Harold Pinter: Battle in the bedroom

[DB7]

Battle in the bedroom

Full of adultery, alcohol and menace, Harold Pinter's screenplays have given actors their best roles - and directors the opportunity of a lifetime. By David Hare

Wednesday July 6, 2006
The Guardian

Fellini's great friend, the screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, once said: "Cinema is a collaboration where everyone tries to erase everyone else's work." Certainly the popular convention is to insist that films are made principally by directors; some directors certainly appear to think so. And a second axiom, peddled by the lost generation at Time Out magazine, is that British cinema is weak because it is overly dependent on British theatre.

Both propositions seem to me faulty. A good script is, if not the sine qua non of a good film, at least its most heartening omen. It's hard to imagine how desperately enfeebled our national cinema would be without the backbone and expertise put in by refugees from the playhouse. Where did Michael Caine start? Theatre. Julie Christie, Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Stephen Frears, Vanessa Redgrave, Stephen Daldry? Oh, and Laurence Olivier - remind me, where did he start?

Article continues
The first gift a playwright has is to write for actors. The better the playwright, the better the roles. This is as true of film as it is of theatre. Harold Pinter regularly offers actors what will become the opportunities of a lifetime: to Meryl Streep, obviously, in The French Lieutenant's Woman; to Peter Finch and Anne Bancroft in one of the most overlooked of all British films, The Pumpkin Eater; and, unforgettably, to Dirk Bogarde, both in Accident and The Servant. Pinter offers the stuff actors want and with which they can do magic - surface vitality, of course, but also an undertow of narrative and implied feeling which deepens the simplest remark. In the spare, complicated screenwriting of Pinter, "yes", "no" and "maybe" become words which do a hundred jobs.

There is a third cliche, tirelessly repeated in film classes the world over: film, they say, is a visual medium. Oh yes? Is that why, in the past 20 years, the shot has become so much more important than the sequence? The lighting more important than what is being lit? The action more important than the acting? The special effects more important than the story? Is that why everything at the Odeon now seems to drag? And is that why, in the United States, everyone in search of intelligent entertainment prefers to watch television?

To jump back into the world of Pinter's movies is to remind yourself of a literate mainstream cinema, focused as much as Bergman's is on the human face, in which tension is maintained by a carefully crafted mix of image and dialogue. These are directors' films, where the director's opportunities have been created by a writer. That's what the best film writers do - give directors their chance. Unlike certain of his best-known colleagues, Pinter does not deliberately work with weak directors: this is a writer who boxes his own weight. His collaborators of choice include Joe Losey, Elia Kazan, Karel Reisz, William Friedkin and Jack Clayton. Not exactly the bunch a writer would choose in search of an easy ride.

What, then, are Pinter's films about? Earlier this year I was asked by the American Academy to review every film Pinter wrote, and to choose some sequences which both illustrate his themes and give an idea of his sense of pure film. When I showed my selection of clips to the British chairman of the Academy, he said: "It's so clever the way you've avoided the obvious choices." I said: "Oh yes? Tell me, what are the obvious choices?" So, let's just say that when, after my survey of his film output, I suggested to Pinter that his recurring themes were adultery, alcohol and violence, he replied: "That's very funny" - though not exactly in the tone of someone who had found what I said genuinely amusing.

To say that Pinter's true genius is for capturing the feeling of time passing, of human life draining away in disappointment and frustration is to make it sound as though he writes dreary or depressing movies. Nothing could be less true. A social realist makes poetry from the even grind of life, its dailiness. But Pinter is drawn much more to its amazing highs and lows. He works up to, round and away from, a series of decisive, life-changing moments - the accident in Accident, the discovery of the lovers in The Go-Between, the throat-cutting in The Comfort of Strangers - single incidents which will be the turning point in lives of many. In his world, security is fragile, catastrophic change always just round the corner, love or intimacy hard-won and often too carelessly thrown away. There is no such thing as a Pinter film with low stakes.

You could argue that it's hard to judge the overall flavour of Pinter's work without the realisation of the script on which he worked longest - A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, completed in 1972 - and on which he said he never felt he had wasted a moment, in spite of the fact that it was never made. But even without that finished film, it's possible to say Pinter has found himself writing repeatedly about class. The three films he made with Losey - The Servant, Accident and The Go-Between, are all, surprisingly, about aristocracy. And in the cheerless fuckpad in Betrayal, in the half-felt, half-meant location romance of The French Lieutenant's Woman, in the boozy, donnish watchfulness of Accident, in the repellent modern partnership between Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson in The Comfort of Strangers, and in the all-out marital war of The Pumpkin Eater, you see finished portraits of a queasy bourgeoisie, whose values and convictions - whose very sense of identity - seem to wobble about in a murky plasma of whisky and deceit.

Catching the violence and the hatred which inspires adultery, Pinter offers two of the most perfect scenes he ever wrote. How many times have we heard the tired injunction, "Show, don't tell"? Of all the specious screenwriting rules peddled by gurus fleecing the young, this is the most annoying of the lot, because it's plain to anyone who's ever bothered to watch a play or a film carefully that the best writers invariably achieve their effects by mixing showing and telling. It's how you configure showing and telling that makes you great. In fact, it's the amount of one you mix with the other to which we give the name "personal style". Read one page of Shakespeare, a writer fond of interior monologue. First he tells, then he shows. And that's how Pinter does it as well.

In The Pumpkin Eater we never see Maggie Smith making love to Peter Finch. We don't need to. Finch tells us about it, more powerfully than any shot of flailing limbs could ever achieve. And even more powerful, because at second hand, in Anne Bancroft's eyes we see a glare of pain and betrayal which tells us more about what went on than any mere showing could hope to show.

If you want a wordless summary of everything that's good about Pinter's film writing, please look also at the tracking shot in The Servant, a tracking shot worthy of Fellini in his early days, worthy even of I Vitelloni. James Fox, like a panther, leaves a Chelsea bistro, accompanied by two separate Johnny Dankworth tunes, and goes out in the night, wealthy, gifted, young and fit, just looking for trouble - which he then finds back in his own home, in the irresistible form of the young Sarah Miles. All right then, let me revise that list: adultery, violence, alcohol, class and sex.

· Adapted from a speech given to the American Academy in London. Harold Pinter's films will be screened as part of Sheffield Theatre's Pinter festival, from October 11 to November 11. For details visit Welcome to Sheffield Theatres | Checking Plugin