“My most – Indeed my only – political film.” That was how visionary director Ken Russell described his incendiary 1971 masterpiece … Yet since opening to divisive reviews 55 years ago, Russell’s masterpiece has never been released as he intended … The story The Devils tells is an engrossing one, inspired by extraordinary real-life events that climaxed in the public burning of a priest, Urbain Grandier, in the French city of Loudun in 1634 … Despite their apparently fantastical nature, the historical facts behind The Devils are well documented … Most celebrated of the many accounts, however, is Aldous Huxley’s 1952 classic The Devils of Loudun, which is credited as the source of Russell’s movie, alongside John Whiting’s stage-play The Devils, which was first performed by the RSC in 1961. Russell was “knocked out” by Huxley’s book, and wanted his film to inspire a similarly powerful reaction in audiences. For him, this was “a story about brainwashing”. Despite having converted to Catholicism many years earlier, Russell was confident that the events at Loudun had nothing to do with demons or the supernatural and everything to do with political corruption and weaponised hysteria … Shot at Pinewood Studios on awe-inspiringly pristine sets designed by fledgling artist Derek Jarman, The Devils was a controversial project from the outset … Russell’s original vision proved to be ahead of its time, with key sequences deemed too intense for its contemporary viewers. Most notably, a sequence in which a very public display of alleged “demonic possession” climaxed in hysterical nuns tearing down and ravaging a giant crucifix was excised in its entirety, alongside other edits made for the UK release, with further cuts
for American audiences. For Russell, these alterations were heartbreaking because, as he told me in 2002, the deleted material not only contained “some of my finest work”, but also encapsulated the thematic heart of the film – a pantomime spectacle of blasphemy that is paraded out for corrupt political purposes … This is the version of The Devils that Ken Russell hoped would one day be available to international audiences – a fearless masterpiece that is even more relevant in these “post-truth” times than it was when Russell first conjured its unforgettably fiery excesses.

Mark Kermode