"The Ninth Guest" was produced as a motion picture by Columbia, this in 1933 and released in 1934. In the Fifties, it was released to TV by Screen Gems, a subsidiary of Columbia, but was subsequently pulled from circulation. I was told some time ago, by someone at Columbia, that the picture was being readied for a rerelease - hopefully with the title card restored to the original - but this has not yet happened.
The film was based on the 1930 book entitled "The Invisible Host" and also the stage version, also 1930, with the title "The Ninth Guest" - this guest being Death! The book's novel plot has eight people invited and trapped in a penthouse, where they are scheduled to die sequentially (in the film, a fancy illuminated wall clock steadfastly renders the time, as if emphasizing the inevitable deaths!). One of thirty such books published in the early Thirties by the Mystery League, the most commercial aspect of these their striking art deco dust jackets - the main reason people collect them nowadays (most of the entries being outlandishly mediocre!).
The motion picture was helmed by veteran director, Roy William Neill, probably best remembered for directing eleven of the twelve superb "Sherlock Holmes" features released by Universal in the Forties. With the 1934 mystery, Neill transcended the finite area of a penthouse, in which most of the narrative transpires, with creative lighting and fluid camerawork - in one scene, the frightened victims are photographed through a large statuary hand, appearing to be in its grasp; for another, the cowering group are viewed from within a radio, the slats symbolizing bars! These creative touches are not heavy-handed but rather executed quickly; to look away could be to miss either! Discovering eight coffins lining the roof garden is yet another macabre touch.
Often compared to Agatha Christie's 1939 masterpiece, "And Then There Were None", "The Ninth Guest" gets into a bind when only three survivors remain in the penthouse, one of whom has to be the killer - whereas Christie's novel employs an ingenious gimmick serving to conceal the villain's identity, and in the end, all ten of the characters are dead (this not suitable to Christie's theatrical version, "Ten Little Indians", she changed it so as to have two people survive the mass murder!).
The Roy William Neill tour de force makes up for not having the guilty party consume poison, as in the novel and play, by electrocuting himself before the startled eyes of the couple who survived his machinations. As sparks fly about wildly and the current hums, the camera goes from the quivering killer to a light up in the wall, fluttering crazily before it goes out. End of picture.
An old Screen Gems print of "The Ninth Guest" can be viewed on the Internet. It's worth seeing!
