Timothy as Dr Rock in The Doctor and the Devils.

Based on a screenplay by the poet Dylan Thomas, adapted by the Academy Award-nominated writer of 'The Dresser,' Ronald Harwood, Brooksfilms' The Doctor and the Devils is a gothic thriller inspired by the real-life exploits of the famed 19th Century grave-robbers Burke and Hare.

The Brooksfilms Presentation The Doctor and the Devils stars Timothy Dalton, Jonathan Pryce and Twiggy. Filmed at London's Shepperton Studio's, the Twentieth Century Fox release is produced by Jonathan Sanger and directed by noted cinematographer Freddie Francis, from Ronald Harwood's adaption of Dylan Thomas's original screenplay.

The story Dylan Thomas told in his richly imagistic screenplay for The Doctor and the Devils is an often shocking meditation on life and death, on poverty and privilege, and on the perennial question of whether the end justifies the means. Timothy Dalton stars as Dr. Thomas Rock, an unorthodox anatomist who refuses to obey the rules of the Victorian medical establishment. In his quest for scientific truth, Dr. Rock unwittingly falls in league with a team of 'resurrectionists,' Fallon (Jonathan Pryce) and Broom (Stephen Rea), who are more then willing to supply him with dead bodies - fresh ones.

Besides being a renowed cinematographer, Freddie Francis also directed several classic British horror films, including Tales From the Crypt.

Along with his considerable accomplisments as a producer/writer/director/actor, Mel Brooks, through his production company, Brooksfilms, has been responsible for several very highly acclaimed and unusual motion pictures, including 'The Elephant Man' (which garnered eight Oscar nominations.)

Dylan Thomas and The Doctor and the Devils

The outbreak of World War II found Dylan Thomas excluded from active military service because of asthma, and burdened by the money worries that beset him throughout much of his adult life. His solution to both problems was to write film-scripts: Hired at a beginning salary of £8 a week by Donald Taylor's Strand Films, a company then engaged in making films for the Ministry of Information, Thomas spent the war years writing morale-boosting documentaries, some of which featured the poet's extraordinary voice on the soundtrack as well. Films like 'They Are The Men' and the ambitious 'Our Country' taught Thomas the craft of screenwriting and enabled him to address a popular audience for the first time in his life. The Doctor and the Devils is by common consent the best of the screenplays Thomas wrote for Donald Taylor; like 'Under Milkwood,' the radio play which was actually begun the same year.

Taylor, who believed that a good script needed "a background of idea which is the driving force of the plot," had hit on the Burke and Hare case as a way to dramatize the question of "the end justifying the means." William Burke, a cobbler, and William Hare, a ruffian who ran a rooming house for the poor in Edinburgh, are among the most famous villains in the annals of crime. Between November, 1827, and their arrest in October, 1828, they murdered 33 people and sold their bodies to Dr. Robert Knox, a brilliant independent professor of anatomy who refused to let his research be hampered by existing laws limiting medical research to the cadavers of executed criminals. Their exploits had inspired 'The Body Snatcher,' a Val Lewton horror film starring Boris Karloff which was only loosely based on the Robert Louis Stevenson story of the same name; and Knox had been the subject of a play by James Bridie, 'The Anatomist.' Excited by the subject, Taylor researched and wrote a story in which historical fact was observed, although the names were altered, and assigned Dylan Thomas to turn it into a screenplay.

Dr Rock (Timothy) lecturing at the Academy in The Doctor and the Devils

Thomas seems to have found Taylor's approach to screen writing, with its emphasis on a single unifying idea, particularly congenial. Borrowing structural ideas as well as imagery from the death-obsessed Jacobeans, he dramatized Taylor's 'master idea' by creating starkly contrasted worlds of poverty and privilege, the Market-Place and the Academy, between which all sorts of echoes, exchanges and insidious contaminations could occur.

The most striking thing about The Doctor and the Devils is Thomas's use of language - in the colorful and sometimes lyrical dialogue passages, but especially in the descriptions and stage directions, where his strongly visual imagination ran wild. While some of Thomas's descriptions - for instance, a Halloween vision of leaves and scraps of paper blowing like ghosts in the deserted Market-Place - would have required the Disney studios to bring them to life, the highly-colored descriptive writing was not the poet's self-indulgence; Thomas understood that film was a visual medium, and in this script he found a way to dramatize an abstract idea through imagery, although his gift for dialogue served him well. Ironically Dr. Rock is the only upper-class character who acknowledges the existence of the Market-Place and shows a humanitarian interest in its inhabitants, but Thomas also portrays him as a man blinded by intellectual pride, who refuses to see the web of complicity that has bound him to his 'instruments,' Fallon and Broom, until he has been destroyed by them.

For reasons that history does not record, The Doctor and the Devils was never produced, although Thomas cared enough about it to approach his friend Graham Greene in 1947 for help getting it made. After Thomas's death in 1953, Donald Taylor published the screenplay with the technical directions taken out - the first screenplay ever to be published before being produced, he observed "due to the literary quality, unusual in this medium."

After it's publication The Doctor and the Devils was performed a few times on the stage, and during the sixties the American director Nicholas Ray planned to bring it, at long last, to the screen. But all efforts to mount a film production failed.

Filming The Doctor and the Devils

Director Freddie Francis first read The Doctor and the Devils in 1975 while directing a horror film with Peter Cushing. One of the world's leading cinematographers, Francis had left his first profession to direct, but found himself 'pigeonholed' as a horror specialist; when his producer showed him the Thomas script, he was very interested. "Most of the films I have made as a director," he recalls, "I'm only proud of that because they surpassed the script, and I get satisfaction out of that. But with The Doctor and the Devils I would be starting with words written by Dylan Thomas, whom I greatly admired. I like the moral premise of the story for a film, and I thought the period - early 19th Century - was a good one for a film; it's a period filled with atmosphere and opportunities for visual stylization."

But the film never got made, the rights were eventually acquired by Dr Barrington Cooper, who contacted Francis, several years later about directing a project. Cooper subsequently presented the project with no director attached, to a number of production entities, including Brooksfilms, where Mel Brooks expressed interest in producing the Thomas script. Cooper at this point was unaware of Francis's prior involvement with Brooksfilms, and Brooks was unaware of Francis's long-standing interest in directing The Doctor and the Devils until he learned of it from Jonathan Sanger (Producer/Director) "I had read the script before Mel," Sanger recalls, "and recommended we get involved with it: My first impression was that it was a very, very dramatic story, with great emotional lights and darks. I also loved the evocative language of the stage directions; it was clear Thomas had a sensational visual sense. "Then when I was in London talking to Freddie Francis about shooting my first film as a director, 'Emerald,' he mentioned to me that there was a project he was in love with and had been trying to get off the ground for a long time. By strange coincidence, it turned out be The Doctor and the Devils. When I told Mel this and added that if Freddie directed I would want to produce the film, Mel liked the idea of getting the 'Elephant Man' team together again, and he agreed."

After decades of waiting, Dylan Thomas's screenplay was put into production rapidly. "Freddie and I went off to Paris to make 'Emerald,'" says Sanger, "and during the course of production, on week-ends, we would be talking about The Doctor and the Devils. We hired a production manager and started pre-production while we were still making the other picture." In the meantime, Mel Brooks had brought in Ronald Harwood, to revise the Thomas screenplay.

"I have always adored Dylan Thomas," says Harwood, "I nearly met him once, just before he died. And I had read The Doctor and the Devils in the sixties when I was a dresser and business manager for Donald Wolfitt; a film company offered him the part of one of the graverobbers.

"I remember thinking at the time how powerful it was, but I also saw things I would want to change, which we have changed in this version, I think for the better. My main function was to sharpen the original by cutting what was not dramatic - the overly discursive or argumentative passages - and bringing it down to the drama. This was particularly important with Doctor Rock's character: We wanted to dramatize his dilemna rather then talk about it, and make that side of the story more interesting. Because of course Fallon and Broom are always going to be fascinating.

"I didn't always feel that I was collaborating with Dylan Thomas, but I felt that thing you feel when you work on something of quality - you feel a certain respect for the author. And I felt it was kind of a nice justice to have the film finally made, after all these years."

For director Freddie Francis the project was a fulfillment of a ten-year dream. "When I first read a script, he says "I form a mental picture of the film I'd like to make, and when I first read The Doctor and the Devils ten years ago, I saw it as a conflict between two ways of life. I love photographing and directing films with lots of atmosphere, and I thought the contrast of these two atmospheres, the Market-Place and Rock's Academy, would be quite striking.

"I was particulary interested in showing the relationship between Rock and Fallon - they're very similar characters, in a way, because they're both single-minded. Once Fallon realizes how easy it is to get these bodies and sell them, that is his career, and he's as single-minded about it, in an animal sort of way, as Rock is about the benefit of mankind.

"We have made two important changes: We changed the time period to the Victorian era, a little later then the events portrayed in the screenplay, and we have made it an English city, although we don't specify which one. Theoretically we could have shot it in London on various locations we did on 'Elephant Man,' but there's very little left of the old London I wanted to show. So we built everything on soundstages at Shepperton: We created a huge area to film in, which you couldn't get a tenth of in London or even in Edinburgh today. Also it's easier to stylize the sets without spending lots of money if you do it on a soundstage."

This is a photograph of some old houses in Cloth Fair, London. Circa 1877.

For nine weeks during production two soundstages at Shepperton were joined and converted into an 1840's city square, complete with cobbled lanes and alleys, a drainage system, molded arches and columns, and lofty flats representing broken down tenements. The whorehouse, tavern and cockpit, down to the minutest detail, were authentic to the period, including the accessories that dressed the set and stalls within.

As sources Francis gave production designer Robert Laing books by French illustrator Gustave Doré, who had drawn numerous English city scenes during the period portrayed in the film. "We are not trying to create beautiful sets," says Laing. "We wanted to create the squalor, and put the actors right in the muck and mire. Visitors to the set would cringe when they came in. We had to joke that no one should go down one of our alleys unless accompanied by a second person."

For the scenes in Rock's home and Academy, interiors of existing 18th Century buildings in Lincoln's Inn Field and Temple were duplicated on soundstages as well. Rock's lecture hall, whose circular form echoes the cockpit built for the Market-Place scenes, were copied exactly from a hall in a London museum where conditions would have made filming impossible.

Finally, all the director's efforts at a heightened portrayal of a period were at the service of Thomas's darkly poetic tale and themoral dilemna it pose. "What I have tried to do with the low-lifes in this film," says Francis, "is to depict how little life was worth in those days. Is Dr. Rock right? Does the end justify the means? Before you can really judge that, you have to show the audience the value of life and death in that particular era. Otherwise they can't really make up their minds whether they find Rock guilty or not."

The Doctor and the Devils is a Brooksfilms Presentation produced by Jonathan Sanger. Freddie Francis directs from a screenplay by Ronald Harwood based on an original screenplay by Dylan Thomas. Mel Brooks is the executive producer. The music is by John Morris. The Doctor and the Devils was released October 1985. Domestic release by Twentieth Century Fox. Brooksfilms distributed the film internationally.

The Production Information for The Doctor and the Devils © Copyright Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation 1985 All Rights Reserved.