The Birthday Party

Harold Pinter's brilliant early play-on-film, The Birthday Party, is one of his best efforts, and perhaps, with The Homecoming, the pinnacle of the Theater of the Absurd. The plot itself is simple. Two men come to visit Stanley, a classical pianist who has, for unknown reasons, left his home and is staying with a provincial couple. He is visited by Shamus McCann (Patrick McGee) and Nat Goldberg (Sydney Tafler). They alternately celebrate and menace Stanley, who may or may or may not know them. Nothing is clearly stated. Most of the dialogue consists of insinuations and vague threats. Performances across the board are outstanding, with Robert Shaw outdoing himself as Stanley Weber. Moultrie Keisall as Petey is excellent but understated, and his final words really put the cherry on the birthday cake. (sorry for the pun). Nothing I can say can communicate the unique strangeness and power of this film. Top marks, 5 stars, classic.

Harold Pinter's work is infuriating at best, but this film version comes close to making some sense of 'The Birthday Party'. Dandy Nichols runs a boarding house in which oddball lodger Stanley lives (very well played by Robert Shaw) and when two unusual menacing visitors arrive (Patrick Magee and Sidney Tafler) events start to get progressively weirder. The play is dark, claustrophobic, and extremely clever, and the film plays on this - I particularly liked the sequence with the torchlight which had heaps of atmosphere. Not seen much, this version is now commercially available again and hopefully will be eventually viewed in the same light as other Pinter movies such as 'Accident'. It deserves better than it has had so far.

Reportedly the first film William Friedkin directed that he was really, truly excited about, The Birthday Party is an adaptation of Harold Pinter's play of the same name, adapted into a script by Pinter himself. Having never seen a Pinter play or read much of anything about him, I think I can still suss out the meaning of the play's intentions, but I was generally not that engaged by what was going on. The only thing that really kept my interest was Friedkin's ability to find new ways to shoot a very confined space, keeping the film visually interesting from start to finish in a small two-room set that occupies about 95% of the film's runtime.

The film only has six characters. The central character is Stanley (Robert Shaw), a former piano player, currently out of work and spending all of his time in the boarding house he lives in in a seaside town on the English coast. The boarding house is run by Meg (Dandy Nichols) who is married to Petey (Moultrie Kelsall) who reads his newspaper, eats his corn flakes, and wishes for more to eat than corn flakes for breakfast. Being a Pinter play (I assume), there's a lot of talk to set up these characters in their routines, to establish the scene through character actions and dialogue. Essentially, they live a quiet, repetitive life with little excitement, the only real interesting things being the mystery around their boarder, Stanley. Meg decides that that day is his birthday, even though, after he eventually gets down for breakfast, he disagrees, and she's going to throw him a birthday party.

Into this mix come two strangers, McCann (Patrick Magee) and Goldberg (Sydney Tafler). Who they are never becomes clear, though their motives become clear enough as they butt into the little existence with a clear-eyed focus on Stanley. From the moment they enter the scene, they have an obvious motive of breaking Stanley down, but it doesn't become terribly clear why until very late in the film. Essentially, what I can figure out is that Stanley represents a kind of harmless non-conformism that cannot be tolerated, so advocates of conformity come in to clear that up and make him fly straight. He's something of a loser, clinging to half-remembered and perhaps incorrect memories of professional heights from years past. The two break him down by questioning the past, even his very name, and Stanley, being in no good mental shape, is an open target to be harassed and broken down.

It all crescendos at the titular party, the neighbor Lulu (Helen Fraser) having brought a toy drum for Stanley as a present which becomes the central visual motif of the film as it represents his lowered status and even that gets broken in its own way before Stanley himself is completely broken. There is still a half hour of the film left where we get insights into Goldberg, in particular, and Petey standing up slightly for Stanely before being shooed out of the house to deal with some business at the beach.

So, I find it kind of obvious. Most of the character beats are people just talking about themselves in extended soliloquies that never feel natural despite the emphasis on character and realistic setting which are obviously meant for naturalism on some level. The actual action extends into some level of absurdism and surrealism which Friedkin enhances through conscious filmmaking techniques.

Which takes me to Friedkin himself. I don't know what I was expecting when I started going through his work chronologically, but whatever it was, it wasn't going to be actor-focused theatrical adaptations. And yet, that's exactly what I'm getting. What's surprising beyond that is that Friedkin is taking this stage-bound production and really making it feel cinematic. The focus is very much on the actors and their characters, so it's not like our eyes are wandering to the backgrounds and compositions, but that doesn't stop Friedkin from finding new ways to keep his actors in the frame. This has an advantage over something like The Zero Theorem in that there are multiple subjects, so when Friedkin uses something like a camera move from the living room through the window to the kitchen, following two actors as they go and talk, the visual composition is changing, evolving, and continuing to be interesting as he moves from one composition to the next (evoking Wyler to a great degree) while the focus is very much on the two actors.

Those actors are uniformly very good, of course. I always get a kick out of seeing Magee because it makes me think of his performance in A Clockwork Orange, but it's Shaw who's the focus as the broken man broken further by the outside presence intruding upon his little life.

So, it's well-made and it's well-acted, but I just generally can't get into it. I find extended monologues about the self to be less interesting than Pinter does, it seems, and the central point feels both too on the nose and too thin for the running time. Maybe it works better on the stage.

If one has never seen a Pinter play, this one is a hard one to start with. I studied numerous playwrights in college and nearly wrote a dissertation on this guy, but my advisers turned down my proposal. Absurdist theatre is a hard business from Ionesco to Beckett, but Pinter paved his own way. It was interesting to see Robert Shaw, the skipper in Jaws and a bad guy in The Sting, the victim here. He lives in a house (not really a boarding house) and is a harsh, depressed man. The woman who runs things is a clueless nit. Out of nowhere come a pair of men, who decide to stay there, but their target is Stanley (Shaw). Their motives are unclear, other than to turn him into a relative vegetable with intense nonsense interrogation. The title comes from what would seem a benign celebration of Stanley's life which then turns into a nightmare. The film is pretty well crafted with "good" performances. But like every Pinter play I've seen, it leaves one unsettled and spooked.

Friedkin does an excellent job of turning Harold Pinter's crunchy little Comedy of Menace into a suitably dank, dreary-looking movie full of dark corners, both visual and characteristic. Cast is spot-on, but Sydney Tafler's Goldberg is outstanding; alternately affable and deeply threatening with sublime ease. Even better is Dandy Nicholls as Meg, a truly pitch-perfect performance in one of Pinter's few sympathetic (and substantial) female roles. This reading does invite comparison with the 1987 TV production, in which Pinter himself plays Goldberg and Joan Plowright the daffy Meg. For my money, this movie is the winner by a length. Highly recommended.