October 17
#14 The Ninth Gate (1999)
October 18
#15 The Undying Monster (1942)
October 19
#16 The Ghost Ship (1943)

It’s bizarre to think that The Ninth Gate is ten years old.  It has, as I’d always suspected it would, taken a while to find its fans, and now has a deserved cult following thanks to DVD and the rising popularity of Johnny Depp.  But Roman Polanski, in recent weeks, has become something of a flashpoint for issues of the Art vs. the Artist, among other things.  (As I write this, Polanski is still under arrest in Switzerland and battling extradition to the United States for fleeing the country in 1977 before he could be sentenced for the crime of unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl.)  I’m not going to comment here on Polanski and his legal troubles, as I’m not a legal expert, although I’d suggest that anyone wishing to form an opinion should seek out his autobiography, Roman, in which he details the incident as well as the legal fallout and his time served, and also watch the documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which covers the case fairly well.  Polanski’s troubled life story aside, I’ve always been a fan of his work, and my reaction upon first viewing The Ninth Gate was that it was an artistic sucess, although it wasn’t what I’d expected it to be: it was marketed as an end-of-the-millenium, End of Days-style Apocalypse thriller (which was in vogue at the time, as you’ll recall). That it was “from the director of Rosemary’s Baby” was also an effective way for the studio to sell it as a Satanic horror film. It isn’t quite that. What I saw was a film that was deliberately old-fashioned, with nods to Hammer Studios (a scene is borrowed from The Devil Rides Out), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Alfred Hitchcock. It’s intended for the audience who enjoys that sort of thing, and I very much do. As Polanski admits on the audio commentary track, he made it because it’s the sort of movie he likes to watch.

He was the victim of a kind of hysteria in the late 60’s, and practically tagged a Satanist by the press after the Manson Family murdered his wife Sharon Tate–the implication being that he invited the tragedy by making Rosemary’s Baby (a film which is now regarded as a classic, although at the time it was viewed as extremely explicit and diabolical). In fact, he’s an avowed atheist. His suspense thrillers are more concerned with psychological states than the supernatural: Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Tenant deal with issues of paranoia and schizophrenia.  He is also keenly interested in both the subjectivity and specificity of the camera’s eye: when his films are not taking the direct point of view of the protagonist, they are often observing details pointedly.  Take the pre-credits scene of The Ninth Gate: we see a man writing a letter; as he writes, the camera makes pains to show you a footstool unusually positioned in the center of the room, and then pans up to a noose hanging from a chandelier.  A moment later, the man carefully finishes his letter, places it in the envelope, strides calmly across the room, and puts his head in the noose.  We see his feet awkwardly attempt to kick aside the stool, and when they succeed, we see the chandelier jerk downward by a few inches, shorting out the lights, and then the feet struggle in mid-air.  When they cease to move, the camera wanders across the room, over the desk and the envelope, and then searching the bookshelves, passing over a multitude of antique books with the obsessive quality of its protagonist, the “book detective” Dean Corso (Depp).  Finally the camera discovers a gap between books–a missing volume–and it plunges into the darkness of that gap and into the opening credits.  In a capsule, we have the entire film: the sinister amidst the mundane, a passion for books, and a search for the one special volume which might contain a dark secret.  Those who were expecting special-effects driven horror with MTV cutting, rock music, possessed children and gory deaths would have to look elsewhere (say, the next 10 years of Hollywood horror).  This is a Roman Polanski film, and it has as much in common with Chinatown as Rosemary’s Baby (and Death and the Maiden, and Frantic, and The Tenant, and Bitter Moon, and even Cul-de-sac).  It’s very much in his ouvre, and not a lesser Polanski picture by any means.

One of the chief joys of watching The Ninth Gate is, however, Johnny Depp, who gives Corso such a winning mixture of Philip Marlowe and, well, Ichabod Crane, whom he played that same year in Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow.  I’m not sure if it was Polanski’s or Depp’s idea to make a subplot out of Corso’s glasses, of all things–he’s constantly adjusting them, polishing them with his tie, or putting them back on after they’ve been slapped off or trod upon–but I have a feeling they were both giddily urging each other to push it as far as they could.  Corso is also an unashamed scoundrel, a book appraiser introduced casually ripping-off some clients to get his hands on an 18th century multi-volume edition of Don Quixote; and it’s this trait which becomes crucially important as the plot advances.  Corso is hired by an amoral millionaire, Boris Balkan (Frank Langella, rarely better), to validate his prize possession–a Satanic volume called The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows–against the only other copies known to exist in the world, held in private collections in Portugal and France.  The book was written in 1666 (of course) by Aristide de Torquay, who was burned by the Inquisition for writing it, and for possessing, it’s said, a book written by Lucifer himself.  Balkan suspects that his copy is a fake.  “You mean the Devil won’t show up?” Corso asks.  He’s required to take the book with him so he can carefully compare all three copies, but in great film noir tradition, it’s deadly cargo: the wife of the man who last owned the book tries to seduce Corso to get it back; an albino is trying to kill him for it; and he’s trailed by a mysterious woman–known in the credits only as The Girl, and played by Polanski’s wife, Emmanuelle Seigner (Bitter Moon)–who protects Corso for reasons she keeps to herself.  Depp, much like Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, acts tough and cracks wise while ducking, weaving, and running from all the forces out to stop him; and often he loses spectacularly (although his nostril never gets sliced).  The mystery involving The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows, and its Tarot-like illustrations, is deeply compelling, faithfully translated from the novel The Club Dumas–but Polanski otherwise gutted the book, removing, for example, all references to Alexandre Dumas, as well as more literature-oriented digressions.  The film must be taken on its own merits, not as an adaptation of Arturo Perez-Reverte’s work; and, on that level, it succeeds as a story of a quest into the nature of evil.  In The Ninth Gate, evil is not located beyond the gates of Hell.  It is in the commonplace, the banal.  It is in Boris Balkan, who believes his money can purchase anything, including a man’s soul: he’s not unlike those tycoons celebrated by reality-TV shows Shark Tank and The Apprentice.  Nevertheless, the ending of The Ninth Gate once bothered me, a misstep in an otherwise fine film.  On this, my third viewing, I was struck by how carefully prepared-for the last scenes were.  Polanski is nothing if not neat and tidy.  I also now believe that I had originally misinterpreted the ending, or at least the nature of The Girl.  This is genuinely one of those films which improves upon multiple viewings.  Polanski’s films are built to last. 

On Sunday and Monday night I watched two minor thrillers of the 40’s, both low-budget but genre-bending, and mildly clever in their own ways.  The Undying Monster, a Fox Studios film directed by John Brahm (Hangover Square), promises a werewolf and doesn’t deliver until the last minute of the film.  Until then, it’s a mildly witty, entertaining-enough mystery in the Agatha Christie mold, with a bit of Hound of the Baskervilles mixed in.  Ironically, the opening shot of this film is very similar to the opening shot of The Ninth Gate, both involving a camera roaming about the room, gazing meaningfully at various objects; in this case, it ends not with a shock but a very funny joke.  More to my taste, however, is The Ghost Ship, which continues my Val Lewton marathon.  Although it’s eclipsed by the more memorable and stylish Val Lewton-produced films of the 40’s, The Ghost Ship is a lot of fun.  Like Jack London’s The Sea Wolf or, of course, Moby-Dick, it involves a sadistic captain (Richard Dix) on the verge of insanity, here tormenting young officer Merriam (Russell Wade).  At first the captain seems like a gentle, if long-winded, soul; he advises Merriam to not kill a moth, for crying out loud.  But his speeches about the meaning of authority take on a sinister air when Merriam witnesses the captain arranging an “accident” for a sailor who had the nerve to question him–this is the film’s strongest scene, as we watch a man trapped in a ship’s well while he’s slowly crushed to death by a great heavy chain spooling down upon him; the noise of the chain is so loud that they drown out his cries for help, and the men above carry on, obliviously killing their friend.  The film is also more than a little strange–in a good way.  The film is intermittently narrated by a mute deckhand, whose voiceover drones on about issues of morality while he stares at the audience with a countenance like the unmasked Jackie Earle Haley in Watchmen.  Eerie indeed.