The Ninth Configuration | movie | 1980 | Official Featurette - video Dailymotion

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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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00:00 [wind]

00:10 [wind]

00:20 [wind]

00:30 [wind]

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]

04:07 [music]

04:11 [music]

04:15 [music]

04:18 [BLANK_AUDIO]

The Ninth Configuration | movie | 1980 | Official Featurette

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