One of the most influential playwrights of the twentieth century brings his celebrated Pinter pauses and anxious ambiguity to the screen in these masterful dramas that quiver with quotidian menace. Having conquered the British stage with landmark works like THE BIRTHDAY PARTY and THE CARETAKER, Harold Pinter embarked on a long and successful screenwriting career that included three brilliantly unsettling collaborations with director Joseph Losey (THE SERVANT, ACCIDENT, THE GO-BETWEEN) and several acclaimed adaptations of novels by writers like Penelope Mortimer (THE PUMPKIN EATER), John Fowles (THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN), Margaret Atwood (THE HANDMAID’S TALE), and Ian McEwan (THE COMFORT OF STRANGERS). Rife with Pinter’s signature themes of power and control, these films are an indispensable part of the monumental legacy of an artist who exposed the tensions lurking beneath the surface of everyday life.
Directed by Joseph Losey • 1963 • United Kingdom
Starring Dirk Bogarde, Sarah Miles, Wendy Craig
Director Joseph Losey and playwright Harold Pinter kicked off their celebrated trio of collaborations with this provocative deconstruction of class, power, and identity adapted from the novella by Ro...
Directed by Jack Clayton • 1964 • United Kingdom
Starring Anne Bancroft, Peter Finch, James Mason
An Oscar-nominated Anne Bancroft delivers a stunning performance as a woman on the edge in this shattering adaptation of the novel by Penelope Mortimer. She plays Jo Armitage, a mother of numerous c...
Directed by Joseph Losey • 1967 • United Kingdom
Starring Dirk Bogarde, Stanley Baker, Jacqueline Sassard
Mysterious, subversive, and endlessly fascinating, ACCIDENT is a tantalizing modernist puzzle from director Joseph Losey and writer Harold Pinter. Stephen (Dirk Bogarde) is a middle-aged pro...
Directed by Joseph Losey • 1971 • United Kingdom
Starring Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Dominic Guard
Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, the third and perhaps finest of the three collaborations between writer Harold Pinter and director Joseph Losey is a cool and cutting adaptation of the novel by...
Directed by Peter Hall • 1973 • United Kingdom, United States
Starring Paul Rogers, Ian Holm, Cyril Cusack
Director Peter Hall revisits his original stage triumph as a claustrophobic delirium that exploits the jagged tempos and seductive tensions of one of Harold Pinter’s greatest plays. In Nort...
Directed by Harold Pinter • 1974 • United Kingdom
Starring Alan Bates, Jessica Tandy, Richard O'Callaghan
On any given day, Ben Butley, a self-made train wreck of an English Literature professor, can shrug off everyone and everything with ease. But today, the disaster of Butley’s misspent life t...
Directed by Karel Reisz • 1981 • United Kingdom
Starring Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons, Hilton McRae
An astounding array of talent came together for the big-screen adaptation of John Fowles’s novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” a postmodern masterpiece that had been considered unfilmable. With a...
Directed by Paul Schrader • 1990 • United States
Starring Christopher Walken, Rupert Everett, Natasha Richardson
Two couples are drawn into a dark psychosexual vortex in Paul Schrader’s stylish take on the erotic thriller. Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson are a British couple hoping to repa...
Directed by Volker Schlöndorff • 1990 • United States
Starring Natasha Richardson, Faye Dunaway, Aidan Quinn
Adapted by Harold Pinter from the landmark novel by Margaret Atwood, the original screen adaptation of THE HANDMAID’S TALE takes place in an authoritarian future America where young, heal...
Harold Pinter’s widely influential 2005 Nobel lecture is a courageous examination of the meaning of truth in art and politics—how the former seeks to illuminate it, while the latter warps it—and a stinging excoriation of America’s foreign policy.
