Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 180: Sun Jul 8

The Birthday Party (Friedkin, 1968): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.20pm


A conversation with a prominent BFI Southbank executive two decades ago made it clear that Harold Pinter wasn't going to get a retrospective at the cinema anytime soon. A shameful omission that is now being redressed, unfortunately after the playwright's death. This 35mm screening, which is part of the Pinter season (full details here), is also screened on July 18th (full details here).

This interpretation, which I saw recently on the excellent Talking Pictures TV channel, is well worth seeking out for those familiar or not with the groundbreaking play. 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 said: "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." Critic Drew Hunt of the Chicago Reader named it Friedkin's greatest work when he compiled a top five of the director's work in 2013. Not to be missed.

Chicago Reader review:
This adaptation of Harold Pinter's classic chamber drama represents Friedkin at his most focused, capricious, and antagonistic. It features a style he'd replicate in his best films, most obviously in the aforementioned 
Bug. Friedkin injects Pinter's play, already menacing and unnerving in its own right, with a deeper sense of dread. Perhaps more than any other filmmaker, Friedkin understands the oppressiveness of tight spaces. In The Birthday Party
, he frames the action in tight, unwavering closeups that heighten a sense of claustrophobia unattainable in a staged version of the text.
Drew Hunt


Here (and above) is the opening of the movie.

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