Col. Vincent Kane is a military psychiatrist who takes charge of an army mental hospital situated in a secluded castle. | dG1fMDBMRDZ3UmRFY2M
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Short filmTranscript
00:00 [wind]
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00:38 Somebody's coming.
00:40 [wind]
00:43 Welcome to Comeduncut.
00:44 One of my favourite films of all time has just arrived on Blu-ray here in the UK
00:48 and I want to take this opportunity to flag it up.
00:50 If you're a regular here at the blog, you'll know that I'm obsessed with The Exorcist
00:53 and I know I go on about it endlessly, but I am equally obsessed with The Ninth Configuration,
00:58 the film which William Peter Blatty, who wrote The Exorcist, wrote, directed and co-starred in
01:03 at the end of the '70s, early '80s.
01:05 The film is an extraordinary piece of work.
01:07 It's a psychological, theological thriller about a psychiatrist who goes to a remote asylum,
01:12 which is actually an old Gothic castle,
01:14 whose job is to find out whether the inmates in this asylum are faking it,
01:18 whether they are really crazy or whether they're putting it on.
01:20 In the course of doing this, he has to work with one of them,
01:23 who is adapting Shakespeare's plays for dogs.
01:26 Do you understand that now, you dumb, stupid idiot?
01:29 From now on, we do the scene my way.
01:32 And also has theological discussions about the existence or non-existence of God.
01:36 Now, the reason I love the film is partly because it reminds us something very important
01:41 about William Peter Blatty, which is before he made The Exorcist,
01:44 he was best known for working in comedy.
01:46 You know the Pink Panther movie, A Shot in the Dark,
01:49 which I think is arguably one of the funniest Pink Panther movies.
01:51 That was co-written by William Peter Blatty.
01:54 His idol when he was young was Groucho Marx.
01:57 In fact, there's a very early television appearance of Blatty with Groucho Marx,
02:00 and that was the area that he worked in before The Exorcist suddenly gave him a name as a horror writer.
02:04 The Ninth Configuration is a wonderful story.
02:07 It is equally involving and thrilling and amusing and endlessly quotable,
02:13 and it also exists in several different versions.
02:16 The Golden Globe that Blatty has for writing its screenplay
02:21 actually has the name Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Cane written on it,
02:23 because the film was variously released as Killer Cane,
02:25 which is the name of the source novel, and The Ninth Configuration,
02:28 which I have to say is my preferred title.
02:30 And there are different versions of the films with different endings,
02:33 different scenes put in, different scenes taken out.
02:35 Some of them have a song at the beginning, some of them don't.
02:38 I've seen at least four different cuts of The Ninth Configuration,
02:41 and somehow none of them are definitive,
02:43 because frankly it still looks, after all these years, like an ongoing work in progress.
02:48 Over the years I've done many interviews with Blatty about Ninth Configuration.
02:54 I think some of those may be on the new Blu-ray.
02:57 I'm not sure, because I haven't been involved in this new Blu-ray version.
03:00 But here's what I want to say.
03:02 If you haven't seen The Ninth Configuration yet, do yourself a favour.
03:06 Check it out. It is a wonderful, life-affirming film.
03:10 It's a film which manages to do the thing you really want cult cinema to do,
03:13 to surprise you, to amaze you, to make you laugh, to make you gasp.
03:18 Over the years various distributors have struggled with how to sell Ninth Configuration
03:31 because of Blatty's reputation as a horror writer.
03:33 When the novel was first issued it had a tagline which said,
03:36 "Nobody writes funny lines like Blatty."
03:38 Later that novel was reissued with a tagline which said it was a tale of shrieking terror,
03:43 which it isn't.
03:44 What it is, is brilliantly indefinable.
03:47 Many years ago I talked on this blog about my love of Andrzej Zawowski's Possession,
03:51 and one of the things I loved most about that film was it's really hard to describe.
03:55 The same is true of The Ninth Configuration.
03:57 I'm going to ask you to do something.
03:59 Just this once, trust me.
04:03 [music]
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04:18 [BLANK_AUDIO]