Movie Review: The Birthday Party (1968)

 Hello readers, I'm writing this blog as an assignment given by the Department of English, MKBU. Here, I've tried to analyze the movie 'The Birthday Party' by Herold Pinter(1968). 

Introduction:

The Birthday Party, drama in three acts by Harold Pinter, produced in 1958 and published in 1959. Pinter’s first full-length play established his trademark “comedy of menace,” in which a character is suddenly threatened by the vague horrors at large in the outside world. The action takes place entirely in a shabby rooming house where Stanley, a lazy young boarder, is shaken out of his false sense of security by the arrival of two mysterious men who proceed to “punish” him for crimes that remain unrevealed. A birthday party staged by Stanley’s landlady soon turns into an exhibition of violence and terror. Pinter’s comic vision of paranoia and isolation is reinforced by his use of dialogue, including frequent pauses, disjointed conversations, and non sequiturs. 

About Author:

Harold Pinter was born on Oct. 10, 1930 in London, England and died on Dec. 24, 2008 in London. He was an English playwright, who achieved international renown as one of the most complex and challenging post-World War II dramatists. His plays are noted for their use of understatement, small talk, reticence and even silence to convey the substance of a character’s thought, which often lies several layers beneath, and contradicts, his speech. In 2005 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Notable Works: 

“Moonlight” 

“The Birthday Party” 

“The Caretaker” 

“The Dumb Waiter“ 

“The Homecoming” 

“The Room”

 

Key Facts:

Full Title: The Birthday Party

Published: The Birthday Party was published in 1957 and premiered in 1958.

Literary Period: Modernism, Postmodernism

Genre: Drama, “Comedy of Menace,” Theatre of the Absurd

Setting: A rundown boarding house in a coastal English resort town

Climax: Stanley has a mental breakdown at his own birthday party, revealing dark and

violent predilections.

Antagonist: From Stanley’s perspective, Goldberg and McCann are the antagonists of The Birthday Party, but some readers or audience members might reasonably argue

that Stanley himself is the true antagonist.

Movie cast of The Birthday Party(1968):

Stanley Webber - Robert Shaw

Shamus McCann - Patrick Magee

Nat Goldberg - Sydney Tafler

Meg Bowles - Dandy Nichols

Petey Bowles - Moultrie Kelsall

Lulu - Helen Fraser 

Movie Review:

The Birthday Party was Pinter’s first full-length play. The scene once more is restricted to a single room, the dining room of a seedy seaside guesthouse. Meg, the landlady, and Petey, her husband, who has a menial job outside the hotel. Meg is especially in her suffocating motherliness. In this movie, however, she is no longer the main character. That role has been taken by Stanley, the only border of the house, who has been there for a year. He is pinned to the house, afraid to go out, feeling that intruders from outside are menacing bringers of death. Although he is in his late thirties, he is being kept by Meg as a spoiled little boy. He sleeps late in the morning, and when he comes down to breakfast, he complains querulously about everything she fixes for him. He is unshaven and unwashed, still wearing his pajamas. 

What is enacted symbolically by Stan’s refusal to leave the house is his fear of going out and engaging life, his fear that an acceptance of life, meaning going outside, having a job, having normal sexual relations with a woman his age, would also mean accepting his eventual death. He is refusing to live in an absurd world that exacts so high a price for life.

It is an untenable position, and his refusal to live as an adult human being has left him a wrinkled and aging child. Further, it does him no good to remain in the house: If he does not go out into the world, the world will come into him. In fact, he hears that two men have come to town and that they are going to stay at the guesthouse. He knows at once that they have come for him and is thrown into a panic. In the meantime, Meg decides that it is his birthday and gives him a present. The unintentionally chilling reminder of his aging is cut across by the present itself, a child’s toy drum, which Stan begins beating frenziedly as the first act ends. 

The relationship between Stan and his surrogate mother, Meg, beautifully handled, is both comic and sad, comic because it is ridiculous for this nearly middle-aged man to be mothered so excessively and to behave so much like a spoiled child; sad because one believes in both Meg and Stan as human beings. Both comedy and pathos, realism and symbolic undercurrents, grow out of the fully developed language of the dialogue. Its richness, its circumlocution, all elements that have come to be called “Pinteresque” are evident even in this early play. 

It is obvious that the two men who come, Goldberg and McCann, have indeed come for Stan. There is no concealment between them and Stan. He is rude to them and tries to order them out. They make it equally clear to him that he is not to leave the premises. McCann is gloomy and taciturn; Goldberg, the senior partner, is glib and falsely jovial. His language is a wonderfully comic and sinister blend of politicians’ clichés, shallow philosophy, and gangster argot. There is a brilliant scene when they first confront Stan, cross-examining him with a dizzying landslide of insane questions (“Why did you kill your wife? . . . Why did you never get married? . . . Why do you pick your nose?”) that finally leaves him screaming, and he kicks Goldberg in the stomach.

Meg comes in, and they stop scuffling, the two henchmen putting on a show of joviality. They begin to have a birthday party for Stan. Lulu, a pretty but rather vulgar young woman, is invited. Lulu in the past has frequently invited Stan to go outside walking with her, but he has refused. She and Goldberg hit it off together, and she ends up in his lap kissing him as everyone at the party drinks heavily.

They begin a drunken game of blindman’s buff “If you’re touched, then you’re blind” and the recurring image of blindness serves as a foretaste of death. McCann, wearing the blindfold, comes over and touches Stan, so that it is Stan’s turn to be “blind.” To make sure, McCann breaks Stan’s glasses. The drunken Stan stumbles over to Meg and suddenly begins strangling her. They rush over to stop him, and suddenly the power goes out. In the darkness, Stan rushes around, avoiding them, giggling. The terrified Lulu faints, and when someone briefly turns on a flashlight, the audience sees that Stan has Lulu spread-eagled on the table and is on top of her.

With his mortality approaching him anyway, then, Stan, buoyed up by drink, makes a desperate effort to get out of the house, out of his entrapment in sterile childhood. He struggles to strangle the mother who is suffocating him and to have a sexual relationship with an appropriate female, a taste of the life he has denied himself in order to escape paying the debt, death. It is too late. In the morning, a nearly catatonic Stan is brought downstairs by the two henchmen. He has been washed and shaved and dressed in a suit, as if for burial.

A black limousine waits outside the door. Petey, Meg’s husband, makes a halfhearted attempt to save Stan from the henchmen, but to stop his protests, they need only invite him to come along. One is reminded of the medieval morality play Everyman. When Death is carrying off Everyman, Everyman’s friends and family promise to be true to him and help him in any way, but the moment they are invited to come with him, they find some excuse to stay behind.

Word Count: 1309