The Birthday Party (film)

Plot

The protagonist is a lodger in his late 30s named Stanley (Webber), played by Robert Shaw, who is staying at a seaside boarding house; he is visited by two unexpected additional guests, menacing and mysterious strangers, Goldberg (Sydney Tafler) and McCann (Patrick Magee). Their neighbour, Lulu (Helen Fraser) brings her a parcel, a boy's toy drum presented to Stanley as his "birthday present." Goldberg and McCann offer to host Stanley's birthday party after Stanley's landlady, Meg (Boles), played by Dandy Nichols, tells them that it is Stanley's birthday, although Stanley protests that it is really not his birthday. In the course of the party, Goldberg and McCann break Stanley down and ultimately take him away from the house purportedly to get medical attention (from "Monty") in their car. The film ends (as the play ends) after Meg's husband Petey (Moultrie Kelsall), a deckchair attendant, who did not attend the party because he was out playing chess, calls after Stanley, "Stan, don't let them tell you what to do"; at the end, Meg, still somewhat hung over, is unaware that Stanley has been taken away, since Petey has not told her that, and tells him that she was "the belle of the ball."

Production

The movie was a passion project of director William Friedkin who called it "the first film I really wanted to make, understood and felt passionate about". He had first seen the play in San Francisco in 1962, and managed to get the film version funded by Edgar Scherick at Palomar Pictures, in part because it could be made relatively cheaply. Pinter wrote the screenplay himself and was heavily involved in casting. "To this day I don't think our cast could have been improved," wrote Friedkin later.

There was a ten-day rehearsal period and the shoot went smoothly. Friedkin says the only tense exchange he had with Pinter in a year of working together came when Joseph Losey saw the movie and requested through Pinter that Friedkin cut out a mirror shot as it was too close to Losey's style; Friedkin refused as "I wasn't about to destroy the film's continuity to mollify Losey's ego".

Max Rosenberg, best known for his horror movies for Amicus Productions, had been called in by Palomar as line producer.

Critical reception

In his film review, published in The Nation on 6 January 1969, critic Harold Clurman described the film as "a fantasia of fear and prosecution," adding that "Pinter's ear is so keen, his method so economic and so shrewdly stylized, balancing humdrum realistic notations with suggestions of unfathomable violence, that his play succeeds in being both funny and horrific".

As the reviewer of the Evening Standard observed, in a description of the film published on 12 February 1970, the film, like the play, is "a study of domination that sows doubts, terrors, shuddering illuminations and terrifying apprehensions inside the four walls of a living-room in a seaside boarding-house where Stanley, (Robert Shaw), the lodger, has taken refuge from some guilt, crime, treachery, in fact Some Thing, never named".

Box office

The film earned rentals of $50,000 in North America and $350,000 in other countries. After all costs were deducted, it recorded an overall loss of $725,000.

However Friedkin later said it was "a film of which I'm proud. The cast played it to perfection. With the exception of an occasional over-the-top directorial flourish I think I captured Pinter's world. The time I spent with him and the many conversations we had were the most invaluable and instructive of my career."