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THE NINTH CONFIGURATION
aka
TWINKLE, TWINKLE, KILLER KANE
Rating: 
USA. 1979.
Director/Screenplay/Based on the Novel Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane by/Producer – William Peter Blatty, Photography – Gerry Fisher, Music – Barry De Vorzon. Production Company – Warner Bros.
Cast:
Stacy Keach (Colonel Hudson Kane/Colonel Vincent ‘Killer’ Kane), Scott Wilson (Captain Billy Cutshaw), Ed Flanders (Colonel Fell), Jason Miller (Lieutenant Reno), Neville Brand (Major Groper), Moses Gunn (Major Nammack), George DiCenzo (Captain Fairbanks), Steve Sandor (Stanley), Tom Atkins (Sergeant Krebs)
Plot: Colonel Hudson Kane arrives to take command of a psychiatric institution housed in a castle in New England for military officers who have gone crazy during the course of duty. His job is to decide if the men really are crazy or just derelict in their duty. Kane has unusually effective methods and is determined to change the men’s lives, particularly that of Captain Cutshaw, an astronaut who refused to go to the Moon. But Kane also has a twin brother, Vincent, who is one of the most vicious killers in the military service, and is haunted by his existence.
The Ninth Configuration is an interesting, although not very well known film. It was the directorial debut of William Peter Blatty, who had had some acclaim several years earlier as writer/producer of The Exorcist (1973) and the 1971 novel it was based on. Blatty also based The Ninth Configuration on one of his novels, a work published in 1978 under the title Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane, which this is sometimes also alternately known as.
But The Ninth Configuration was not at all a success and was barely even released. That this was the case is not too much of a surprise. It is one of those films where all easy dramatic footholds have been abandoned and that for a time leaves one with a sense of wondering what on Earth is going on. Perhaps the closest comparison one can make is to call it a version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) as directed by Robert Altman – and Altman in his weirdly experimental stage around about Brewster McCloud (1971) time. There’s a looming sense of absurdist humour that is quite disorientating in the obliqueness of its delivery. Sometimes the results are really hilarious – like Scott Wilson’s little monologue about punishing a wall with a sledgehammer for it not moving its molecules to allow him to pass through; or droll lines about suicide pills with mild laxative side effects. Or Jason Miller, The Exorcist’s Father Karras, who has appeared in all of Blatty’s films, who has an hilarious part about trying to stage Shakespeare with a cast of dogs.
Of course when one settles into it, the film becomes rather enjoyable in its own way. There’s a remarkable twist reversal that comes in the middle of the story – one that Blatty has borrowed not a little from Edgar Allan Poe’s The System of Professor Tarr and Dr Fether (1845). Of course as with The Exorcist what one finds is that Blatty is not really making a horror film – or in this case an absurdist comedy – but rather a vehicle to carry a message about his Catholic faith. The script sidetracks off into often interesting arguments about faith. And Stacey Keach ultimately becomes a bizarre analogue for Jesus Christ, wherein he comes to sacrifice himself so that Scott Wilson can believe and at the end delivers proof of the existence of an afterlife.
Although in an equal sense this is, without Blatty even perhaps realizing it, a film about deliverance from the social shock that the Vietnam War delivered to the American zeitgeist. This is really a film about Post-Vietnam Stress Disorder made before the term was even coined!!! Although interestingly the film does not take the position held since that the horrors of the War caused enormous traumatic stress, but rather sits wondering why so many people became insane and if they are faking it. On a wider level it’s a film about finding delivery from the mass insanity the War induced on every level of American society and Blatty’s belief that the solution to the sense of social loss can be found in faith.
The only other work Blatty has written or directed to date is the greatly underrated The Exorcist III (1990), which is arguably a better film than The Exorcist was.
Copyright Richard Scheib 2001
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