The Devils Restored: Ken Russell's 1971 Obscenity Landmark Returns Complete

Ken Russell's 1971 film The Devils, banned for obscenity on its original release, has been restored and rereleased in its complete form after years of censorship. Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave, in what the Guardian's reviewer calls the performances of their lives, anchor a film whose shock value has outlived the high-street cinema era that produced it.

The film opens with a line that sets its tone. "I could never be Satan's boy. I haven't the humility," says Father Urbain Grandier, the 17th-century French priest accused of witchcraft, played by Oliver Reed. The Devils belongs to a period when movies playing in ordinary cinemas could still shock, could position that shock within the polite cultural mainstream, and could compel serious discussion about whether the shock itself — or, conversely, a ban — was justified.

What is the film actually based on?

The Devils adapts a true story of politically directed mass hysteria. Russell built the screenplay from two literary sources: Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun and John Whiting's stage play The Devils. Grandier was a real historical figure, a priest charged with witchcraft in 17th-century France, and the hysteria around his trial and execution forms the spine of the plot.

The reviewer's central claim is that the film's obscenity is deliberate and pointed. "Of course it is obscene; obscenity is the glowing sulphurous paint which Russell is applying to the canvas," the review states. But the target matters. The obscenity does not reside, the reviewer argues, in the sexualised images of the crucified Christ or in naked nuns disporting themselves. It is the violence of authority that the film shows to be obscene.

That distinction carries historical weight. The burning of martyrs and heretics at the stake has long been an accepted fact, recounted in U-certificate history lessons, and it survived as a punishment well into the European enlightenment. Russell's contribution is to show what such an execution might actually look like — and doing so, the reviewer writes, involves a confrontational assault on good taste.

What does the restoration change?

The complete-form rerelease closes a gap that censorship had kept open for decades. Viewers can now judge the full cut that provoked the original obscenity ban, rather than the trimmed versions that circulated in its shadow. The reviewer's verdict is that Reed and Redgrave deliver career-defining work and that the film's fury remains aimed at power, not at piety.

For a 1971 film to return intact, and still to command this kind of argument, is the restoration's real achievement.