So…guess there aren’t a whole lot of Costaphiles in this neck of the woods, huh? Or Pialat fans, for that matter…
Moving right along…among the many grumbles I’ve heard about Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island and, even more so, its source, a novel by Dennis Lehane, is that it rips off the William Peter Blatty novel Twinkle Twinkle “Killer” Kane and Blatty’s own 1979 film version of the book, The Ninth Configuration. Having revisited Blatty’s film…well, their twists/premises are indeed strikingly, even terrifically similar. But within Configuration itself comes an acknowledgement of what it is “ripping off,” so top speak, when one of the inmates of that film’s asylum (a military facility, as it happens), Lt. Frankie Reno, announces that the arrival of the facility’s new head, Col. Vincent Kane, is something straight out of Hitchcock’s Spellbound…wherein a personage claiming to be the new head of the place is in fact an inmate.
One supposes one could go back ever further and find other tales containing the exact same “twist,” but I can understand, up to a point, why some would make a very particular correspondence between Configuration and Island. Each picture features a guilt-haunted, delusional protagonist who’s also, as they say, a “man of violence.” Each attempts to go to similarly dark areas, and each features elaborate hallucinations on the part of some characters. But both are very, very different movies. Not least of which is due to the fact that Scorsese is just technically a far more accomplished filmmaker than Blatty could ever hope to be (despite the fact that Blatty here worked with master cinematographer Gerry Fisher).
The film does have its very enthusiastic champions, including writer Mark Kermode, who in a Sight and Sound writeup calls the film “an extraordinary theological thriller” that combines “scabrous satire with sanguine spirituality” and “presents a breathtaking cocktail of philosophy, eye-popping visuals, jaw-dropping pretentiousness, rib-tickling humor and heart-stopping action.” As for myself, well, this time around I found it an overstuffed cinematic piñata from a pseudo-intellectual sentimentalist who took the de-sanctification of St. Christopher way too hard. But that’s just me.
On the plus side, the picture has constantly crackling, if largely cornball, dialogue,one of the greatest guy’s-guys casts of its era. Stacy Keach, Jason Miller, Joe Spinell, Robert Loggia, Scott Wilson (playing an astronaut named Cutshaw, apparently the same character who’s told “You’re gonna die up there” by little Regan in Blatty’s The Exorcist; apparently Blatty was creating his own omniverse before Tarantino took a stab at it)…and Neville frigging Brand, for pete’s sake, who seems shorter here than I remember him being in most films.
That guy in the middle there isn’t Powers Boothe (don’t we wish) but a young George DiCenzo. Just so you know.
Another thing Shutter Island has over this picture is that Shutter Island’s opening music is from a Penderecki symphony, while Configuration kicks off with a song called “San Antone,” a piece so thoroughly wet-noodley that it makes Dan Hill’s “Sometimes When We Touch” sound like “Whole Lotta Love.” Ugh. Although apparently said song was also used in the terrific Rolling Thunder, although I don’t remember it from that picture. Maybe I was so traumatized by it that my mind erased it.
I revisited the film via a region 2 U.K. DVD from the Blue Dolphin label, lent to me by a friend; it announces itself as “Widescreen” but the transfer is not optimized for 16 X 9 displays but letterboxed within a 4 X 3 picture. Feh. It is out of print, as is the 2002 domestic Warner disc.
UPDATE: My pal Joseph Failla has some pertinent thoughts:
I’m not surprised you have your share of problems with NINTH CONFIGURATION as I rarely find two people who can agree on it’s attributes and weaknesses. Most folks understandably hate it for its indulgences and pretentiousness. I still remember [WNEW TV’s] Stewart Klein’s scathing review, stating this is why you should never let an author direct a film adapted from his own work. While others I know hail it as a maligned masterpiece, from the way they speak so highly of it, you’d think they were talking about CITIZEN KANE and not TWINKLE TWINKLE, KILLER KANE (the film’s alternate title). Actually all the arguing seems to make NINTH the very definition of a cult film.
Although I haven’t seen NINTH in quite awhile, my memories of it’s eccentricities and my admitted bewilderment with many of it’s shenanigans are pretty well intact. As much as Klein might be on to something with his sharp swipe at Blatty directing his own material, I’ve been more charitable about its debated brilliance. Everyone, pro or con, always mentions its celebrated cast; it’s a unique group of engaging character actors to be sure. Where else would Scott Wilson be given such a notable role outside of IN COLD BLOOD? And yes, you’re right, Neville Brand was always an intimidating figure, who knew his co-stars were usually so short?
It’s been said Blatty’s inexperience at knowing how a film should be conceived for mass audiences is what keeps NINTH in terminal discussion and while that’s mostly true, I think you can see he knew enough about what buttons to press to get a reaction, that he wasn’t the wrong choice for this particular project. Anyone who would cast Richard Lynch as a deranged biker in that great bar room fight scene, has got to have some grip on what audiences expect. It’s just that he has no concerns about how they’ll react to the way he chooses tell his story. All bets are off right from the start as the story takes its time coming together for almost two hours. This is one of the longest slow burns in films I can recall, so when you’re finally given the last piece of the puzzle (in that very last shot), you feel the ride (detours and all) was well worth it. That alone would draw a strong comparison with SHUTTER ISLAND and beg multiple viewings.
What I enjoy most about NINTH is how it overlaps with the first and third EXORCIST installments. Remember this was before any of us had seen THE VERSION YOU NEVER SAW of the original EXORCIST, which this closely rsembles with its more longwinded explanations. And plays even better with Blatty’s own EXORCIST III, another film which has no qualms about who it alienates in creating its own brand of suspense and unease. At least Blatty has had final say in a definitive cut of NINTH, something that still alludes him with the studio reworking of his latter EXORCIST film.
I’ll be looking at NINTH again shortly in order to gage how extremely out of place the film plays today. The fact that the dvd remains out of print testifies to the movie’s utterly unusual and daring storytelling. Something I regard more highly each and every year.
I dispensed with the whole “Lehane ripped off Blatty!” argument for the exact same reason you did, Glenn: SPELLBOUND. Blatty didn’t get there first, and neither, probably, did Hitchcock/Hecht/Palmer/Sanders.
As for THE NINTH CONFIGURATION, I like it quite a bit more than you do. I even like “San Antone”, if for no other reason than its incongruity at the beginning of the film is so perfect. That whole opening is such a strange mishmash of tones and images – castles, space shuttles, moons, mournful Scott Wilsons – that for several minutes you don’t really know what the hell you’re watching. I’ve always thought the opening of the film really works a treat.
(And “San Antone” is indeed the opening song in ROLLING THUNDER as well, and I think it works much less well there, although, like you, it’s been ages since I saw it.)
It would be moronic to argue that Blatty is anywhere near the filmmaker that Scorsese is now, or was at the time CONFIGURATION came out, but I do enjoy his direction in the two films he made. I like the way he opens some scenes with a rapid series of static shots of inaminate objects, setting a particularly creepy, orderly tone, even if he borrowed that idea (unless Blatty himself wrote it into the script) from Friedkin’s work in THE EXORCIST.
I will admit, though, that I haven’t actually sat down and watched CONFIGURATION all the way through in a long time, and I strongly suspect that its impact now would be considerably less than when I first saw it. At my most enthusiastic, I would say that Kermode nails it, but I think it’s safe to say that anybody coming to the film for the first time won’t have ever seen anything quite like it before, and that realization can make one very forgiving. The aspect of Blatty’s film I’m least looking forward to, when I do watch it again, is the humor, which has always been pretty scattershot. Sometimes it can have a great, old-fashioned one-liner quality (from EXORCIST III: “Shouldn’t you be reading the Gospels?” “They don’t give you all the latest fashions.”), and other times it can be positively smothering (his novella ELSEWHERE).
And yet! It’s a fascinating, deeply strange, disturbing, and sometimes beautiful film. You have to love that shot of Christ on the moon.
I Netflixed THE NINTH CONFIGURATION a couple of years ago, and found it almost singularly odd. It’s like they gathered all the resources and elements needed for a mainstream Hollywood thriller and put them in the hands of someone who’d never even SEEN a movie before. Nowhere was this more apparent than the utterly weird sound design.
The bar fight scene is one of the all-time greats, though. And Jason Miller staging Shakespeare plays with an all canine cast is a good gag.
For what it’s worth, I projected The Ninth Configurations to 10+ people last year, and they all seemed to enjoy it, some were pretty blown away. Though I definitely contemplated turning the sound down on San Antone halfway through because those first few minutes were pretty embarrassing.
I’m also a big fan of Exorcist III, which has an equally great cast and dialogue (as Bill said above Blatty said above, Blatty write some killer one-liners).
And as for symmetry or omniverse, don’t both Configuration and the original Exorcist both end with someone receiving a religious pendant of some kind?
EXORCIST III is the shizznit. “Do you know that you are in the presence of an artist?” It’s a wonderfulL life. That wide shot of the night-nurse and the Gemini killer approaching her from behind with hedge-clippers. Fantastic stuff, and George C. Scott’s Raspberry-winning performance is in fact a late-career triumph. I wish all novelists-turned-filmmakers were so unaccomplished.
I truly never understood the cult that’s developed around this film – we’re going to build out an elaborate Spellbound scenario (or, if Roger Mexico is around, sorta like the one set in motion for Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow, only with far more formal/narrative justification) for one troubled shrink at some abandoned sanitarium? Uh, not to be a wet blanket, but isn’t there a WAR on? I’m glad Glenn also had the same aversion to “San Antone” on the saoundtrack in the opening shots – such incongruity between music and image is why we invented the acronym “WTF?”. It does have a great cast, of course, including the underrated Richard Lynch, but redemption is rarely this contrived, much less goofy.
This movie also ends with one of my least favorite narrative tools: rewarding a character who’s overcome a crisis of faith with concrete evidence of the existence of a god/afterlife/etc.
No film can be considered wholly pretentious if it has men playing “The Great Escape” in it. And, is it me, or is “Rolling Thunder” a film that is overrated by people’s memories? The last time I watched it, about two years ago, it seemed(outside of Devane’s unnerving performance) like a sluggish rural “Taxi Driver” with redneck stereotypes and a singularly crappy theme song(the aforementioned “San Antone”)? Well, the title’s cool, I guess.
I always lump 9th Config together with Castle Keep, as overwritten military tragicomedies set in castles with Scott Wilson…
Oh, and I’m seeking out Pialat movies thanks to you, Glenn.
It really helps, I believe, that NINTH CONFIGURATION has Stacy Keach in the lead. I find him tremendously credible in this odd film, something I can’t really say about Leonardo DiCaprio in SHUTTER ISLAND.
I haven’t yet managed to get to Shutter Island but despite everything I’ve done, it seems pretty apparent that the whole thing is based on old Poe’s System of Dr Tarr and Professor Fether… or is it? I don’t yet know. But when somebody says there’s a new film, set in an asylum, with a twist, it’s hard not to think “Hmm, what could that possibly be?” I think maybe I’ll spend some of my hard earned time off this weekend watching Under Satan’s Sun, instead of Shutter Island… maybe it’s time to break my unbroken record of seeing every single Scorsese film while it’s still in the cinemas…
I sort of love Blatty’s semicompetent direction—like GANJA & HESS, it produces a kind of alienation that a slicker director isn’t necessarily capable of, and that’s appropriate for such a heady film.
As for comparing it to SI: I think that as a script, it’s much, much better, for the simple reason that it puts the twist in the middle, rather than the end, so we actually get to see the consequences of the reveal play out. Unlike in SI, where the twist comes in at the last minute and turns everything before it into arm-waving distraction, the reveal in TNC fits into the narrative, and is given time to grow and develop and play out in the story, rather than just being a button at the end.
Geez, I liked SI when I saw it, but I seem to like it less and less the more I think about it…
I’d consider myself a pretty big cheerleader for Configuration (though I haven’t seen it in eons) and, at The First Bill C’s prompting, Exorcist III, which is both brilliantly loony and a pretty fascinating comment on the original film itself. Plus it’s got Brad Dourif, already at an advanced stage of mental instability. And Alonzo Mourning as Death! Blatty is exactly as Fuzzy Bastard says: semicompetent, but he goes about it so aggressively balls-out it’s kinda hard not to admire and adore the wackiness he creates.
Fuzz – Thanks for kicking the ball Bill Gunn’s way in this discussion. A certain Armond White’s advocacy for Mr. Gunn notwithstanding, Ganja is unforgettable, and more than a little sui generis in its tone and approach, but one which I wouldn’t call “semi-compentent” (semi-financed, maybe!). The proof is in the never-screened Stop!, his Warners-financed/suppressed first film from 1970 I was lucky enough to see at that Whitney retro after Gunn’s death now almost 20 years ago – it’s almost brazenly accomplished and gorgeously shot, if also more of a relationship head-trip than the more fanciful Jodorwsky variety being screened contemporaneously. Strindberg meets DuBois on acid in 1970 Puerto Rico? Could be. Folks should check out the new BAM Gunn retro screening to decide for themselves (AND dig on a young Ry Cooder, Buell Neidlinger, &c., &c. on the thoroughly lysergic soundtrack):
http://www.villagevoice.com/2010–03-30/film/the-groundbreaking-bill-gunn-at-bam
Peter – Patrick Ewing is Death, not Alonzo Morning. But Nicol Williamson plays FATHER Morning, and you can hear Lee J. Cobb’s voice on the loudspeaker in that same messed-up dream sequence that features Ewing, and a dubbed-over Samuel L. Jackson.
I love EXORCIST III. The opening credits are stunning, and The First Bill C is right: George C. Scott is terrific, as is Ed Flanders, Brad Dourif and Scott Wilson.
@bill – Ach, you’re right. And let’s not forget John Thompson’s brief, nonsensical cameo.
Or Larry King’s…
Or Fabio’s.
Oh shit, I forgot about Fabio. What a loony film. Although, to be fair, I don’t think Fabio had become famous yet, so it wasn’t any sort of goofy stunt. I don’t think.
I don’t know if George C. Scott’s speech to Ed Flanders about the carp in his bathtub in Exorcist III is improvised or written by Blatty, but I fell in love with the movie because of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p6QgDY1CHo
Speaking of weird cameos in Exorcist III, how about C. Everett Koop, and Patrick Ewing as the Angel of Death?
Whoops. I see Bill already mentioned Patrick Ewing as Death, but it’s so bizarre it probably needs repeating a few times.
I love love love Ganja & Hess—“semicompetent” is mostly in reference to the all over the place eyelines, particularly in the pimp’s-apartment killing (I think it was a pimp’s apartment? I saw it years back, but that sequence struck me particularly), where screen direction and eyeline are so mismatched as to produce a marvelous kind of haze. Also the refusal to ever cut to the listener during monologues, an Editing 101 trick whose absence makes the dinner-table scene much more effectively claustrophobic than a more “professional” editing job might (as does the oddly head-space-heavy framing). Thanks for the heads-up, James—I’m in the midst of a huge project and I think the Maly Theater’s “Uncle Vanya” is the only indulgence I’ll be permitted this month, but shizz, I’d love to see more Gunn.
And up until the silly ending, I think Exorcist 3 might be a better film than the first Exorcist—not as ably directed, but way more theologically serious and thought-provoking. And honestly, maybe more creepy—the long hallway track is certainly as scary as the head-turning in the first.
D Cairns -
I friggin’ love “Castle Keep”! Particularly the silly episodes involving Scott Wilson’s Clearboy and his relationship with the phantom VW prototype. Though, I tend to think of Michael Mann’s “The Keep” when I think of “Castle Keep”. And that film, for all its flaws(and it has many) has a surrealist grandeur that hooks me in no matter how many times I watch it. Plus, it makes a great Tangerine Dream double feature with “Sorcerer”.
Let me add some more love for Exorcist III, a truly wonderful movie. It’s a tragedy that the studio demanded Blatty’s version be changed to make it more populist, although one good thing did come out of the meddling: blending Jason Miller and Brad Dourif into a single character. I hope that one day Blatty’s original ending can be re-integrated into the picture and the ridiculous Nicol Williamson exorcism dropped.
What a painful review! You accuse Blatty of taking his sweet old time telling his story yet you had to go on and on like some incapable of closing his mouth.