Harold Pinter was named today in Stockholm as this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. The Birthday Party, The Servant, Accident…the screenplays for Turtle Diary, The French Lieutenant’s Woman…of course. But for me the ultimate Pinter work has always been Betrayal, which I first saw on the New York stage in 1980 with Roy Scheider, Raul Julia and Blythe Danner. Maybe the rights holder to David Jones’ riveting 1983 film version (CBS Fox Home Video put out a cruddy, muddy-looking VHS in the mid ’80s) will take notice and finally release a cleanly mastered DVD of this disappeared Pinter film, which costars Ben Kingsley, Jeremy Irons and Patricia Hodges. Where would the art of dialogue be without Pinter’s influence? Verbal evasion, unspoken menace, less is more, the things that are there but unsaid.
