrave and Oliver Reed, The Devils dramatizes the downfall of Urbain Grandier, a 17th-century French priest burned at the stake after being accused of witchcraft amid a wave of supposed demonic possession among nuns at a convent in Loudun. Russell drew on Aldous Huxley’s 1952 nonfiction account of the events and John Whiting’s earlier stage adaptation, but shaped a version so visually extreme that distributors gutted it before release in 1971.
The Vatican pushed to scrap its scheduled debut at the Venice Film Festival that year; organizers limited the screening to journalists rather than risk public protests. Russell still won Venice’s directing prize, but several countries banned the film outright, and U.S. and U.K. audiences saw it only with an X rating and substantial cuts.
A reconstruction supervised by Russell himself reached London’s National Film Theatre in 2004, projected from a DigiBeta tape, but it never had a theatrical run. According to critic Mark Kermode, who helped assemble that cut and introduced the new restoration last month at Cannes, a key sequence involving nuns and a statue of Christ was believed lost for decades, salvaged only after extensive searching. Kermode has said the project moved forward after a January meeting in Berlin with Clockwork executives Christian Parkes and Spencer Collantes, who told him they wanted to release Russell’s director’s cut in full.
The Cannes screening, introduced by Russell’s widow alongside Kermode, drew prominent guests including filmmaker Peter Jackson, and tickets reportedly sold out within a minute of going on sale. Reviewers who saw it described the restoration’s stylized black-and-white-and-blood palette as sharper than ever, and many in the audience were seeing the film for the first time.
Clockwork, formed late last year by former Neon executives, has built its slate around acquisitions and restorations aimed at theatrical audiences; The Devils marks its first archival release, following the label’s deal for Sean Baker’s Ti Amo! The film will next screen on 35mm at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna before its October opening, with an international rollout, including a U.K. release through the BFI, to follow.
