Harold Pinter, the caretaker

► The Servant is re-released in UK cinemas on 10 September.

Between the 1960s and the 1990s, Harold Pinter actually wrote almost as many screenplays as stage works. As a screenwriter he is probably best remembered for the ingenuity of his John Fowles adaptation The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), with its intertwined parallel stories, and for his unfilmed adaptation of A la recherche du temps perdu, published in 1978 as The Proust Screenplay. But somehow a fatal combination of literary prejudice against ‘movie work’ and the idea that a great writer should leave his mark, or fail nobly, conspire to distract attention from Pinter’s large body of unshowy, highly professional work as a screenwriter.

Two of his scripts actually deal with screenwriters. In his adaptation of Penelope Mortimer’s 1964 novel The Pumpkin Eater Anne Bancroft’s philandering husband, played with rumpled charm by Peter Finch, is an early example of the species. And a later underrated film, The Last Tycoon (1976), is based on the last, unfinished novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, patron saint of writers allegedly crucified by Hollywood. In what would be Elia Kazan’s last film, Robert De Niro plays the world-weary producer Monroe Stahr, who has to placate and, occasionally, inspire everyone around him to make better movies. One of these is an expatriate English novelist, probably based on Aldous Huxley, who thinks it’s all beneath him. It recalls memorable accounts of directors trying to motivate recalcitrant writers – like Wilder working on Chandler to deliver a sharper script for Double Indemnity – and must have seemed rich in ironies to Pinter, not least as the writer was played by Donald Pleasence, famous for creating the role of Davies in Pinter’s breakthrough 1960 play The Caretaker (a role he repeated in the 1963 film).

There is considerable invention in the script of The Last Tycoon, which includes scenes such as a studio tour hosted by the Hollywood veteran John Carradine that must have evoked Pinter’s own childhood as an avid filmgoer, coinciding with the climax of Hollywood professionalism in the late 1930s and 1940s. Linda Renton’s superb study of Pinter as screenwriter (Pinter and the Object of Desire: An Approach through the Screenplays) quotes him saying how natural the process seemed when he started to write for films in the early 1960s. Before that, he had also been affected by the European art cinema he saw in film societies, especially by Buñuel and Dalí’s early surrealist masterpieces, Un chien andalou and L’Age d’or.

A strong commitment to the power of the image runs through his screen work, however paradoxical this might seem in a writer famed for his sparring dialogue. Renton argues that the image was central to his approach to film, suggesting that there is an ‘object of desire’ at the heart of all Pinter’s screenplays: one which is often barely visible – or even invisible – to the characters in the story. For his famous The Proust Screenplay – since realised on stage and radio – Pinter actually proposed a long series of autonomous images that would stake out in advance themes and episodes from the subsequent narrative.

Whether or not this might have made as successful a filmic version of Proust as Ruiz’s phantasmagoric Time Regained (1999) would have depended on the director, and perhaps a willingness to depart from Pinter’s script. Kazan reputedly wanted to change The Last Tycoon, but was prevented by producer Sam Spiegel, who despite his reputation as a vulgarian was an admirer of Pinter. For better or worse, this may be the most faithful Pinter realisation, although it was also Spiegel who gave him the chance to rework his 1978 play Betrayal as a film five years later. This story of an adulterous triangle, apparently inspired by Pinter’s own long affair with Joan Bakewell in the 1960s, is famously told in reverse, beginning with a meeting after the affair has ended. The technique sounds like bringing cinema’s flashback technique to the stage, although it might be better described as running the reels in reverse order.

As a film – modestly yet deftly directed by David Jones, with Jeremy Irons and Patricia Hodge as the lovers and Ben Kingsley as Hodge’s husband – Betrayal reveals Pinter as a superb adaptor of himself. Nothing is really changed, yet in the process of transferring this haunting study of love’s consequences to the screen, with its range of anonymous London settings, everything alters. Without the histrionics and overt eroticism of Pinter’s celebrated adaptation of Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers for Paul Schrader in 1990, Betrayal as a film has an intensity and intimacy that are deeply disturbing.

Although Pinter’s collaborations with Losey may always be regarded as his highest achievements in cinema, another strand of his work deserves attention. Pinter grew up in London’s East End, where British fascists tried to foment anti-Semitism. He retained a sense of his Jewish identity, and although it rarely appears in his stage work, it runs through his screenplays, from The Quiller Memorandum (1966, adapted from Adam Hall’s novel The Berlin Memorandum) – set in Cold War Germany with neo-Nazism resurgent – to two of his lesser-known later works. The first film, Reunion, directed by Jerry Schatzberg in 1989, is an apparently straight adaptation of a novella by Fred Uhlmann about a German-born Jewish man returning to the scenes of his boyhood long after World War II and recalling his friendship with a young Lutheran aristocrat as the Nazis rose to power. It’s an archetypal story, as several reviewers noted, but one told with simplicity and passion; when Pinter was invited to talk about his screenwriting in Oxford in the mid-1990s, this was the film he had screened. A flurry of flashbacks near the beginning bears witness to Pinter’s continuing belief in the primacy of the image, before the extended flashback engages us in its painful, poignant relationship. The structure may recall The Go-Between (1971, adapted from the L. P. Hartley novel), but the issues are those of identity and survival in the face of a murderous anti-Semitism.

One of Pinter’s last screenplays to be filmed was a version of Kafka’s The Trial (1992), again directed by David Jones. There were inevitable comparisons with Orson Welles’s earlier account, starring a haunted Anthony Perkins, and while Pinter was considerably more faithful to Kafka, few felt this achieved the same intensity as Welles. But what it did was to make K, the hapless victim of irrational inquisition, very much a Jewish protagonist. Neither Kafka nor Pinter wanted to be defined as ‘Jewish artists’, but in adapting this great work of protest against persecution, Pinter managed to articulate this link.

Pinter certainly suffered the same frustration all screenwriters have. One of his saddest losses was reputedly The Remains of the Day, which he adapted from the Kazuo Ishiguro novel, only to see it rewritten by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala when the project was reassigned from Mike Nichols to James Ivory. Yet he could probably count more victories than most. Cinema for Pinter was a time machine, an apparatus that allows us to engage with memory and consciousness in a unique way, quite different from the experience of the theatre or reading. And some of his simplest screenplays are also among his finest.