Movies
February, 1969
The Birthday Party is Harold Pinter's own screen adaptation of an early exercise in Pinteresque terror that Broadway audiences saw last season. Pinter characters by definition are people at the end of their tethers, impotent, trapped in small, stifling rooms and using meaningless words to fend off modern man's chronic sense of dread. Here the setting is a sleazy rooming house in a dreary seaside town, and director William Friedkin imbues every inch of habitable space with claustrophobia. A frump...
