Bottom of the Ninth

Here’s a trivia question for you: what movie beat out Ordinary People, The Elephant Man and Raging Bull to win the award for Best Screenplay at the 1981 Golden Globes? You’ll never guess the answer: it was The Ninth Configuration, the directorial debut of William Peter Blatty, the former comedy writer who reinvented himself as the master of “theological horror” with the publication of his 1971 novel The Exorcist.

I purchased The Ninth Configuration on DVD a couple of months ago at the Wee Book Inn. It was an impulse buy—I had a dim memory of sci-fi curmudgeon Harlan Ellison having given it a favourable review, and the tantalizing, inexplicable image on the DVD cover of an astronaut on the moon looking up at Christ on the cross closed the deal. But I didn’t get around to watching it until last week, having gotten sidetracked by a bunch of much more ordinary movies and TV shows. I’m glad things worked out that way, though. By the time the haunting opening images of The Ninth Configuration started flickering across my TV screen—a lonely man sitting in the turret of a fog-enshrouded castle, listening to a cassette recording of a country song called “San Antone”—my brain had been sufficiently softened up for the film’s bizarre twists and turns to have maximum impact upon me.

The Ninth Configuration is one of the damnedest movies I’ve ever seen. I can’t believe anybody gave Blatty the money to make it—on his DVD commentary, Blatty implies the film was some kind of complicated tax dodge the Pepsi-Cola company had worked out with the Czechoslovakian government.

It’s set in an abandoned castle in the Pacific Northwest that’s been converted into an ultra-experimental psychiatric facility for Vietnam veterans, all of whom seem to have wandered straight into this movie from Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor. One black inmate walks around in a homemade Superman costume, another dresses up like Leonardo da Vinci, another tries to stage all-dog versions of Shakespeare’s greatest plays. Doctors pose as patients, patients pose as doctors. A patient played by Robert Loggia dons blackface and sings along to an Al Jolson record.

Most of the film plays like Hellzapoppin’ set in a mental asylum... except, that is, for the scenes between volatile former astronaut Scott Wilson (a last-minute replacement for real-life crazy person Michael Moriarty) and newly installed head psychiatrist Stacy Keach. Most of these scenes involve Keach and Wilson arguing about the existence of God: Keach says mankind’s ability to rise above his animal nature and perform purely altruistic acts of self-sacrifice is evidence of the divine; Wilson remains unconvinced.

Blatty’s script is unbearably pretentious, and yet it’s also consistently hilarious. The performances are hammy and yet completely mesmerizing—the volcanic rage that Stacy Keach uncorks in a couple of scenes is genuinely terrifying. There doesn’t seem any way this mixture of dorm-room philosophizing and non-sequitur slapstick could possibly combine into a coherent movie, and yet, especially once you discover the Keach’s big secret, this schizophrenic tone seems like exactly the right choice.

Critics have never given Blatty much credit as a director, but I can’t figure out why. Maybe the skimpiness of his filmography is the problem: after all, he’s only ever directed two movies, The Ninth Configuration and Exorcist III. But even if you don’t think the films completely hold together, Exorcist III still contains one of the greatest heart-in-your-mouth shocks of any horror flick of the last 25 years, while Ninth climaxes with an amazing, surreal, tense barroom standoff that David Lynch himself would have been proud to have filmed.

I’d love to see Blatty make another film, but he may simply be too busy re-editing The Ninth Configuration to even start. There are at least five “official” cuts of the film already out there, and Blatty says he’s assembled perhaps 30 more... and counting. Which suggests to me that he’s gone a little bit insane. Maybe what he needs is a room in a quiet castle in the forest somewhere where he can set up his moviola, play “San Antone” a few times and work through his madness in peace. (June 29, 2006)