A 4K restoration of The Devils to screen at Cannes

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Ken Russell’s controversial, censored 1971 film The Devils is getting an uncut, 4K screening at the Cannes Film Festival this year. Director Guillermo del Toro may soon get his wish. Only last November, the filmmaker was talking about one of his favourite films – 1971’s The Devils – and bemoaning its lack of a definitive, ... A 4K restoration of The Devils to screen at Cannes

Ken Russell’s controversial, censored 1971 film The Devils is getting an uncut, 4K screening at the Cannes Film Festival this year.

Director Guillermo del Toro may soon get his wish. Only last November, the filmmaker was talking about one of his favourite films – 1971’s The Devils – and bemoaning its lack of a definitive, restored 4K disc release.

“Somebody really doesn’t want this released,” he said at the time.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, however, director Ken Russell’s controversial horror-drama classic is among a number of restored films being shown at the Cannes Film Festival this year.

A restored, uncut, 4K scan of The Devils will screen as part of the Cannes Classics strand – it being one of a eclectic line-up of cleaned-up prints.

We half wonder whether Del Toro had something to do with securing a screening of The Devils, since his own phantasmagoria, Pan’s Labyrinth, will also be showing as part of the same program. Del Toro will be in attendance for the 20th anniversary presentation of his period fantasy, and we’d bet, ooh, £5 of our own money that he’ll also be there for The Devils screening.

Among the other cornerstones of cinema selected for this year’s Cannes Classics you’ll find Akira Kurosawa’s Sugata Sanshiro, Orson Welles’ The Stranger and Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine. Oh, and, er, Rob Cohen’s The Fast And The Furious.

The screening of The Devils could – hopefully – mean that a 4K disc release isn’t too far away. Heavily censored on its initial run, Russell’s lurid, unsparing account of religious zealotry, power hunger and madness in the 17th century has only been sporadically available since.

A 117-minute cut, which Mark Kermode managed to unearth in 2002, was the closest anyone’s gotten so far to a definitive version of Russell’s original. That version hasn’t been seen again for almost a quarter of a century. It now looks as though the version showing at Cannes will be an uncut version taken from the original camera negative – in other words, exactly as Russell intended it over 50 years ago.

One of the people who worked on the restoration revealed as much on BlueSky. Loitering in vaults for decades, this classic of British cinema is finally getting the screening it deserves.

“Ken Russell was unique,” del Toro told Konbini in November. “He has an energy that nobody else has. When people see baroque filmmaking, they think it’s easier. It isn’t… When you make tables for a living, when you’re a carpenter, which is a director, you know when somebody’s delivering something exceptional. Ken Russell’s The Devils is one of the greatest movies ever directed.”