The 9th Guest

A group of folks arrive at a mansion for a party. Each has received an unsigned invitation and are expecting an exciting night...and boy are they in for a surprise! It turns out some maniac has worked incredibly hard to create the setting and plans on killing off the guests...one by one. The guy communicates to everyone using a record player and no one is sure who the unknown host is...or if, perhaps, he's among the guests. Regardless, folks begin dying in the most diabolical manner...including poisonings and electrocutions! All, according to the machine, because these people are evil and deserve to be punished!

While the cast are mostly unknown actors and it's a B-movie from Columbia, don't think that it's just another schlocky B-film. No, instead it's very intelligently written and exciting...more so than many of the A-pictures. Well worth your time and amazingly good.

This is a very tough-to-find classic studio horror film from the golden age of horror films. Above all, it deserves to be seen by more fans of the films of that era. While it is very obvious from the beginning as to who the killer is (fans of this type of film will know based on formula), the film is consistently entertaining and very well-directed. Unlike many slow and stagy productions from the early 30s, this one is very fluid and Roy William Neill, who would later direct many of the Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films, has an excellent grasp on how to effectively move his camera. It is refreshingly unpretentious and almost sickly stylish at times and not stagy as a Monogram and Mascot feature almost inherently at some level must be. It is Grand Guignol fun with a stylish Art-Deco apartment where eight guests are trapped by the titular "ninth guest", a voice from the radio that commands their ill-fated party. It is reminiscent of Ulmer's 'The Black Cat' from the same year, in how it uses a modern design to decorate its' house of horror. The cast is very good and includes Donald Cook, who next year made a fine Ellery Queen and Edwin Maxwell and Samuel S. Hinds lend their usual solid performances for this type of film. It was made by Colombia Pictures.

Eight strangers are invited to a dinner party at an apartment. They are Informed by the host through the radio that they are all his enemies, without escape, and that they will meet the ninth guest: death.

Familiar format used often in film and also more successfully. Nevertheless the script, based on a book, which itself was based on a play, is effective and holds one's attention. Stars Donald Cook and Genevieve Tobin.

Eight people, every one of whom has got something to hide - from crooked politicians to greedy businessmen to fake 'society ladies' - are invited by telegram to a 'party' in a penthouse high upon a skyscraper; which, as soon as they all arrive, turns into a 'prison', and the party into a deadly 'game' between the eight guests and their mysterious 'host', who communicates with them only via a radio. And he predicts that, before the night will be over, either they or he will die - and slowly, the eight trapped people start suspecting each other of being the 'hidden' host...

Does that sound familiar to us? It CERTAINLY does: Agatha Christie's famous novel "Ten Little Indians", which was made into the MAGNIFICENT thriller "And Then There Were None", runs pretty much along the same lines... Now, "The Ninth Guest" may seem to us like being on a somewhat smaller scale at first than Rene Clair's masterpiece - BUT not only does it predate that classic movie by 11 years, but it ALSO predates Agatha Christie's novel, which was first published in 1939! So the general idea originated from HERE...

And seen as a classic murder mystery in itself, it's really one of the most suspenseful ever made, with a brilliant cast that conveys the psychological aspect of mutual suspicion and strong tensions PERFECTLY, as well as the conflict between despair and the will to survive... And there are some names among it that are QUITE well-known to fans of classic movies: Donald Cook would soon play the famous writer-sleuth Ellery Queen in "The Spanish Cape Mystery", and later became a TV star, just like Hardie Albright, who appeared in many a comedy and gangster movie in the 30s and 40s; and then there is, of course, lean-and-hungry Edward Ellis - the 'Thin Man' (no, not Nick Charles, of course, but the REAL 'thin man' Clyde Wynant, around whom the story of the original "Thin Man" movie revolved)! And director Roy William Neill, who did a FANTASTIC job in creating this claustrophobic atmosphere, later directed many of the 'Sherlock Holmes' movies starring Basil Rathbone. So the whole crew certainly IS a guarantee for an hour of CLASSIC 'whodunit' entertainment - a 'must' for every fan of the genre, and not only!

It's almost certain that Agatha Christie did not see this 1932 movie which will inevitably remind the viewer of her classic murder mystery "and then there were none ": the unknown person who throws a party and invites people who have something to be guilty about; the similarities in the first part are striking : the host is not present ,there' s a voice out of a radio accusing the guests ,they cannot leave the penthouse (the doors are charged with electricity ) ,and of course,they begin to suspect each other.And let the countdown begin!

In fact , apart from the confessions , the development is closer to modern thrillers such as " saw" or the Spanish thriller "la habitacion de Fermat" .

The atmosphere itself is charged with electricity ;the only sound is the unbearable ticking of a clock ; the problem is that there is too little time to make acquaintance with the characters and the final confession is too hurried for comfort: if you have not read the book (very hard to find nowadays) ,it's sometimes difficult to follow the plot -the film hardly lasts 70 minutes.And it lacks the implacable mastery of Dame Christie .

Yet, her buffs should watch this because it contains the seeds of her 1939 masterful thriller.