As a playwright, Harold Pinter had a unique and unmistakable voice. But as a screenwriter, argues Ian Christie, he was a meticulous and highly sensitive adaptor of other writers, including Fitzgerald, Kafka – and himself.

Between the 1960s and the 1990s, Harold Pinter actually wrote almost as many screenplays as stage works. As a screenwriter he is probably best remembered for the ingenuity of his John Fowle’s adaptation The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), with its intertwined parallel stories, and for his unfilmed adaptation of A la recherche du temps perdu, published in 1978 as The Proust Screenplay. But somehow a fatal combination of literary prejudice against ‘movie work‘ and the idea that a great writer should leave his mark, or fail nobly, conspire to distract attention from Pinter’s large body of unshowy, highly professional work as a screenwriter.

Two of his scripts actually deal with screenwriters. In his adaptation of Penelope Mortimer’s 1964 novel The Pumpkin Eater Anne Bancroft’s philandering husband, played with rumpled charm by Peter Finch, is an early example of the species. And a later underrated film, The Last Tycoon (1976), is based on the last, unfinished novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, patron saint of writers allegedly crucified by Hollywood. (..)

Pinter ceratinly suffered the same frustration all screenwriters have. One of his saddest losses was reputedly The Remains of the Day, which he addapted from the Kazuo Ishiguro novel, only to see it rewritten by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala when the project was reassigned from Mike Nichols to James Ivory. Yet  he could probably count more victories than most. Cinema for Pinter was a time machine, an apparatus that allows us to engage with memory and consciousness in a unique way, quite different from the experience of the theatre or reading. And some of his simplest screenplays are also among his finest.

Ian Christie

*Full text can be found: Sight & Sound, 6′09, 33. p.

Prepared by: Zane Krumina