The Birthday Party movie storyline. Based on Harold Pinter’s enigmatic play about a border in a British seaside dwelling who is visited by two strangers. They torment him verbally, ask him idiotic unanswerable questions, force him to sit down and stand up, and give him a “party.” Then, eventually, they take him away, a tongue-tied idiot. The trivial becomes the terrible, and with it a certain wonder, a certain pity.
The Birthday Party is a 1968 British drama neo noir directed by William Friedkin and starring Robert Shaw. It is based on the 1957 play The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter. The screenplay for the film was written by Pinter as well. The film, and the play, are considered examples of “comedy of menace”, a genre associated with Pinter. The film was a passion project for Friedkin, who had been a fan of the play, and he remained proud of the film after its release, though it was a box office disappointment.
The film was a passion project of director William Friedkin who called it “the first film I really wanted to make, understood and felt passionate about”. He had first seen the play in San Francisco in 1962, and managed to get the film version funded by Edgar Scherick at Palomar Pictures, in part because it could be made relatively cheaply. Pinter wrote the screenplay himself and was heavily involved in casting. “To this day I don’t think our cast could have been improved,” wrote Friedkin later.
There was a ten-day rehearsal period and the shoot went smoothly. Friedkin says the only tense exchange he had with Pinter in a year of working together came when Joseph Losey saw the movie and requested through Pinter that Friedkin cut out a mirror shot as it was too close to Losey’s style; Friedkin refused as “I wasn’t about to destroy the film’s continuity to mollify Losey’s ego”. Max Rosenberg, best known for his horror movies for Amicus Productions, had been called in by Palomar as line producer.
The Birthday Party (1968)
Directed by: William Friedkin
Starring: Robert Shaw, Patrick Magee, Sydney Tafler, Dandy Nichols, Moultrie Kelsall, Helen Fraser
Screenplay by: Harold Pinter
Production Design by: Teresa Bolland
Cinematography by: Denys Coop
Film Editing by: Antony Gibbs
Art Direction by: Edward Marshall
Makeup Department: Eddie Knight, Betty Sherriff
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Continental Distributing
Release Date: December 9, 1968
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