Warner Bros has launched Clockwork, a new specialty label named after Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange with an eye-catching brief: filmmaker-led projects, modest budgets, a small number of theatrical releases each year, and a mandate to restore titles from the studio’s back catalogue. First up, Sean Baker’s Ti Amo!, described as a “love letter to the Italian sex comedies of the ’60s and ’70s.” Well, ok.
But perhaps the real story lies elsewhere.
Part-way down the PR release, we find this: “[Clockwork] builds on Warner Bros.’ legacy of producing socially relevant, provocative and culturally resonant cinema for audiences globally… Clockwork’s remit includes independently produced and acquired projects, in-house feature development and the restoration of classic Warner Bros. films – all for worldwide theatrical release.”
Within days, Clockwork’s social feed posted an image of Ken Russell on the set of The Devils, tagged simply “Uncle Ken.” A light touch, but make no mistake – Clockwork is grasping a live wire here. Russell’s most infamous Warner collaboration remains one of the studio’s most carefully managed problems.
So the obvious question is: if Clockwork is serious about restoration, what happens to The Devils?
Set in 17th-century Loudun, the film charts the persecution of priest Urbain Grandier, played by Oliver Reed, as political ambition and religious hysteria converge on a convent in open revolt. Vanessa Redgrave’s Sister Jeanne becomes both catalyst and casualty, her visions weaponised by men who understand exactly how useful a spectacle can be. Russell stages the story as a kind of deranged civic breakdown, where faith becomes theatre and power reveals itself through cruelty. It’s one of the great films of its age, and its story of men trying to ride a wave of mass hysteria for political ends remains extremely relevant in our highly networked age of populist rabble-rousers and social media feedback loops.
Warner backed the project when others stepped away, then recoiled at the result. Before censors intervened, the studio had already insisted on cuts, most notoriously the so-called “Rape of Christ” sequence. So the version that reached cinemas in 1971 was already compromised, and further edits followed for different territories. Russell’s film was released, but not as he made it.
If anything, Warner’s unease hardened after release. The film was not allowed to quietly become part of the catalogue. Instead, it was handled at arm’s length for decades: rarely screened, tightly controlled, and conspicuously absent from the kind of restoration programmes that have revived far less contentious titles. Even when more complete materials resurfaced, the studio showed little appetite to formalise them into an official version. The result has been a strange limbo, where a major Warner production exists in public memory and critical discourse, but not in a stable, studio-endorsed form.
The UK’s BFI DVD presents the theatrical cut. Television and streaming appearances surface from time to time, always at best in the studio-censored form. A more complete version has circulated in limited contexts, but a fully sanctioned restoration, particularly on Blu-ray, has never been issued. For a major studio title, the absence is striking.
Far from simple neglect, this has been a longstanding stance from Warner Brothers. The Devils is simply too provocative, too dangerous for a mainstream US studio to celebrate or endorse. I ended my 2022 Sight and Sound poll entry with a plea for the studio to “give us the uncensored cut of Ken Russell’s The Devils, you swines!”
Clockwork’s remit complicates that position. It’s been tasked with curating Warner’s past in a way that speaks to the present, and focusing in on the “socially relevant” and “provocative,” – and what is The Devils if not these very things? The “Uncle Ken” Devils post reads, in that light, like a signal of intent. If Russell is part of the house lineage, then The Devils is the unavoidable test case.
An optimistic reading is that Clockwork becomes the arm that finally assembles and releases the most complete version possible, pairing a theatrical revival with a proper Blu-ray or UHD. The infrastructure is there, and the appetite is not in doubt. This could be the time that Warner Brothers embrace one of their greatest films.
But perhaps not. Clockwork operates inside Warner Brothers, not outside it. Global distribution, ratings boards, and brand management still apply. A restoration remit does not automatically extend to a film that has spent decades on the edge of the catalogue.
What the label has done is bring the question back into the open. If it wants to define itself through both new cinema and the re-curation of the archive, then The Devils is the film that will clarify what that means in practice. If Clockwork follows through, it will not just be issuing a film. It will be at long last reclaiming a piece of Warner’s own history.
Warner Brothers have been approached for comment.
Whitlock&Pope 