6 - Harold Pinter, screenwriter

Summary

Harold Pinter is one of the premier dramatists of the twentieth century; he also is a master screenwriter. In spite of the fact that he has written twenty-four filmscripts and in the 1980s and 1990s his artistic attention was focused almost exclusively on his screenwriting, relatively little critical attention has been paid to this large segment of his canon.

Since his first scripted film, The Servant, appeared in 1962, he has had numerous cinematic successes, in terms of both popular acceptance and critical acclaim, and he has won several prestigious awards for his work. Besides being entered in major festivals, Pinter’s films have been listed among the year’s ten best consistently, and he received both the British Screenwriters Guild Award and the New York Film Critics Best Writing Award for The Servant (1963), the Berlin Film Festival Silver Bear and an Edinburgh Festival Certificate of Merit for The Caretaker (1963), the British Film Academy Award for The Pumpkin Eater (1964), the Cannes Film Festival Special Jury Prize and a National Board of Review Award for Accident (1967), the Cannes Film Festival Golden Palm for Best Film and the British Academy Award for The Go-Between (1970), and a National Board of Review Best English-Language Film Award for The Last Tycoon (1976). His more recent films, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), Betrayal (1982), Turtle Diary (1986), The Handmaid’s Tale (1990) and The Trial (1993) have received equal praise from reviewers. As a matter of fact, critics claim that Pinter’s distinctive style and unmistakable writing ability have been responsible for the best work done by several of his directors (as I documented in Butter’s Going Up well over twenty years ago).