My favorite playwright is Harold Pinter, perhaps England’s most famous post-war stage author whose dramas, to my mind, psychologically break apart human relationships and interpersonal dynamics in the way Picasso visually disassociates the human figure. Whenever I’ve had a chance to catch a Pinter play, I’ve made a beeline to the theatre. This was largely in London, England and one time at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. Unfortunately, Pinter’s plays are shown few and far between. But this week the Criterion Channel released 10 films either of his plays or films for which he wrote the screenplay, another talent in Pinter’s extensive oeuvre. However, only one is an actual Pinter play, The Homecoming. The rest are screenplays based on other people's novels. But, hey, I'll take what I can get.
The first film was The Go-Between (1971), directed by Pinter’s close associate in filmmaking, Joseph Losey. The period piece stars two British actors in their prime – Alan Bates and Julie Christie - as surreptitious lovers circa 1900 in a kind of pre-Downton Abbey era. A young boy, Leo (Dominic Guard), on vacation at the palatial estate, is recruited by Lady Trimingham (Christie) and next-door farmer Ted Burgess (Bates) to carry letters between them scheduling, well, illicit rendezvous. I almost never miss a film starring Christie and Bates but this narrative, though well-acted, is rather plodding but in part is redeemed by an exquisite score from the French composer Michel Legrand.
Accident (1967) also directed by Losey with text by Pinter, has another of my British faves of the period (and someone again whose films I never miss), Dirk Bogarde. Bogarde plays Stephen, a don at an Oxford college, who covets a student (Jacqueline Sassard), who is actually having an affair with his best friend Charley (Stanley Baker). Meanwhile Stephen himself engages in some extra-sexual activity with a former flame. His wife, Rosalind (Vivien Merchant), pregnant, seems to take it all in stride in this study of middle-class hypocrisy. Oh yes, another fave English actor of the period, Michael York as William (and Anna’s alleged fiancé), brings literally a sardonic smirk to his character. Again, a good score, this time mellow jazz by John Dankworth.
The Servant (1963). Bogarde makes an appearance again as Losey directs in this classic, starring another British period icon, Sarah Miles, and “introducing” James Fox. What is the story about? I’ve seen the movie perhaps four times and I think it’s about class conflict and homosexuality – but only maybe. Bogarde’s Hugo is a “manservant” for Fox’s Tony, an up and coming real estate developer. But Hugo, as they would say today, doesn’t respect “boundaries” and begins offering unsolicited opinions and physically rearranging his master’s house. Susan (Wendy Craig), Tony’s fiancé, resents this intrusion and browbeats him. But Hugo has his revenge with alleged sister Vera (Miles). You’d think that would be the end of it, but it isn’t, and there is a very surprising coda. Again, great jazz by Dankworth and Cleo Laine croons repeatedly the song All Gone.
Finally, The Pumpkin Eater (1964), this time directed by Jack Clayton and written by Pinter starring Peter Finch and Anne Bancroft. Finch, who plays a screenwriter, marries into Jo’s (Bancroft) family of six children from previous marriages. He immerses himself in the raucous household until, well, he doesn’t. His distancing – enabled by his affairs – undermines Jo’s exuberance and eventual mental stability. This is the third Bancroft film I’ve seen in a couple of weeks and her range is amazing. Here she’s an Englishwoman through and through. But in another recently seen film, Melvin Frank’s 1975 The Prisoner of Second Avenue, she’s a stereotypical raw-speaking Manhattanite. And of course she's Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate (Mike Nichols 1967).
More Pinter in next week's post.
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