Harold Pinter: Comedies of Menace & Quiet Desperation
As Pinter’s magnum opus Betrayal plays on Broadway, we give New Yorkers a chance to sample some of the best film adaptations of works by post-war Britain’s greatest playwright, as well as films based on his own original screenplays and adaptations of other writers’ work.
William Friedkin
1968|
U.K.|
123 minutes
Seaside boarding-house lodger Robert Shaw is terrorized and broken down by two menacing strangers (Patrick Magee and Sidney Tafler) who throw him a birthday party—even though it isn’t his birthday.
Clive Donner
1964|
U.K.|
105 minutes
Aston (Robert Shaw) invites a tramp named Davis (Donald Pleasence) to stay at Mick’s (Alan Bates) house, and the brothers use the poor man as both a shield and a weapon.
Karel Reisz
1981|
U.K.|
123 minutes
In Pinter’s metamovie, the story of a Victorian fossil-collector (Jeremy Irons) drawn into an affair with a scarlet woman (Meryl Streep) is interspersed with scenes of the making of the film in which actors Mike (Irons) and Anna (Streep) begin an affair of their own.
Joseph Losey
1971|
U.K.|
118 minutes
An elderly man (Michael Redgrave) recalls the traumatic events one summer on a country estate in 1900, when as a 13-year-old boy he secretly delivered letters between two lovers (Julie Christie and Alan Bates).
Peter Hall
1973|
U.K. / USA|
114 minutes
Philosophy professor Michael Jayston brings wife Vivian Merchant (then Mrs. Pinter) home to visit his estranged family—a brutish and quietly malevolent bunch (father Paul Rogers, uncle Cyril Cusack, brothers Ian Holm and Terence Rigby).
Elia Kazan
1976|
USA|
130 minutes
Pinter’s adaptation of Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel about a Hollywood production head undone by a romantic obsession and the complications of studio politics stars Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Robert Mitchum, Jeanne Moreau, Tony Curtis…
Jack Clayton
1964|
U.K.|
110 minutes
Anne Bancroft plays a woman with six children and another on the way who suffers a breakdown when lecherous James Mason tells her that new husband Peter Finch is unfaithful in this magnificent film of hushed resignation and anguish.
Joseph Losey
1963|
U.K.|
115 minutes
Upper class James Fox hires manservant Dirk Bogarde but when Tony’s girlfriend (Wendy Craig) threatens his supremacy within the household, he sets his sluttish girlfriend (Sarah Miles) to work.
John Irvin
1985|
U.K.|
96 minutes
In this adaptation of Russell Hoban’s novel, lonely bookseller Ben Kingsley and single children’s author Glenda Jackson are brought together by their mutual longing to liberate the turtles at the zoo aquarium, aided by zookeeper Michael Gambon.
November 22 – 28
As Pinter's magnum opus Betrayal plays on Broadway, we give New Yorkers a chance to sample some of the best film adaptations of works by post-war Britain's greatest playwright, as well as films based on his own original screenplays and adaptations of other writers' work.
See three films or more and save with our Discount Package!
