The Doctor and the Devils [1985] Freddie Francis

http://bayimg.com/CAgnGaAdi The Doctor and the Devils (1985) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089034/ At the School of Anatomy in 18th Century Edinburgh, Dr Thomas Rock is engaged in a passionate idealistic fight to advance medical science and refuses to accept traditional establishment views of research. The only bodies he is legally allowed to conduct anatomical experiments on are those of hanged murderers – but there are only a handful of these each year and he is otherwise forced to rely on body snatchers. Lowlifes Robert Fallon and Timothy Broom discover there is lucrative money to be made stealing bodies and selling them to Rock. In the desire to make more money, this enterprise quickly turns to murder. Timothy Dalton ... Doctor Thomas Rock Jonathan Pryce ... Robert Fallon Twiggy ... Jennie Bailey Julian Sands ... Dr. Murray Stephen Rea ... Timothy Broom Phyllis Logan ... Elizabeth Rock Lewis Fiander ... Dr. Thornton Beryl Reid ... Mrs. Flynn T.P. McKenna ... O'Connor Patrick Stewart ... Prof. Macklin Siân Phillips ... Annabella Rock Philip Davis ... Billy Bedlam Philip Jackson ... Andrew Merry-Lees Danny Schiller ... Praying Howard Bruce Green ... Mole The story of real-life body snatchers Burke and Hare who operated in Edinburgh in the 1820s has fuelled several films before – most famously Val Lewton’s The Body Snatcher (1945), as well as The Greed of Burke and Hare (1948), The Flesh and the Fiends/Maniac (1960), Burke and Hare (1971) and subsequently John Landis’s comedic version Burke and Hare (2010). Celebrated poet Dylan Thomas wrote his own screenplay adaptation of the story The Doctor and the Devils in 1953 but this remained unfilmed following Thomas’s death shortly after. There were several attempts to mount a production but none of these succeeded until Mel Brooks and Freddie Francis came along 42 years later. Freddie Francis was one of the finest directors to emerge out of the Anglo-horror school of the 1960s. (See below for Freddie Francis’s other films). By the 1980s, Francis was one of the few directors from the Anglo-horror school still in the business. The Doctor and the Devils marked Francis’s return to the director’s chair after a decade’s absence – his last film was The Ghoul (1975). The Doctor and the Devils could almost have been a film of the old Hammer school – a Hammer film with a better budget. Certainly, a better budget is something that allows the presentation of Edinburgh as a grim and grimily realistic Victorian ghetto. The Doctor and the Devils was about the only horror film during the 1980s to be set in the 19th century that used to be Hammer’s regular stomping ground – which probably says something about how much the horror film has changed since the demise of the Anglo-horror cycle. And as such, The Doctor and the Devils was very much an anachronism in its year and not many people went to see it. There is a faint old-fashionedness to its plot – it is ever so contrived at times and swings some ungainly plot devices – the diamond ring, the well-educated Dr Murray’s dalliance with a street prostitute – devices that seem extremely familiar to the sedately controlled type of plot that Hammer films specialized in but much more hokey amid the greater realism of this film. Where The Doctor and the Devils succeeds is in its literate articulation of the characters of Dr Rock/Dr Knox and Fallon and Broom/Burke and Hare. Freddie Francis makes strikingly potent contrast between Rock’s idealistic fervour and Fallon and Broom’s naked greed. (The film’s sympathies initially do lie in a understanding of Rock’s idealism, although by the end, the film condemns him, resorting to the old Anglo-horror potato of the anti-science polemic). The Doctor and the Devils is based less on Dylan Thomas's writings than on the historical facts of the murders perpetrated mainly by William Burke and William Hare in Edinburgh in 1827 and '28 to supply fresh bodies for the Anatomy course at Edinburgh Medical College. Dr. Robert Knox, the purchaser, was putatively unaware that the bodies supplied for his course by Burke and Hare were in fact those of murder victims, rather than of derelicts recently deceased, buried, and unearthed by grave robbers. (In the film, the villains are known as Fallon and Broom, and the anatomy professor becomes Dr. Thomas Rock.) Dylan Thomas did write a screenplay on the subject, sometime in the 1950s. The Wikipedia article on the Burke and Hare Murders, as it calls them--they are also known as the Anatomy College murders, and the Edinburgh murders-- fails to note or list the Thomas screenplay in its article and bibliography, though it does include a good listing of other films about Edinburgh's real-life horror story that were made around the same time that Thomas wrote his version. Ronald Harwood's adaptation of Thomas's screenplay goes far beyond a rewrite, so much so that the film's crediting of Thomas seems more a legality than a true writing credit--and a good thing, too, for Thomas's screenplay is arguably unshootable, even on a sympathetic reading. Harwood's screenplay takes account of some of the historical facts of the murders, but rather than attempting a purely realistic dramatization, it strikes a balance between straight costume drama and an almost postmodernist deconstruction of the narratives of the main characters' lives, as projected through their individual psyches. Here, it matters that actors of the caliber of Timothy Dalton (Dr. Rock), Jonathan Pryce (Fallon), and Stephen Rea (Broom) are cast in the principal roles. Their portrayals of the title characters are flawless--haunting and terrible. Beyond these, the entire supporting cast shines, with Sian Phillips as Rock's sister, standing out in particular. Other marvelous performances include those by Twiggy, that pop icon of Sixties fashion modeling, here absolutely wonderful as a wh*re with a heart; Beryl Reid, as one of Fallon & Broom's most poignantly tragic victims; and Patrick Stewart, in a richly realized character role from his pre-Picard days. (I didn't spot him at first; see if you do!) First-rate production design graces the film, which represents 19th-century Edinburgh, socially and physically, in sometimes beautiful, and more often horrifying detail. The filmmakers' recreation of the lives of the lowest classes--the impoverished slum dwellers, the frantic immigrant families, the sad and desperate prostitutes and their higher-class johns, the cut-throats and the grave-robbers and the gin-swilling dregs of society--makes their sordid, hopeless days and nights seem viscerally real and immediate. We are embarrassed, along with one or two of the film's more humane characters, to move from the filthy back streets into the elegant, lushly appointed drawing rooms of the doctors, professors, and their friends. The film asks, which is the greater horror--the casual acceptance of the social status quo, or the desperate crimes that appear to result from it? Yet, The Doctor and the Devils is no simple-minded polemic. The doctors, members of a socially well-off and respected class, are concerned in the main with advancing the cause of medicine, with the specific aim of improving people's lives. This charitable spirit embraces even those most in need--those whose lives, it would seem, are almost not worth living. When Dr. Rock saves Billy Bedlam's leg--and with it, no doubt, his life--following an accident in the street, we all feel, with Dr. Rock, with Billy's grateful sister, and with Billy himself, that this is a medical triumph, regardless of the degradation of the life Billy must return to. That Billy is feeble-minded, or that his sister is another prostitute--the friend of Twiggy's character Jenny--does not factor into Dr. Rock's equation for calculating the value of a human life. And the knowledge that gives him the gift for saving lives comes from the meticulous practice of dissecting and studying bodies--a knowledge that Rock is desperate to pass on to all his anatomy students, and rightly so. The judgments in the film are far-reaching and complex, and viewers are left to make thoughtful judgments of their own. In this sense, The Doctor and the Devils is reminiscent of Shakespeare's tragedies and problem comedies. As a viewer, one feels compelled to participate in the ending, in the judgment, because, being human, this is one's duty, when faced with a terrible moral dilemma. Thus, the film should be considered a serious drama--a tragedy, in essence. At the same time, the film deserves to be classified as a horror movie--not of the contemporary sort, but of the variety associated with older styles of film-making that invoked Gothic horror. What sets it a cut or two above average, in this respect, is that it treats matters that had, once upon a time, real and dreadful consequences for people's actual lives--and it does so by reminding us that their tragedies mattered, in the largest moral sense. Thus are all of Edinburgh's tragic victims--of murder, of good intentions, of social neglect--redeemed, revalued, and remembered. It is good that they still have the power to move us, to make us feel awe at the strength of the human spirit, to make us, perhaps, weep for them.

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