QUICK SELECT
HAROLD PINTER: ADAPTATION
Proving that writing for cinema is not as easy as it seems, dramatist Harold Pinter (1930-2008) is one of the few Nobel Prize winning writers with any body of screenwriting credits. Even including the patchy Hollywood careers of William Faulkner, he’s the only one to have achieved critical acclaim as a screenwriter. Importantly, Pinter established himself as a specialist in one of the most unforgiving of crafts by adapting other writer’s 'literature,' in many of the 20 plus scripts that reached the screen, and in legendary projects that never did (adaptations of Marcel Proust and Conrad’s Victory) or which were filmed after passing out of his hands (The Remains of the Day and Lolita). We follow our screening of The Servant in late June with a new print of Accident (1967) the second of his renowned collaborations with director Joseph Losey (the most famous, The Go-Between, being sadly currently unavailable for film screening). Consciously avoid filmed versions of Pinter’s own plays the program looks at the ‘Pinteresque’ in cinema in his celebrated adaptations of novels by John Fowles, Penelope Mortimer and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Sat 4 Jul: 4.30pm: ACCIDENT (1967, M)
Sat 18 Jul: 4.30pm: THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN (1981, M)
Sat 25 Jul: 4.30pm: THE LAST TYCOON (1976, M)
Sun 2 Aug: 2pm: THE PUMPKIN EATER (1964, 18+)
Sat 8 Aug: 4.30pm: THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM (1966, PG)
ACCIDENT
Dir: Joseph Losey, UK, 1967, 105 mins, 35mm, (M)
A pair of idealistic undergrads (Michael York and Jacqueline Sassard), two mid-life-crisis-ridden Oxford Dons (Losey regulars Dirk Bogarde and Stanley Baker), and a long suffering spouse (Pinter’s then wife Vivien Merchant) lunch on the grass, basking in a late English summer and the social and gender turmoil of the 1960s. Emerging as a new critical favourite amongst the Pinter-Losey collaborations, Accident is humid with sexual, moral and class tension “…Losey's finest film… (has) grown more resonant with time.”- Nick James, Sight and Sound.
THE FRENCH LIUETENANT’S WOMAN
Dir: Karel Reisz, UK, 1981, 124 mins, 35 mm, (M)
Pinter solved the ‘unfilmiblity’ of John Fowles’ complex, revisionist, and self-reflexive post-Classic Victorian novel by providing its cinematic analogue: a complex reflection on the processes of film adaptation. In an example of early 1980s dream casting, Jeremy Irons and Meyrl Streep play both Fowles’ class-defying lovers and also a Pinteresque pair of actors, starring in the movie of the novel and deep into a conflicted, adulterous, on-set affair. With the current trend for romance-saturated Jane Austin adaptations, Pinter’s text and subtexts seem even more of a revelation.
THE LAST TYCOON
Dir: Elia Kazan, USA, 1975, 123 mins, 35mm (M)
Written as a comeback project for On the Waterfront’s director Elia Kazan and producer Sam Spiegel, Pinter’s attempt to shape F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished final work (novelising the life of MGM producer Irving Thalberg) probably represents noble defeat for the art of screen adaptation. However, the casting is magnificent. Robert DeNiro is the Thalberg-like Monroe Stahr, studio-era veterans Robert Mitchum, Tony Curtis, and Ray Milland get to caricature their one-time employers, and there’s a table tennis match between DeNiro and Jack Nicholson – their only screen time together.
THE PUMPKIN EATER
Dir: Jack Clayton, UK, 1964, 118 mins, 35mm, (M)
From novelist, screenwriter, film critic Penelope Mortimer’s part-autobiographical novel, Anne Bancroft stars as a woman with too much passion, too many children and a vital, but at times self-destructive instinct that the next love must be better. Almost overcoming the star casting (with James Mason as an ambiguous confidant and Peter Finch as husband number three) Pinter and director Clayton (The Innocents) made a work of British psychological realism, as good or better than similar but better regarded French films of this period by Truffaut or Louis Malle.
THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM
Dir: Michael Anderson, UK/USA, 1966, 99 mins, 35mm, (PG)
George Segal is a Cold War-era spy unexpectedly seconded to investigate a West Berlin neo-Nazi organisation, staffed by a creepy gang of Euro-criminals (including George Sanders, Max von Sydow and Australian Robert Helpmann). Despite the shadow of the Cold War and the then new Berlin Wall, Germany’s old ghosts, histories and intrigues drag him inward and downwards. Pinter found the terrain of Len Deighton and Le Carre as a very suitable mechanism to explore his own regular themes of personal betrayal, but also some of his uneasy survivor’s guilt as an English Jew.
