The Ninth Gate
Short description
A rare-book specialist named Dean Corso is hired by a wealthy collector of occult literature, Boris Balkan, to authenticate a seventeenth-century volume said to hold the key to summoning the Devil. Corso's task is to compare Balkan's copy with the only two others known to survive, one of which is presumably a forgery. The commission takes him from New York to Spain and France, where he meets collectors, dealers and others connected to the book, and where people he has dealt with begin turning up dead. A mysterious young woman keeps appearing wherever he goes.
Roman Polanski directed and co-wrote the screenplay with John Brownjohn and Enrique Urbizu, and also produced. It is the fourteenth film of the twenty-three he has directed, arriving between Death and the Maiden and The Pianist. Johnny Depp plays Corso, with Frank Langella as Balkan, Lena Olin as Liana Telfer, Emmanuelle Seigner as the girl, Barbara Jefford as Baroness Kessler and Jack Taylor as Victor Fargas. The credited cast numbers twenty-three, the crew 193. Made for about 38 million dollars, the film took roughly 58 million worldwide.
On IMDb it holds 6.7/10 from around 209,000 votes, and on TMDB 6.5/10 from some 3,466 votes. A critics' rating of 5.5/10 from 97 reviews places it below both audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- Dean Corso smokes Lucky Strike cigarettes.
- The booksellers Pablo and Pedro Senitz, whom Corso meets in Toledo, were played by one actor – José López Rodero. The little girl who encounters Corso at the airport in Paris was played by Morgan, Roman Polanski’s daughter.
- The cigarettes smoked by Liana Tellfer are called “Black Devils”.
- In the novel, Liana Tellfer is a striking blonde with a curvaceous figure. Actress Lena Olin is a slender brunette, clearly not matching the book's original description.
- The pen Corso writes with is a limited-edition collector's item – a Montblanc Agatha Christie ballpoint pen.
- The film is based on Arturo Pérez-Reverte's novel 'The Dumas Club, or the Shadow of Richelieu' (El club Dumas o la sombra de Richelieu, 1993).
- In Pérez-Reverte's book, there are two plotlines that turn out to be unrelated. Polanski organically merged both lines into one in the screenplay. Before the film begins, the camera first flies through the nine gates during the opening credits.
- At the beginning of the film, we see a series of different opening gates – there are exactly nine of them.
- The main character's name was changed. In Reverte's novel, he is called Lucas Corso. In Polanski's film, he became Dean Corso.
- On the set of the film, Johnny met Vanessa Paradis, his future common-law wife and the mother of his two children.
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