On a Wednesday evening in mid-October, the auditorium at the West Wyandotte Library will go dark and a very old joke about the Devil will start to play. The Kansas City, Kansas Public Library's Mad for the Movies series has built its monthly themes around actors, directors, genres, time periods, and plot devices, and October's theme is one of the oldest plot devices of all: deals with the Devil. The film chosen to carry it is Bedazzled, Stanley Donen's 1967 British comedy, screening free at 6 p.m. on October 14, 2026, at 1737 N 82nd Street.
The premise is a hapless loser who sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for seven wishes and then has trouble winning over the girl of his dreams. That is the Faust bargain, dressed in the clothes of Swinging London. Dudley Moore plays Stanley Moon, a short-order cook hopelessly smitten with a waitress named Margaret Spencer, played by Eleanor Bron. Peter Cook plays the Devil, who here goes by George Spiggott and who grants the wishes while carefully twisting their wording so that each one curdles. Bedazzled is firmly on the satire end of the range of films about human dealings with the Devil.
The film is a product of one of the great comedy partnerships of the twentieth century. Cook and Moore met at Cambridge and came up together through the comedy club The Establishment and the satirical magazine Private Eye, then reached a mass audience with the television series Not Only... But Also, which ran from 1964 to 1970. They were part of the pre-Monty Python generation of British comics, and Bedazzled was their second film together after The Wrong Box in 1966. Cook wrote the screenplay from a story he and Moore devised; Moore wrote the music. Donen, who produced as well as directed, was the American filmmaker behind Singin' in the Rain and Charade, working here in Panavision and DeLuxe Color on a budget of roughly $770,000. The picture opened in New York City on December 10, 1967, and in London on December 21.
It is a scrappy, irreverent movie that takes aim at more than just its own premise. A contemporary review in The Harvard Crimson called it "the most irreverent picture in a long time, one executed with dash, wit, and occasional dollops of bad taste," and noted that hell supplies most of the gags. The Devil, in Cook's telling, complains about God sitting on his throne "surrounded by thousands of sycophantic, prissy little angels." Between wishes, Stanley trails the Devil through his daily round of what the film calls casual mischief: popping the buttons off shirts just back from the cleaners, telephoning people while they are in the bath, ripping the last page out of Agatha Christie novels. One wish lands Stanley in a convent of the Leaping Virilians, where initiation means bouncing on a trampoline to the beat of Big Sister while signs on the wall read "Big Sister Is Watching You." The Crimson's reviewer also offered a warning that still applies to anyone drawn in by the poster: Raquel Welch, billed prominently in the film's marketing, appears for perhaps five minutes of its running time, playing one of the seven deadly sins. Lust, naturally.
That same review noted a small confusion that has followed the film for decades, crediting Cook with the music when it was in fact Moore's work. Moore was a trained musician and composer as well as a comedian, and his score is part of what gives the film its particular texture. The movie runs 103 minutes and took in about $1.5 million in rentals in the United States and Canada, a modest return against its budget. It has since settled into the status of a cult favorite, and it was remade in 2000 by Harold Ramis with Brendan Fraser and Elizabeth Hurley, a version that kept the wish-granting structure and swapped the Swinging London setting for a Southern California one.
The screening is the latest installment of a series that runs every Wednesday night at 6 p.m. and exists, in the library's words, to explore and enjoy cinema from every era. The format is deliberately loose. Attendees are welcome to stay after the credits for a casual chat about what they just watched, or to treat it like a trip to the theater and slip out as soon as the movie ends. There is no ticket and no charge. The West Wyandotte branch has an auditorium with a projector and screen, and a dedicated parking lot off 82nd Street.
What makes the pairing work is that Bedazzled is not really a horror film about damnation. It is a comedy about the fine print. Stanley gets exactly what he asks for, seven times over, and it never once gets him what he wants, because the Devil is less a monster than a pedant with a sense of humor. For a series built around the idea of humans bargaining with the ultimate boogeyman, that is the joke worth sitting with: the deal is always available, the terms are always legible, and the trouble is always in the wording.