The Devil and Max Devlin

The Devil and Max Devlin is a 1981 American fantasy–comedy film produced by Walt Disney Productions, directed by Steven Hilliard Stern and starring Elliott Gould, Bill Cosby and Susan Anspach.

The film was considered to be controversial for a Disney film at the time because of the subject matter and the fact that Bill Cosby was featured as a character of evil, and was one of three motion pictures that influenced Disney to establish Touchstone Pictures and Hollywood Pictures (and later, to purchase such studios as Miramax Films and 20th Century Fox), as a method to produce and release films for mature audiences.

Plot
Max Devlin is a shady landlord of a rundown tenement in Los Angeles. Killed when he is run over by a bus, he descends into Hell, which resembles a corporate headquarters. He meets the devil's chief henchman, Barney Satin. Satin tells him that Max is doomed to spend eternity on Level 4 unless he can convince three other people to sell their souls in exchange for his. Max has two months to avoid damnation.

Satin retains Max's soul, so Max does not cast a reflection. Satin gives him limited magical powers to help him achieve his goal. Satin tells Max that if he succeeds, his soul will be free and the three subjects will continue to live until the natural end of their lives. It's implied that Max will only be “free” temporarily as his actions will still lead to him going to hell at the end of his life.

Max returns to Earth and begins his frantic quest. Barney appears frequently to check on Max's progress and to taunt Max. Only Max can see and hear Satin.

Max's three targets are Stella Summers, a high school dropout and aspiring singer; Nerve Nordlinger, a high school student who dreams of being popular; and Toby Hart, a child who wants his widowed mother to find happiness again. Max charms his way into each of their lives by landing a recording contract for Stella, trains Nerve after school as a motorbike racer, and spends time with Toby while helping his mother operate a day care facility.
  
Along the way, Max begins to care for all three of his subjects and discovers his innate decency. He falls in love with Toby's mother. Max finds it more difficult than he expected to get his victims to sign away their souls. Stella refuses to sign her contract, believing that Max is trying to get more than his 20% fee as her manager. Nerve is too focused on training for an important race. Toby refuses to sign his contract unless Max marries his mother.

Eventually Max obtains all three signatures. Immediately the signers' personalities all change and they all become bitter and hostile. As Max prepares to wed Toby's mother, Satin appears and reveals that he lied: he will take all three souls at midnight, and although Max gets to live until the natural end of his own life, he is still damned anyway. Max tries to destroy the contracts. Satin whisks Max to Hell and reveals his true demonic form. He threatens Max with even greater torment unless he turns over the contracts. Max destroys them and is immediately returned to Earth. 

Believing himself to be still damned, Max leaves his wedding reception to bid farewell to his three victims and finds that their personalities have all returned to normal. He also realizes that he casts a reflection in a mirror again. He surmises that by trying to sacrifice himself for the others he has been reprieved. He gives thanks as he attends one of Stella's concerts with his new wife and Toby.

Cast
 Elliott Gould as Max Devlin
 Bill Cosby as Barney Satin
 Susan Anspach as Penny Hart
 Adam Rich as Toby Hart
 Julie Budd as Stella Summers
 Sonny Shroyer as Big Billy Hunniker
 David Knell as Nerve Nordlinger
 Chuck Shamata as Jerry Nadler

Production
The film started its life much differently than it ended up: originally, screenwriter Jimmy Sangster conceived it in 1973 as a Hammer Films horror film called The Fairytale Man with Vincent Price as a dead actor who collects children's souls for the Devil, but it went into turnaround when producer Harold Cohen, who produced two TV movies based on Sangster's other novels, could not raise money for it. Sangster bought the rights back and sold it to Walt Disney Productions. Studio head Ron W. Miller hired Mary Rodgers to rewrite it based on the fact that Freaky Friday (1976), whose screenplay she adapted from her own novel, had been one of the studio's biggest hits of a decade for which profitable and critically well-received new films were few and far between for them. The title changed to The Devil and Max Devlin to reflect both its Faustian origins and the studio's desire not to be perceived as making movies that are only for children, while bike racing and music replaced the theater (despite that being what Rodgers' father, composer Richard Rodgers, was most famous for), and instead of just children, the Devil wanted adults' souls as well.

This was the second of two films Elliott Gould made for Disney after The Last Flight of Noah's Ark. Coincidentally, that film's plot line was also related to religion.

Though he had turned offers from Disney down before because of rumors that they were unwelcoming to minorities, and his wife Camille Cosby expressed reservations about an African-American actor playing the devil, Bill Cosby took the part because the role had already been played by whites primarily before this. The film was shot on Soundstage 3 at Disney's Burbank studio where the underworld set used so many butane furnaces, dry ice, and smoke machines pushing the heat up to 100 degrees, the cast and crew could only stay inside for a limited time while shooting. Part of Max Devlin's initial descent into Hell also incorporated footage of bodies marching from 1979's The Black Hole.

Soundtrack
In addition to the musical score by Buddy Baker, the film features two songs composed by Marvin Hamlisch and sung by Julie Budd: "Any Fool Could See" (lyrics by Allee Willis) and "Roses and Rainbows" (lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager). They were released as a single on both the A&M Records and Buena Vista Records labels in both the U.S. and the U.K., but it did not chart. To date, neither the two singles nor the film's underscore have received any kind of release on CD, but Julie Budd rerecorded the latter song for a 2005 album called The New Classics.

Reception
Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that the film "is neither the worst nor, certainly, the best of the lot." Variety wrote, "Though starting out well, film falls on its face fast, and never recovers." Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune was positive, giving the film three stars out of four and calling it "a surprising success. Newspapers have been filled with stories commenting of the demise of the Disney magic, but 'The Devil and Max Devlin' shows signs that someone is living in the 1980s on the Disney Burbank lot. This is a very funny little movie." Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "Somewhere inside 'The Devil and Max Devlin' (citywide), a lively, well-thought-out script (by Mary Rogers) struggles against layers of Disneyfication ... Cosby, in an unsympathetic first for him, has nothing which stretches either his comedic or his acting gifts." Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote, "It's no fun at all watching a lumpy, glum Elliott Gould going through the motions of preying on a group of children before reforming himself with the foregone conclusion of a last-minute change of heart. The real self-image problem may exist at the Disney organization, which appears to be groping desperately for less innocuous story material." As of August 2019 the film holds an 18% score on Rotten Tomatoes based on 11 reviews.

It was not a sizable moneymaker for the studio; it came in 45th place in the yearly U.S. box office race with a $16,000,000 gross, but an August 1981 article in the New York Times quoted Ron W. Miller as saying that it lost money. Although the film also was one of the earliest in a series of PG films designed to modernize the studio's image, this had a reciprocal negative effect when they received angry letters from longtime supporters of the company who objected to the profanity in the dialogue, claiming that Walt Disney would never have allowed it. In fact, he allowed characters to use the word "hell" in the feature films 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Sleeping Beauty and depicted it as a place in the short cartoon Pluto's Judgement Day. This persuaded Disney to delve further into the idea of creating other labels to handle such family-unfriendly material, though it would be another three years before that actually happened.

First released on videocassette in the U.S. in late 1981 and then discontinued for years in spite of Bill Cosby's renewed TV popularity because of The Cosby Show (which started its eight-year run in 1984, the same year Elliott Gould's sitcom E/R came and went), Anchor Bay Entertainment released the film on DVD in November 2000, and Walt Disney Home Entertainment re-released it on DVD in 2006.

In the U.K., ironically considering the film's English origins, its 1987 videocassette debut caused a minor stir as it coincided with the growing uproar over "Video nasties," the press-generated term for films with gory violence and explicit sex. Anti-censorship campaigner Liam T. Sanford wrote a letter to the police watch committee about the film just to make a point about their criteria for pulling films, and they actually pulled it. The suspension was only temporary; the film had already passed the BBFC classification with an A rating in cinemas in 1981 and again with a PG in 1987 for videocassette and 2003 for DVD.

Though Jimmy Sangster received on-screen credit for the film's story but not the screenplay, he said of the experience: ""My only consolation in the affair (apart from the money) was the fact that I got to share a screen credit with the daughter of Richard Rodgers ... that's the Richard Rodgers who wrote all the great musicals. Would that his daughter had been as good a screenwriter as her father was a musician."

References

External links

 
 
 
 The Devil and Max Devlin at UltimateDisney.com

Category:1981 films
Category:1980s fantasy-comedy films
Category:American fantasy-comedy films
Category:American films
Category:Films directed by Steven Hilliard Stern
Category:Films set in Los Angeles
Category:Walt Disney Pictures films
Category:Works based on the Faust legend
Category:Films scored by Buddy Baker (composer)
Category:Films about singers
Category:Films set in hell
Category:The Devil in fiction
Category:Films with screenplays by Jimmy Sangster