''The Doctor and The Devils'' is a 1985 British gothic horror film directed by

Freddie Francis Frederick William Francis (22 December 1917 – 17 March 2007) was an English cinematographer and film director. He achieved his greatest successes as a cinematographer. He started his career with British films such as Jack Cardiff's ''Sons and L ...

, and produced by

Mel Brooks Mel Brooks (born Melvin James Kaminsky; June 28, 1926) is an American actor, comedian and filmmaker. With a career spanning over seven decades, he is known as a writer and director of a variety of successful broad farces and parodies. He began h ...

, through his production company Brooksfilms. It is based upon the true story of

Burke and Hare The Burke and Hare murders were a series of sixteen killings committed over a period of about ten months in 1828 in Edinburgh, Scotland. They were undertaken by William Burke and William Hare, who sold the corpses to Robert Knox for dissection ...

, who in 1828

Edinburgh Edinburgh ( ; gd, Dùn Èideann ) is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 Council areas of Scotland, council areas. Historically part of the county of Midlothian (interchangeably Edinburghshire before 1921), it is located in Lothian ...

Scotland Scotland (, ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a border with England to the southeast and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the ...

, murdered at least 16 people and sold their bodies for anatomical dissection. The film stars

Timothy Dalton Timothy Leonard Dalton Leggett (; born 21 March 1946) is a British actor. Beginning his career on stage, he made his film debut as Philip II of France in the 1968 historical drama ''The Lion in Winter''. He gained international prominence as ...

as Dr. Thomas Rock (a character based on the real-life Dr. Knox, to whom Burke and Hare supplied bodies) and features

Jonathan Pryce Sir Jonathan Pryce (born John Price; 1 June 1947) is a Welsh actor who is known for his performances on stage and in film and television. He has received numerous awards, including two Tony Awards and two Laurence Olivier Awards. In 2021 he wa ...

and

Stephen Rea Stephen Rea ( ; born 31 October 1946) is an Irish film and stage actor. Rea has appeared in films such as ''V for Vendetta'', ''Michael Collins'', ''Interview with the Vampire'' and ''Breakfast on Pluto''. Rea was nominated for the Academy Award ...

as Fallon and Broom, characters based upon Burke and Hare. The film was directed by

, and features a script adapted by Sir Ronald Harwood from an unproduced screenplay by

Dylan Thomas Dylan Marlais Thomas (27 October 1914 – 9 November 1953) was a Welsh poet and writer whose works include the poems "Do not go gentle into that good night" and "And death shall have no dominion", as well as the "play for voices" ''Under ...

Plot

Dr. Thomas Rock (

) is a respected 19th-century anatomist lecturing at a prominent medical school. He is deeply passionate about improving medical knowledge, a pursuit for which he believes "the ends justify the means." Unfortunately, due to the laws of the time very few

cadavers A cadaver or corpse is a dead human body that is used by medical students, physicians and other scientists to study anatomy, identify disease sites, determine causes of death, and provide tissue to repair a defect in a living human being. Stude ...

are legally available to the medical profession, necessitating the use of

body snatchers Body snatching is the illicit removal of corpses from graves, morgues, and other burial sites. Body snatching is distinct from the act of grave robbery as grave robbing does not explicitly involve the removal of the corpse, but rather theft from ...

or "Resurrection men" by the medical establishment to procure additional specimens. Dr. Rock's young assistant Dr. Murray (

Julian Sands Julian Richard Morley Sands''Births, Marriages & Deaths Index of England & Wales, ...

) is given the task of buying the bodies, for which he is authorized to pay a small fortune, particularly for fresher corpses. When alcoholic miscreants Fallon (

) and Broom (

) overhear details of the arrangement, they begin to murder the locals and sell their bodies. Gradually, Dr. Murray becomes more suspicious of the string of fresh bodies turning up at the medical school, but Dr. Rock dismisses his concerns. Meanwhile, Murray has begun to fall for beautiful local prostitute Jennie Bailey (

Twiggy Dame Lesley Lawson (''née'' Hornby; born 19 September 1949) is an English model, actress, and singer, widely known by the nickname Twiggy. She was a British cultural icon and a prominent teenaged model during the swinging '60s in London. ...

), who soon becomes the target of Fallon and Broom's murderous enterprise. When Jennie's friend Alice (

Nichola McAuliffe Nichola McAuliffe (born 1955) is an English television and stage actress and writer, best known for her role as Sheila Sabatini in the ITV hospital sitcom '' Surgical Spirit'' (1989–1995). She has also starred in several stage musicals and won ...

) turns up dead in Dr. Rock's dissection room, Murray realizes what is happening and heroically rescues Jennie from a murderous Fallon. Both killers are soon arrested, but Broom agrees to

turn state's evidence A criminal turns state's evidence by admitting guilt and testifying as a witness for the state against their associate(s) or accomplice(s), often in exchange for leniency in sentencing or immunity from prosecution.Howard Abadinsky, ''Organized C ...

against his former partner, and is set free, unrepentant. Fallon is executed by hanging. Dr. Rock, for his part in the killings, is the subject of widespread public outrage, but ultimately not punished or censured by his colleagues. The film ends with Rock pondering his responsibility for the horrors and concluding, "oh my God -- I knew what I was doing."

Cast

Production

Brooksfilms founder and

executive producer Executive producer (EP) is one of the top positions in the making of a commercial entertainment product. Depending on the medium, the executive producer may be concerned with management accounting or associated with legal issues (like copyrights o ...

, a lifelong horror fan, acquired the rights to Dylan Thomas's unproduced screenplay ''The Doctor and the Devils'' (first published in 1953) in the hopes of adapting it into a horror film. He hired director and former

cinematographer The cinematographer or director of photography (sometimes shortened to DP or DOP) is the person responsible for the photographing or recording of a film, television production, music video or other live action piece. The cinematographer is the ch ...

, who during the 1960s and 70s had directed a series of horror films for famed British horror productions companies

Hammer A hammer is a tool, most often a hand tool, consisting of a weighted "head" fixed to a long handle that is swung to deliver an impact to a small area of an object. This can be, for example, to drive nails into wood, to shape metal (as w ...

and Amicus. Brooks' original intention was to simply use the title of the Thomas screenplay, but Francis pushed for a closer adherence to the original script. A compromise was arranged with playwright and screenwriter

Ronald Harwood Sir Ronald Harwood ( né Horwitz; 9 November 1934 – 8 September 2020) was a South African-born British author, playwright, and screenwriter, best known for his plays for the British stage as well as the screenplays for ''The Dresser'' (for w ...

adapting Thomas's more cerebral work into something more genre-friendly. Despite the adaptation, much of Thomas's original dialogue remains.

Reception

The film struggled to find an audience, and was not well received by critics.

Roger Ebert Roger Joseph Ebert (; June 18, 1942 – April 4, 2013) was an American film critic, film historian, journalist, screenwriter, and author. He was a film critic for the ''Chicago Sun-Times'' from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, Ebert beca ...

gave the film one-and-a-half stars out of four, writing, "It is impossible to discover, on the evidence of "The Doctor and the Devils," why anybody connected with this movie thought it should be made. It is unredeemed, dreary, boring, gloomy dreck unilluminated by even the slightest fugitive moment of inspiration or ambition," though he praised star Twiggy as the film's "only ray of sunshine."

Vincent Canby Vincent Canby (July 27, 1924 – October 15, 2000) was an American film and theatre critic who served as the chief film critic for ''The New York Times'' from 1969 until the early 1990s, then its chief theatre critic from 1994 until his death in ...

of the ''

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'' was more positive, writing the film boasts a "first-rate English cast," and adding that "Mr. Harwood's screenplay, which retains a lot of the original Thomas dialogue, is much more fun to see than the Thomas screenplay is to read."

References

External links