William Friedkin | The Birthday Party / 1968

belle of the ball 

by Douglas Messerli

 

Harold Pinter (screenplay, based on his stage play), William Friedkin (director) The Birthday Party / 1968

 

It’s interesting that Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party was written at about the same time that Günter Grass’ novel Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) was being composed,* for the Pinter play features a character—a kind of surly man-boy figure, Stanley, who is treated almost as a child by his dotty landlady, Meg—who, like Grass’ man-child Oskar Matzerath, is given a tin drum—an absurd birthday gift from Meg, who claims, with her usual illogic, to have chosen it because the former piano player didn’t have a piano. And somewhat like Grass’ fiction about the infantilization of an entire populace, Pinter’s play, as I read it, suggests that if you accost any down-in-the-heels Brit with issues having to do with the Irish and the Jews he will quickly turn into a driveling idiot unable to communicate in any way other than a newborn’s babel.

    In the play these two quite maddeningly “dilemmas” arrive to face the down-and-out ordinary English bloke in the form of two frightening boarders, Goldberg and McCann, who enter the filthy seas-side home of Meg and Petey in order to menace and verbally torture the spiritually sour, somewhat intellectually challenged Stanely by ripping up columns of the local newspaper and reconfiguring them into unreadable pillars of words and images and peppering him with inane questions and meaningless riddles such as “What have you done with your wife?” and “Why did the chicken cross the road?”

     A birthday party for Stanley—who insists it is not his birthday—follows, where he, the near “bonkers” Meg, and the sex-starved Lulu are plied with plenty of booze and temporarily blinded by the villains who switch off the lights, insist that the celebrants play “blind-man’s-buff,” and, finally, destroy Stanley’s glasses. The very process, it appears, of being forced to celebrate with such enigmatic forces sends Stanley over the edge—a bit like Tennessee Willaims’ sexually abused Blanche DuBois—as he is bundled off, presumably to bedlam if not to his death.

     Ten years after its London premiere—a production which apparently so confused and scandalized the British public that it closed after only 8 performances—US filmmaker William Friedkin determined to film the work.

     The result is a fascinating movie that, with regard to the actors’ ability to convey Pinter’s stunning turns of language and logic, proceeds quite excellently. Dady Nichols as Meg and Roger Shaw as Stanley are particularly brilliant, and, as the two would-be villains close in upon their confused and unsuspecting prey, Patrick McGee as McCann and Syndey Tafler as Goldberg show of their thespian talents as well.

     To the complaint of some critics, that the work is not cinematic enough, I would argue that Friedkin has done a credible job portraying the sense of increasing claustrophobia with his camera jumpily cutting across the surfaces of the filthily cramped rooms, particularly the kitchen and living room where most of the action takes place. Although there are some references, as in Joseph Losey’s The Servant, the fun-house possibilities of mirrored images, for the most part Friedkin relies more on the fitful creak of his seemingly held-hand camera.

     The central problem with the Friedkin production is perhaps that it is too artsy, particularly in its extended scenes during the enforced black-outs, wherein it appears that Friedkin determined to up the ante by briefly imitating Stan Brakhage and other film experimenters. Friedkin’s genious has always been his ability to take slightly exploitive and poorly written works of pop literature and turn them into works of higher art, as in The Night They Raided Minsky’s, The Exorcist, The French Connection, and To Live and Die in L.A. By attempting to transform an art-house classic work such as Pinter’s play into a kind of formal experiment in cinematic language he distracts from the most important thing that the playwright’s work offers: the spoken word, which Pinter deliciously tortures in this work even more than his criminal one-night boarders intimidate their pre-determined prey.

    If the denizens of this nightmare flop-house cannot cope with the realities of their world, it is because they have no language in which to express it. While Petey shouts out to the devasted Stanley as they take him away, “Don’t let them tell you what to do,” we know that that is precisely the problem with Stanley, Meg, and Petey himself; their cliché-ridden language utterly determines how they behave and what they do. Their identities are limited by their delusions of themselves, the play ending with the truly blinded Meg (who does not even know that her beloved man-child has been taken from her life) suggesting to Petey that during the drunken melee of her last evening, “I was the belle of the ball…I know I was.”

 

*The Birthday Party premiered in 1957, while Grass’ novel was published in 1959 and translated into English in 1961.

 

Los Angeles, April 16, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2015).