The Ninth Configuration – William Peter Blatty, 1999 ★★★½

Nuttier Than a Wagon Load of Pralines

In the last 30 years of rewatching The Ninth Configuration, something about the shock of my first viewing has never worn off.

Like Jake and Elwood Blues, screenwriter-director William Peter Blatty was on a mission from God. If he left a few overturned cars or crushed motorcyclists in his wake, it was a feature, not a bug. Wonder what was going on in his head? Too late to ask now; he died last year. But we do have this book featuring the original shooting script.

The Ninth Configuration remains little known in its own right, though it did win a surprise Golden Globe in 1981 for Best Screenplay. It followed one of the most famous horror movies of all time, The Exorcist, which Blatty scripted from his own novel for director William Friedkin. The Exorcist may be nuts, but not like this.

In his introduction to the screenplay included in this edition, film critic Mark Kermode calls Ninth Configuration “one of the most genuinely bizarre offerings of modern American cinema. A work of matchless madness, it has divided audiences like the waves of the Red Sea since its opening in 1980, becoming a cult classic that continues to provoke either apostolic devotion or baffled dismissal…”

No doubt which side of the divide Kermode is on. He not only provides a running string of marginalia throughout this book, but sat with Blatty two years later for a DVD commentary.

Set in a military insane asylum, The Ninth Configuration follows the arrival of a new commander, Hudson Kane (played in the movie by Stacy Keach). Kane’s mysterious, haunted background is echoed by his new surroundings, a sprawling mansion crammed with baroque statuary and assorted headcases, most of them decorated officers with combat experience in Vietnam. A Marine guard calls them out:

GROPER: I’ve known a lot of good men who didn’t like this war…Some of them were kids; scared, confused. But they stood up, you sons-of-bitches. They stood up! Now, some of them don’t have arms; or their legs; some of them are blind. [Pause] And most of them are dead. And you play games in a goddamn castle in California! You stinking, garbage-crawling scum!

Inmates whistle and hiss at him, demand he say “Simon Says,” pepper each other with quotes from famous movies, and burst into “You Are My Sunshine” when Kane’s car pulls into the driveway. It’s that kind of movie, and it’s just getting started.

If you are one of the few who has seen The Ninth Configuration, you might have noticed something about the above monologue from Groper: It doesn’t appear in the actual film. Blatty shot the scene as written, but left it out because the actor playing Groper, decorated World War II veteran Neville Brand, played the scene with so much conviction it sucked the air out of the humor Blatty crafted around him.

Kane (Stacy Keach) gives Cutshaw (Scott Wilson) a Rorschach test in an early scene from The Ninth Configuration. Ed Flanders, playing a Marine psychologist, looks on. Image from http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/The-Ninth-Configuration-Blu-ray/103379/. 

There are a lot of variances between the script as written and what made it on screen. In his published script for The Shawshank Redemption, which I reviewed for this blog, Frank Darabont wrote of the value of having a record set down of what was in the minds of the film’s creators before budgets and actors get involved. Shawshank was a meticulously developed project; compared to Ninth Configuration it could have been a NASA moon launch.

That’s actually where the movie Ninth Configuration begins, with an astronaut named Billy Cutshaw aborting his lunar mission in the final countdown. There are differences, though, in what comes before that between script and movie, dramatic differences which help us understand what Blatty was trying to do and how he did it.

The script opens on a different scene set in Vietnam. Marines are evacuating a village. One old woman falls behind. A corporal gently leads her to a place where she can rest. While he’s telling her everything will be alright, she reveals a grenade and pulls its pin:

CORPORAL: (not an epithet: a prayer) Jesus.

SIMULTANEOUS CUTS OF:

The Corporal flying upward, impelled by a soundless burst of air.

Gripping, no? Yes, but like Groper’s tirade it feels wrong for the finished film. The prelude’s only direct connection to the rest of the movie would have been via a secondary character, an officer on the scene we later meet as Captain Bennish [not a Marine in the film but an Air Force officer.]

An early establishing shot of the institution where The Ninth Configuration is shot. If it doesn't look like California, that's because it was shot in Hungary. Ironically, as originally written the castle belonged to a famous star of vampire movies. Blatty sneaks a couple of Bela Lugosi references in the finished film. Image from http://misterneil.blogspot.com/2010/09/ninth-configuration.html.

In the movie, Blatty opted to simplify: A few establishing shots of the institution’s moody décor (Hungary subbing for California), a solitary man (Cutshaw) alone in a room, a quiet country song. Credits don’t even roll until we get to the moon shot sequence some minutes in.

Once people start talking, what follows is a wave of profanity, weird jokes, and non-sequiturs:

NAMMACK: What country is this?

RENO: The Bronx.

THE MEN: Hail, Caesar!

RENO: Just one more thing, sir.

GROPER: What?

RENO: Stick a pineapple up your ass and pretend you’re Hawaiian.

Reno may strike you as being on edge; he’s enmeshed at the moment in a “labor of love” directing Shakespeare’s plays for dogs, worried what people will think if he casts a Great Dane as Hamlet.

Other inmates at the institution are similar. One thinks he’s a doctor, another Superman. Fairbanks is convinced he can walk through walls:

FAIRBANKS: Not only me. Anyone. Cops. People. People in Nashville.

When an angry Fairbanks sets to beating one wall with a hammer to punish its atoms for refusing to play along (“Independent snots! Shape up or ship out!”), Kane talks him down by suggesting his problem may not lie with the atoms in the wall but those in the hammer.

The centerpiece of the film, and of the script, involves Kane’s debates about what it all means with Captain Cutshaw:

CUTSHAW: I don’t belong to the ‘God Is Alive And Hiding In Argentina’ Club. But I believe in the devil, all right. You know why? Because the prick keeps doing commercials.

Kane counters that there may be a higher purpose to mortal pain:

KANE: You’re convinced God is dead because there’s evil in the world.

CUTSHAW: Correct.

KANE: Then why don’t you think he’s alive because of the goodness in the world?

This juxtaposition of Christian existentialism and zany comedy takes getting used to. But it works in the context of the film, as it does more fitfully in this earlier script.

There are things about the script that go too far in the direction of goofy randomness, and which I am glad Blatty reconsidered using. One scene would have called out Cadbury Fruit & Nut Bars, one of Blatty’s favorite snacks. There would have also been a cameo from Joe DiMaggio, which Blatty told Kermode he had all set up but opted not to use in the film, “a decision he now thoroughly regrets.” Not me.

You can see how this being a passion project could have messed up Ninth Configuration in so many ways. This was a film dancing in a minefield throughout its production. Blatty was co-financing it with his own money because no distributor wanted it, the two original lead actors left the production mid-shoot, it was being filmed in Hungary because the soda executive producing it was looking for a loss-leader (and was also sleeping with Blatty’s wife.) It’s a freak movie all the way which appropriately opened on a freak day: February 29, 1980.

William Peter Blatty seeks out spiritual advice. His two best-known screenplays were The Exorcist and the best-regarded of Peter Sellers' Pink Panther movies, A Shot In The Dark. Image by Jill Krementz from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/13/books/william-peter-blatty-author-of-the-exorcist-dies-at-89.html?mtrref=www.google.com&gwh=DF6780010CB45E754992E7733F832841&gwt=pay.

But that craziness, and how well it is incorporated into the horror and the comedy, is why Ninth Configuration speaks so well to me, and I suspect to others who embrace it.

Craziness is one of the film’s recurring motifs. Adapting Shakespeare for dogs, Reno asks if Hamlet really crazy in the play, or just faking it? Scholars say one or the other, he notes. Both are wrong:

RENO: Hamlet isn’t psycho. But he’s hanging on the brink…So his unconscious mind makes him do what keeps him sane – namely, acting like he’s not…’Cause acting nutty is a safety valve. A way to let off steam.

It is the operating principle behind The Ninth Configuration, too: A controlled nervous breakdown designed to both penetrate and encapsulate the craziness of the human condition. You can see from the script how delicate an operation this was, and how close it came to falling apart. But it didn’t. Do you believe in miracles?