Collected Screenplays 1: The Servant / Pumpkin Eater / The Quiller Memorandum / Accident / The Last Tycoon / Langrish / Go Down

by Harold Pinter

This collection of screenplays includes "The Servant", "The Pumpkin Eater", "The Quiller Memorandum", "Accident", "The Go-Between", "The Last Tycoon", "Langrishe, Go Down", and "The Proust Screenplay."

Genres: Literature

671 pages, Paperback

First published November 20, 2000

About the author

Harold Pinter was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964) and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1971), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993) and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television and film productions of his own and others' works.

Reviews

[W.S. Luk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pinter's ear for dialogue shines with no distractions in these screenplays, an assortment of adaptations that are as lean and mean as his more famous plays. THE SERVANT and THE PUMPKIN EATER, a pair of troubling domestic dramas, are probably the strongest in this collection, the former playing on anxieties of class and homoeroticism with a delightfully unnerving antagonist in Barrett, the latter a bizarrely-titled character study of a frustrated housewife which manages the difficult task of keeping our empathy for a character who lacks (or perhaps avoids) self-awareness. THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM, a spy story in the Deighton/le Carré mode, is rather uneventful but pleasantly bleak, with a foreboding lack of resolution in its ending. The remaining three screenplays are far more uneven, each with their compelling elements (THE LAST TYCOON's montage-like conclusion is especially interesting as a sequence that makes use of the filmic medium rather than reading like an adapted stage play), but ultimately less gripping than the works before them.

[JanJan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got this for the play 'The Servant."
This is a masterclass in storytelling and structure.

[L · Rating 1 out of 5]

Incredibly vapid, slow moving to nowhere without meaning to do so.
Pintar with Losey creates a content curve which reaches no higher than Death Valley.