The Book Tower

GOLDBERG: Your wife makes a very nice cup of tea, Mr Boles, you know that?
PETEY: Yes, she does sometimes. Sometimes she forgets.
MEG: Is he coming down?
GOLDBERG: Down? Of course he’s coming down. On a lovely sunny day like this he shouldn’t come down? He’ll be up and about in next to no time. And what a breakfast he’s going to get.

By the end of the 1960s Harold Pinter was building an impressive record of film screenplays, including his collaborations with Joseph Losey (The Servant in 1963 and Accident in 1967), the Pumpkin Eater (1964) and The Quiller Memorandum (1966). Now already ten years old, his first full length play The Birthday Party was finally made for the cinema in 1968. It starred Robert Shaw as Stanley Webber. Shaw also appeared previously in The Caretaker (1963) making him perhaps the definitive interpreter of Pinter on film.

The Birthday Party has an interesting pedigree. It is directed by William Friedkin, who was later responsible for The French Connection and The Exorcist. Both of these energetic films are a stark contrast to what is essentially a faithful record of a claustrophobic stage experience. The film’s producers Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenburg were responsible for the run of first class horror films made by Amicus films in the sixties and seventies. The roles of Friedkin, Subotsky and Rosenburg are quite fitting; The Birthday Party is essentially a horror story.

The cast also includes Dandy Nicholls (from Till Death Us Do Part) as Meg Bowes, landlady of the sorriest of seaside boarding houses. She is superb, as are Sydney Tafler and Patrick Magee as Goldberg and McCann, the most menacing of house guests. Moultree Kelsall as Petey and Helen Fraser (Bad Girls) as Lulu complete the line up, and for anyone familiar with the play this is a very faithful version. There is a timeless quality about The Birthday Party, and whilst Friedkin’s direction (though mostly restrained) reveals some 60s indulgences (most notably in the opening sequence with the camera moving in on the wing mirror of Goldberg and McCann’s car and the backing soundtrack of ripping paper) Pinter’s dialogue does not date.

The Birthday Party offers various snapshots of haunting pasts, most disturbingly Stanley Webber and his vague portrayal of a former life. Although essentially a filmed play and little more (only Petey’s life as a deckchair attendant is seen fleetingly, chairs neatly and uniformly arranged), the performances are strong enough to hold the attention by merely suggesting what has happened in the past; here Stanley offering fragmentary snapshots culled from his mysterious history: his musical talent, its positive reception, the champagne that followed, his absent father:

STANLEY: I had a unique touch. Absolutely unique. They came up to me. They came up to me and said they were grateful. Champagne we had that night, the lot. My father nearly came down to hear me…. But I don’t think he could make it. No, I-I lost the address, that was it. Yes. Lower Edmonton.

Robert Shaw, an actor probably now best remembered for Jaws and his stint as a Bond villain, portrays this introspection perfectly.

Pinter’s themes of alienation, persecution and torture are vividly sketched out in The Birthday Party. Apart from Shaw, the other standout actor in the film is Sydney Tafler, who plays Stanley’s eventual nemesis Goldberg, a man who relishes his memories in the form of the anecdote. The refuge of the anecdote is the basis for Goldberg’s entire routine, this charming, smooth and potentially dangerous gentleman:

GOLDBERG: When I was an apprentice …my uncle Barney used to take me to the seaside, regular as clockwork. Brighton, Canvey Island, Rottingdean…we’d have a little paddle, we’d watch the tide coming in, going out, the sun coming down – golden days, believe me.

A stable past is personified by the kindly Uncle Barney, who Goldberg proceeds to describe as a well respected “impeccable dresser. One of the old school.” A pattern is very clear: the importance of place names that connect with memories, a figure from the past worthy of respect and admiration, usually the suggestion of a rose-tinted past, the faded “golden days”. If insecurity of the present needs such constant reinforcement, then the uncertain atmosphere prevalent in The Birthday Party unquestionably highlights this. Even Goldberg and McCann, Stanley’s interrogators, virtual torturers and eventual abductors, have their moments of uncertainty. Of all British cinema of the sixties, this film is the least assured of the supposedly bright decade.

Leslie Halliwell gave The Birthday Party only 1 out of a possible 4 stars and described it:

Overlong but otherwise satisfactory film record of an entertaining if infuriating play, first of the black absurdities which proliferated in the sixties to general disadvantage, presenting structure without plot and intelligence without meaning.

By 1968 Halliwell’s perceived golden age of cinema had already ended. Oddly, like the characters in The Birthday Party, he was stuck in the past.

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Quite often one book can suggest another. Antonia Fraser’s Must You Go? made several references to Harold Pinter’s long standing friendship with Simon Gray, including Pinter’s reaction to Gray’s death in 2008. Gray’s own volume of memoirs, The Smoking Diaries, makes several references to Pinter, including observations of his own failing health. Ruminations on mortality can be depressing, although Gray successfully manages to invest a degree of warmth and humour into things. The Smoking Diaries reflects upon his own sixty a day habit (halved by the early 2000s when the memoirs were written – he’d already given up on the four bottles of champagne a day), observations of (mostly senile) fellow hotel guests, a troubled relationship with his father and the sorry alcoholism of his younger brother. Even the terror of a panic attack – where Gray rushes from his shed unable to remember his exact age. Whatever he writes about, however troubling, it is always compelling writing.

I’m sorry to say that I followed Simon Gray with two writers who couldn’t be less engaging. The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis is possibly the worst book I have ever picked up. It is pretentious, poorly written, dull and ultimately pointless. Its only achievement is recruiting more manpower for the anti-Amis brigade. Unfortunately things hardly improved with The Ghost by Robert Harris, a book recommended to me and one I was interested in because of the forthcoming Roman Polanski film. Sadly The Ghost is an unconvincing thriller in the Dan Brown mould. It’s predictable, the characters are wooden and the outcome is laughable.

But don’t despair. I’m now into The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris and it’s the best thing I’ve read for ages. A review will follow shortly…

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I was surprised to find that I had never seen Race With the Devil. This 1975 film was chosen as a favourite by the author Sean Hutson in a recent edition of SFX magazine. It stars Peter Fonda and the great Warren Oates and blends a mix of road movie with a dash of Satanism. This isn’t as an accomplished movie as, say, Rosemary’s Baby but is much less mannered and far more enjoyable than Spielberg’s Duel and better than, coming much later down the line, The Hitcher and Tarantino’s Death Proof.

The premise of Race With the Devil is that of a camping holiday gone very wrong. Lacking here is campside singsongs, barbecues and cool beers, replaced instead by deadly car chases, eerie petrol stations, inefficient cops and – oh yes – snakes. Snakes that make, if this is possible, Snakes on a Plane look very ridiculous indeed. There’s lots of shots of screaming women in this film. And very often of screaming men.

Fonda and Oates play two regular guys out caravanning with their wives, Lara Parker and Loretta Swit (from MASH), who run into big trouble. Possibly the one drawback of the film is that it never settles down into a particular genre. In the early scenes we see a lot of Fonda racing around on a motorbike, stopping now and then to remove his helmet and look pretty. Perhaps a throwback to his Easy Rider days, but unnecessary. Also very early in the film Fonda and Oates happen to eavesdrop on a scene of ritual sacrifice. What begins as what could be a sequence from Carry on Camping (‘ere Sid, have a butcher’s through these binoculars and cop this!”) quickly turns into our main quartet of characters running for their lives. Like Duel, this is a film where the nameless and mostly unseen enemy pursues and pursues, relentlessly and terrifyingly. But, despite how it may have been billed over the years, it remains essentially a chase film, with only a glimpse or two of anything supernatural.

Interestingly, Race With the Devil still works brilliantly despite the fact that its central theme is now over familiar. This is possibly because the best themes will continue to be used; much of this film reminded me of the recent (although obviously much less restrained) Wolf Creek. People get chased by bogeymen. This is film lore, we learn it but it still entertains. We know that Fonda and Oates will fail in convincing the police that they are being followed by Satanists. We know that every single petrol station they visit will have a telephone that doesn’t work and a particularly creepy attendant. We know that it is absurb how they are persecuted so easily (but this is nevertheless still convincing). We suspect (and hope) that this film will end rather bleakly. So essentially Race With the Devil is manipulative of its audience, setting up a ridiculous yet highly enjoyable premise.

I suspect this movie works so well because it is so rooted in the 70s. In the pre-cellphone age a scene shows Parker and Swit visiting a library to research devil worshipping (they end up stealing two reference books). Isolation was so easier to portray 35 years ago. The sheer size and emptiness of America adds to their hopeless plight, an inhospitable and alien landscape where you don’t really have to travel as far as the hillbillies of Deliverence to find trouble.

If I had to find one word to describe Race With the Devil I would describe it as a hoot. By this I mean a film that’s simply very enjoyable but one that won’t stand up to too much scrutiny like, again, Rosemary’s Baby. The scene with the two rattlesnakes inside the caravan is superb. Oates, as always, is a very watchable actor. The director, Jack Starrett, also does a good job in adding to the drive-in exploitation canon that he excelled in. The movie is fast and energetic. What raises it high in the horror genre is its ending; sudden, nasty, shocking and brilliant.

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