THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN

Long before he hit Hollywood stardom with 10 and Arthur, Dudley Moore was a major figure on the British comedy scene. He first made a name for himself as part of the ‘Beyond the Fringe’ team of satirists, but after that he was usually seen in partnership with the late Peter Cook. Their ‘Pete and Dud’ double act was pretty much the starting point for ‘alternative’ comedy series on British TV.
Back then in the sixties, actor/director Harold Ramis was already a comedy nut, although he didn’t actually become a professional comic until he joined Chicago’s famed Second City improv company in 1969. But, at a time when American audiences were tuned in to Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, Ramis was into Pete and Dud. “From their earliest work, I was a big fan,” he says. “I had actually memorised all their stage material and looked for everything they did.” In those days, Ramis wasn’t in a position to fly over to London to see Moore and Cook on stage at the Establishment Club, so most of what he knew of their work came from 33rpm records. And from movies. The pair had stuck a first tentative toe in the cinematic waters in 1966 with a somewhat laboured farce called The Wrong Box. But they hit paydirt the following year with Bedazzled, which they co-wrote and starred in. The director was Hollywood legend Stanley Donen, the master of romantic comedy.
Bedazzled was basically a modern comic version of the Faust story, in which Moore played a cook working in a burger bar who lusts hopelessly after a waitress. Enter the mysterious Mr Spiggott (Cook), who promises to fix it for him in return for his soul. Mr Spiggott, it turns out, is the Devil.
“When Bedazzled came out, I rushed to see it and I loved it,” recalls Ramis. “Then, years later, my partner Trevor Albert came to me, told me that Fox had the rights to the film and asked if I wanted to remake it.” It was a question, Ramis realised, that he’d been waiting for someone to ask him for some 30 years. But he and Albert (who had been working together since Caddyshack some 20 years before) knew that a straightforward remake was never on the cards.
“I remembered that, when I had seen it when it first came out, I thought it was one of the funniest movies I had ever seen,” recalls Albert, who trained as a journalist but ended up working as a studio researcher before teaming up with Ramis. “It was very irreverent and different from anything else in those days. It took on politics and religion and every possible institution.” In other words, he might have added, it belonged to the British comic tradition, just a few years before the Pythons hit their stride, at a time when Hollywood was still doing tired imitations of the kind of comedies that had starred Rock Hudson and Doris Day a decade earlier. Maybe that’s why Donen went to England to make it.
“So,” continues Albert, “Harold and I had both loved the original movie. But that was in the mid-sixties and now it was 1999, with 30 years of culture and time passing. We felt what we had to do was use the story as a point of departure.