Arguably the most interesting of William Friedkin’s pre-FRENCH CONNECTION (1971) films. Of them GOOD TIMES (1967) and THE NIGHT THEY RAIDED MINSKY’S (1968) were admitted hackwork, while THE BOYS IN THE BAND (1970) played like a remake of this 1968 British-centric chamber drama, which appears to have been the only one of those four films Friedkin truly cared about.
Its basis was an absurdist drama by Harold Pinter that hailed from 1957. THE BIRTHDAY PARTY was Pinter’s second play, and its disastrous initial run nearly derailed his career, which was saved only by a last-minute rave from the renowned theater critic Harold Hobson. Friedkin, who admired the play’s atmosphere of “irrational fear and paranoia,” wanted to film it since viewing a 1962 performance in San Francisco. The film finally got underway in 1968, after Friedkin had burnt many a bridge in Hollywood.
At a seaside boarding house owned by the elderly couple Petey (Dandy Nichols) and Meg (Moultrie Kelsall), a highly apprehensive young man named Stanley Webster (Robert Shaw) is ensconced. It’s his birthday, Meg claims, but Stanley appears to believe otherwise. Enter McCann (Patrick Magee) and Goldberg (Sydney Tafler), two well-dressed men, the former of whom likes to methodically tear newspapers into long ribbons (the unnerving sound of which is played over the opening credits for maximum atmospheric foreshadowing), and grows enraged if anyone dares touch the results of his handiwork. It’s clear that for some unknown reason these two weirdies have an unnatural interest in Stanley, who becomes the subject of a birthday party held against his wishes.
Stanley’s upset is heightened by interrogations undertaken by McCann and Goldberg that consist primarily of non sequiturs designed to unnerve the subject (not dissimilar to the infamous “Picking your feet in Poughkeepsie” interrogation scene in THE FRENCH CONNETION). There’s also an unnerving game of blind man’s bluff in which the lights are turned off and everyone seemingly loses their collective minds. The following morning Stanley is taken away by McCann and Goldberg, leaving Meg and Petey to close things out with a nonsensical conversation about the previous night’s festivities.
As to what all this “means,” Pinter once stated “There are no motivations for the behavior of these people that I’m aware of, and no way to determine whether they’re speaking truth or telling lies.” In other words, there are no hidden meanings to be found, and no explanations, with the rhythm of the dialogue and the intonations by the performers being all-important.
This would appear to be Friedkin’s least characteristic concoction, but examined more closely THE BIRTHDAY PARTY contains more than its share of Friedkin-esque touches. Those include some arrestingly odd camera angles and an atmosphere of mounting unease that suggest a stylistic forerunner to future play-based Friedkin freak-outs like BUG and KILLER JOE. The blind man’s bluff sequence, involving shades of darkness and screams, is as horrific as anything in THE EXORCIST, and the whole thing is infused with a sense of homosexual panic that found its apotheosis in CRUISING.
“To this day I don’t think our cast could have been improved” wrote Friedkin in his 2013 autobiography. Pinter selected much of that cast, which includes Robert Shaw, one of England’s finest actors (though best known in America for playing Quint in JAWS), Patrick Magee, a longtime Pointer confidante who delivers a typically grandiose (typical, at least, to those familiar with Magee’s work in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and DR. JEKYLL AND HIS WOMEN) performance, and British character actor Sydney Tafler. “Left on my own, I wouldn’t have known to cast any of them,” Friedkin admitted.
Friedkin never overcomes the material’s inherent staginess, and nor does he try to. Nonetheless, he and cinematographer Denys Coop (AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS) create a tightly controlled, eye-pleasing and (surprisingly for a director who regularly bragged about his lack of formal education) literate concoction that’s quintessentially Pinteresque. This means the proceedings are highly irrational on the one hand, and cold-heartedly intellectual on the other.
Such proclivities have led to the claim that Pinter’s work is “unfillable” (his original work, that is, as opposed to his adaptations of other peoples’ writing, such as THE SERVANT and THE COMFORT OF STRANGERS). That may be true, but in THE BIRTHDAY PARTY William Friedkin came about as close as anybody ever will to making Pinterese work onscreen.
Vital Statistics
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY
Palomar Pictures International
Director: William Friedkin
Producers: Max J. Rosenberg, Milton Subotsky
Screenplay: Harold Pinter
(Based on a play by Harold Pinter)
Cinematography: Denys Coop
Editing: Antony Gibbs
Cast: Robert Shaw, Patrick Magee, Sydney Tafler, Dandy Nichols, Moultrie Kelsall, Helen Fraser