http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/443431/index.html
Selected filmography[edit]
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Courtesy of Judy Daish Associates Ltd
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| 35mm, black and white, 105 mins |
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| Director | Clive Donner |
| Production Company | Caretaker Films |
| Producer | Michael Birkett |
| Screenplay/original play | Harold Pinter |
| Photography | Nicolas Roeg |
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An elderly tramp is taken in as a lodger by a vulnerable young man, whose cynical older brother is less than keen on the arrangement. A power struggle ensues, during which the three characters reveal uncomfortable truths about themselves.
Show full synopsis
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After the near-universal bewilderment that greeted Harold Pinter's first play, The Birthday Party, in 1958, The Caretaker became the writer's first big critical and commercial success, and is still his most popular and frequently performed play. First staged at the Arts Theatre in London on 27 April 1960, with Alan Bates, Donald Pleasence and Peter Woodthorpe playing the three roles of Mick, Davies and Aston respectively, the play soon moved to Broadway, where a young Robert Shaw took over the role of the sensitive (and possibly brain-damaged) Aston.
It was in New York that Clive Donner and Donald Pleasence first discussed the idea of adapting the play into a film, and the six-man production company 'Caretaker Films', also including Bates, Shaw, Pinter and producer Michael Birkett, was born. Let down at the last minute by an American financier, they finally raised the money for the film from show-business friends, including Elizabeth Taylor, Peter Sellers and Noël Coward. Such was their faith in the film that all six members volunteered to forego any payments until it went into profit.
The Caretaker illustrates many of the dominant themes in Pinter's work, exploring ideas of identity, class, power and, above all, the elusiveness of language. On every level, Pinter's characters struggle to communicate, misinterpreting each other's words and actions, often to comic effect. But beneath the surface lurks a deep sense of menace. At first it is the tramp who seems to hold the balance of power and to manipulate the weaker brother, Aston, but a short way into the film he soon loses his foothold and becomes the bait of Aston's mercurial brother, Mick.
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Donner's film also conveys the underlying bleakness and futility of empty lives, of people at odds with the rest of society. Each character believes in a dream that will change his life. For Davies, if he can only get to Sidcup and retrieve his identity papers his life will be restored, while Aston dreams of building a garden shed and Mick has bourgeois fantasies of transforming the derelict house into a smart penthouse. The issue of class is an underlying theme that runs throughout Pinter's work, through his prose, poetry, plays and the many scripts that he has adapted for film.
Films by Harold
Pinter
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The Caretaker 1963
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Directed by Clive Donner
Starring: Donald Pleasence, Alan Bates and Robert
Shaw
Not published as a screenplay
Original play by Harold Pinter
It is a triangle plot: old tramp falls in with
two incalculable young men, brothers, fancies himself siding with
one against the other, over-reaches himself. Harold Pinter, both
in his original play and in the screenplay which with the minimum
of alteration he has based on it, has devised a dazzling series
of comic and sinister variations. The brothers live in a state
of disconnection both from the outside world and from one another;
they come and go without purpose, their conversation has no normal
relevance to the situation they are in. The tramp is himself a
disconnected figure. He has fantasies of belonging to everyday
life, getting a pair of shoes from somewhere, doing a job, re-establishing
his identity by recovering papers which-I don't know why it should
strike on as so risible-have somehow cone to rest at Sidcup; yet
every sentence every action marks him as a being who has cut adrift.
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| Donald Pleasence
and Robert Shaw |
The triangle, then is a triangle of solitaires.
But they are solitaries in a claustrophobic setting: the attic
room crammed with useless junk where one brother sleeps-and offers
the tramp a draughty bed. Even on the few occasions when the action
moves out-of-doors it is hemmed in; the second brother, giving
the old man a lift, merely drives him in a tight, malignant circle
round an island; and the dimensions of the screen (no CinemaScope
stuff here) increase the sense of enclosure. The fact that though
there is no human relation between the three they are forced into
a constricted spatial relationship and a visual medium such as
the cinema is uniquely equipped to stress this makes them strike
sparks off one another. And the climax of the story comes because
one of the three, the tramp, partly by accident and partly out
of a kind of savagery fails to keep his distance. The second brother
may bait the old man, but the baiting merely frightens, it doesn't
hurt. It is when nerves are exposed that taunts can't be tolerated.
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| Donald Pleasence
and Alan Bates |
Mr Pinter offers no message, no moral: and there
is no attempt to end on a sentimental image. Perhaps that is why
the film is so catching; it looks deceptively undramatic, as if
the characters had been trapped unawares, behaving as they might
behave in private, illogically, absurdly. In particular absurdly,
for on the surface it is a very funny film: slyly funny ironically
finny hilariously funny. Yet amidst the jumble of that cold leaky,
ridiculous attic you can hear echoes of a different sort.
I think " The Caretaker " is about some pretty
serious matters: solitude, ingratitude, cruelty. Embodied solitude
and ingratitude, and cruelty of course; Mr Pinter writes, as he
says, about characters-though they are characters obsessed by
their own qualities. And Clive Donner directing with a mixture
of sympathy and unobtrusive control, has let the characters betray
themselves in their own way-through the actors. This is a single-minded
film; you have the feeling that writer, director, producer, cameraman
and players have worked in harmony. It would be easy to say that
success have on Mr Pleasance as the truculent, ignoble, pathetic
tramp, and goodness knows this is a remarkable performance. But
Alan Bates' ferociously unpredictable young man can't be faulted
either; and Robert Shaw-the impassive bull-head, the air of remoteness
of absence almost-makes the famous speech about shock-treatment
illuminating in a new, threatening and dreadful fashion. I doubt
if you could find a better trio. |
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