And Then There Were Nine

Every now and then I buy the cheap public-domain DVDs because the titles sound interesting. One such example that I recently watched is The Ninth Guest.

The movie stars off with a bank of telephone operators who work for a telegram-by-phone service where you call in the telegrams. Somebody sends out anonymous telegrams to eight people inviting them to a party at a penthouse apartment. Among the eight are college dean Murray Reid (Samuel S. Hinds), who has just received a large donation from Jason Osgood (Edwin Maxwell, looking vaguely reminiscent of Edward Arnold). Osgood is doing it for the positive publicity, considering that he's screwed up by backing the wrong person to run for mayor against the corrupt machine led by Tim Cronin (Edward Ellis) and his attorney/girlfriend Sylvia Inglesby (Helen Flint). Also invited to the party is socialite Margaret Chisholm (Nella Walker), who doesn't want his daughter hanging out with Cronin's crowd; childhood friends Jim Daley (Donald Cook) and Helen Trent (Genevieve Tobin); and Henry Abbott (Hardie Albright), who got kicked out of Reid's college for being a political radical.

On the night of the party, we see butler Hawkins (Sidney Bracey), giving a cook a script of how the party is supposed to go, one which was given to Hawkins by an unseen host. Everything has to go precisely to schedule, for reasons we will soon learn. The guests come, and all of them think that one of the others was responsible for organizing the party, especially considering that Osgood and Cook were both invited and they hate each other's guts. But none of them is the organizer, each having received the identical telegram.

Along with the cocktails, the butler turns on the radio for some background music. But the voice of an announcer not named U.N. Owen comes on, telling the guests that they're going to be playing a game against an unseen ninth guest, one named Death! Our invitees are going to have to keep their wits about them to defeat Death and stay alive. They can't just leave the party because the host has electrified both the radio and the gate to the outside world (you'd think there was a service entrance that bypasses this gate, but no mention of it is made, and it probably would have been electrified too). Indeed, one guest does eventually make the mistake of trying to use the gate and pays a grisly price for it.

Anyhow, our host plans on killing the guests one by one, every hour on the hour. Or at least letting them bump themselves off. Osgood plans to poison everybody else with the prussic acid (an old name for cyanide) left in a bottle, but he accidentally poisons himself. Then, somebody mysteriously leaves a letter for Margaret where only she'll find it, and that leads her to commit suicide. It goes on like this, until....

You'll be forgiven for thinking of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None/Ten Little Indians as you watch this, since the plots seem so similar. However, The Ninth Guest is based on a play and novel which came out nine years before Christie's book, so this is actually the original. (Everything I read suggests Christie was completely unfamiliar with this book/play/movie.) While it may not have the polish of either Christie's writing or the movies based on Christie's books, it's still quite entertaining. I'd also think that people interested in Agatha Christie would enjoy seeing this movie precursor to one of Christie's more famous works.

The Reel Vault DVD is still available at Amazon.