Pinter back to film thrills

Nobel laureate Harold Pinter has been one of the preeminent theatrical voices of the past half a century, penning such spare, elliptical, thought-provoking plays as “The Birthday Party,” “The Caretaker,” “The Homecoming,” “Old Times” and “Betrayal.” But the 76-year-old Briton has also won acclaim as a screenwriter, including an Oscar nomination for his complex, clever adaptation of John Fowles’ “The French Lieutenant’s Woman.”

His latest screenplay is “Sleuth,” which opens Friday. Though Pinter usually has adapted novels and short stories for the screen, “Sleuth,” which stars Michael Caine and Jude Law, is based on Anthony Shaffer’s Tony Award-winning mystery thriller.

Pinter’s screenplays include “The Pumpkin Eater” (1964), “The Quiller Memorandum” (1967) and “Turtle Diary” (1985). But perhaps his greatest works for the screen were the three films he made with Joseph Losey, an American director who worked in Europe after the blacklist destroyed his career in Hollywood.

Pinter and Losey first teamed up for 1963’s scathing black comedy “The Servant,” based on Robin Maugham’s novel, starring a magnificently odious Dirk Bogarde as a manipulative manservant to a spoiled rich boy (James Fox).

Four years later, Pinter and Losey reunited for the sexually charged drama “Accident,” adapted from the novel by Nicholas Mosley.

Bogarde plays a college professor going through a midlife crisis who falls for a beautiful student who happens to be engaged to another of the professor’s students.

Pinter and Losey’s final film is an exquisitely dark examination of British social hypocrisy: 1971’s “The Go-Between.” Set in the summer of 1900, this adaptation of L.P. Hartley’s novel stars Julie Christie as a rich woman who befriends a young boy (Dominic Guard) who has been invited to her family’s country estate by her brother.

Though Christie’s Marian is engaged to a wealthy man (Edward Fox), she is secretly having an affair with a rakish neighbor (Alan Bates).

The Evening Standard’s Alexander Walker wrote that Pinter had adapted the novel with “scrupulous fidelity, yet adds to it his own uncanny skill at depicting people who use words to conceal themselves rather then reveal their meanings.”

– Susan King