The Ninth Gate

Roman Polanski adapted Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s 1993 novel El Club Dumas with John Brownjohn and Enrique Urbizu, cutting the book to a single strand. The thread in which Corso investigates a manuscript page from The Three Musketeers, along with the novel’s literary references, was dropped; what remains is the demonic book and the surviving copies. That is why the suspense comes from comparison, not pursuit: the same page from two copies is set side by side and the difference has to be found in a signature or a single letter. The nine engravings on screen are not historical documents but drawings made for the film; the Spanish artist Francisco Solé produced two for each, a preliminary and a final sketch, eighteen sheets. The shoot crossed three countries: a street in Toledo, the Biester Palace in Sintra, the Château de Ferrières in Seine-et-Marne and the Château de Puivert in Aude. The film took 18.6 million dollars in North America and 58.4 million worldwide, so most of its 38 million dollar budget was earned back in Europe. A good fit if you want a thriller that runs on holding two books open and hunting a one letter difference in an engraving. Not for you if you expect to be shown what lies past the last gate; that frame never comes.