SOURCE: Jays, David. “Face Off.” Sight and Sound 12, no. 10 (October 2002): 4-5.

In the following essay, Jays offers a brief overview of Pinter's screenplays.

“I'll tell you what I am,” snarls Dirk Bogarde. “I'm a gentleman's gentleman. And you're no bloody gentleman!” In his second screenplay The Servant (1963) Harold Pinter introduces an idiom that was to become wholly characteristic of his cinematic career. Pinter, with his startling verbal precision and interest in temporal fuzz, was a perfect match for director Joseph Losey, on the run from McCarthy's America into an oddly antediluvian Britain. And The Servant launched a cinematic body of work as distinctive as his writing for the stage.

Losey was fascinated by the theatricality of British class antagonism, and inspired Pinter to create wonderful meal scenes. Accident (1967) has a seedy Oxbridge Sunday lunch that staggers into supper; The Go-Between (1971) Victorian teas of fearsome formality. In Paul Schrader's...