Word: pinter
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Directed by PETER HALL Screenplay by HAROLD PINTER...
This is a precise adaptation of Pinter's play-the director and much of the cast are intact from the original 1965 London production-and it makes a fine, ferocious film. One reason for its success is that no one writes this well originally for films, not even Harold Pinter. His other screenplays are cool, exemplary, probably the best scenario writing now being done in English, as a recently published collection (Grove; $10) readily attests. The screenplays are all adaptations, though. They have the eerie accents of Pinter, share a great many of his obsessional themes, but the plots...
...Roeg's best work so far -the most deliberate and contained. Much of the movie's power comes from images that carry a kind of glancing, indefinable threat and remain in some dark corner of the imagination. They are immediate but not quite real, like Pinter's language or a Bergman scene...
...credited as "screenwriter" for his own A Delicate Balance. "I'm the screen non-writer." Nevertheless, directors and actors all insist that they have produced not static "filmed plays" but new cinematic interpretations. "A three-dimensional object seen from different vantage points" is the way Peter Hall describes Pinter's The Homecoming in its A.F.T. incarnation. "We've not so much opened up the play as closed in on details...
When Shaw raves at her near the film's end, he seems to be trying to draw her into a moment of identifiable human emotion - acting as much out of his own desperation as the character's. Wolf Mankowitz's screenplay abounds with hock-shop Pinter. "Driving is really an art," m'lady comments, and the chauffeur replies, "More of a skill, perhaps...