In 1980 (or thereabouts) I saw William Peter Blatty’s ‘The Ninth Configuration’ on the Z Channel, LA’s now legendary first run cable channel which featured lousy prints of new-ish movies. I was perhaps fifteen at the time and was so perplexed and mesmerized by this one-of-a-kind film that I promptly blocked it out of my mind, remembering it only this week as we began our doep-dive into cinematic fight scenes. Yes, this is a major bar fight scene and provokes the kind of tension, disgust and successful but spooky payoff that Blatty was awfully good at. You have to have a little patience; the ghastly build up to the fight lasts for fully 3/4 of the running time of this clip. But without sitting through it you’ll miss a good deal of the fun of the payoff. The set-up is really a black comedy/satire of ‘bar fight set-ups’–Blatty was a comic novelist and screenwriter through the 1960s and he first wrote this story as a bleakly comic novel called ‘Twinkle Twinkle Killer Kane!’ in 1966. His road to his finished works was always a bit circuitous (his novel “Legion’ which had nothing to do with ‘The Exorcist’ became ‘The Exorcist 3’ for instance) and in this case he revised the original novel after the success of ‘The Exorcist’, playing up its weird and metaphysical aspects and reducing the comedic ones. The novel was republished with the original title. Then it was re-republised as ‘The Ninth Configuration’. Then the movie was made and released with both titles at different times. See what I mean? This is one of Blatty’s two directing credits and I really must see the film again. It’s legendary strangeness–as well as this fight scene–clearly make it worth a return trip…