GOLDBERG: Your wife makes a very nice cup of tea, Mr Boles, you know that?
PETEY: Yes, she does sometimes. Sometimes she forgets.
MEG: Is he coming down?
GOLDBERG: Down? Of course he’s coming down. On a lovely sunny day like this he shouldn’t come down? He’ll be up and about in next to no time. And what a breakfast he’s going to get.
By the end of the 1960s Harold Pinter was building an impressive record of film screenplays, including his collaborations with Joseph Losey (The Servant in 1963 and Accident in 1967), the Pumpkin Eater (1964) and The Quiller Memorandum (1966). Now already ten years old, his first full length play The Birthday Party was finally made for the cinema in 1968. It starred Robert Shaw as Stanley Webber. Shaw also appeared previously in The Caretaker (1963) making him perhaps the definitive interpreter of Pinter on film.
The Birthday Party has an interesting pedigree. It is directed by William Friedkin, who was later responsible for The French Connection and The Exorcist. Both of these energetic films are a stark contrast to what is essentially a faithful record of a claustrophobic stage experience. The film’s producers Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenburg were responsible for the run of first class horror films made by Amicus films in the sixties and seventies. The roles of Friedkin, Subotsky and Rosenburg are quite fitting; The Birthday Party is essentially a horror story.
The cast also includes Dandy Nicholls (from Till Death Us Do Part) as Meg Bowes, landlady of the sorriest of seaside boarding houses. She is superb, as are Sydney Tafler and Patrick Magee as Goldberg and McCann, the most menacing of house guests. Moultree Kelsall as Petey and Helen Fraser (Bad Girls) as Lulu complete the line up, and for anyone familiar with the play this is a very faithful version. There is a timeless quality about The Birthday Party, and whilst Friedkin’s direction (though mostly restrained) reveals some 60s indulgences (most notably in the opening sequence with the camera moving in on the wing mirror of Goldberg and McCann’s car and the backing soundtrack of ripping paper) Pinter’s dialogue does not date.
The Birthday Party offers various snapshots of haunting pasts, most disturbingly Stanley Webber and his vague portrayal of a former life. Although essentially a filmed play and little more (only Petey’s life as a deckchair attendant is seen fleetingly, chairs neatly and uniformly arranged), the performances are strong enough to hold the attention by merely suggesting what has happened in the past; here Stanley offering fragmentary snapshots culled from his mysterious history: his musical talent, its positive reception, the champagne that followed, his absent father:
STANLEY: I had a unique touch. Absolutely unique. They came up to me. They came up to me and said they were grateful. Champagne we had that night, the lot. My father nearly came down to hear me…. But I don’t think he could make it. No, I-I lost the address, that was it. Yes. Lower Edmonton.
Robert Shaw, an actor probably now best remembered for Jaws and his stint as a Bond villain, portrays this introspection perfectly.
Pinter’s themes of alienation, persecution and torture are vividly sketched out in The Birthday Party. Apart from Shaw, the other standout actor in the film is Sydney Tafler, who plays Stanley’s eventual nemesis Goldberg, a man who relishes his memories in the form of the anecdote. The refuge of the anecdote is the basis for Goldberg’s entire routine, this charming, smooth and potentially dangerous gentleman:
GOLDBERG: When I was an apprentice …my uncle Barney used to take me to the seaside, regular as clockwork. Brighton, Canvey Island, Rottingdean…we’d have a little paddle, we’d watch the tide coming in, going out, the sun coming down – golden days, believe me.
A stable past is personified by the kindly Uncle Barney, who Goldberg proceeds to describe as a well respected “impeccable dresser. One of the old school.” A pattern is very clear: the importance of place names that connect with memories, a figure from the past worthy of respect and admiration, usually the suggestion of a rose-tinted past, the faded “golden days”. If insecurity of the present needs such constant reinforcement, then the uncertain atmosphere prevalent in The Birthday Party unquestionably highlights this. Even Goldberg and McCann, Stanley’s interrogators, virtual torturers and eventual abductors, have their moments of uncertainty. Of all British cinema of the sixties, this film is the least assured of the supposedly bright decade.
Leslie Halliwell gave The Birthday Party only 1 out of a possible 4 stars and described it:
Overlong but otherwise satisfactory film record of an entertaining if infuriating play, first of the black absurdities which proliferated in the sixties to general disadvantage, presenting structure without plot and intelligence without meaning.
By 1968 Halliwell’s perceived golden age of cinema had already ended. Oddly, like the characters in The Birthday Party, he was stuck in the past.
Frankenstein Created Woman
As well as the essential M.R. James reading and viewing, Christmas is also a suitable time for a Hammer Horror. Hammer’s immensely successful 1957 film The Curse of Frankenstein spawned six sequels; The Revenge of Frankenstein (1959), The Evil of Frankenstein (1964), Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), Frankenstein Must be Destroyed (1969), The Horror of Frankenstein (1970) and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974). Although the law of diminishing returns usually applies with film sequels, Hammer hit gold around the halfway mark. Frankenstein Created Woman is the best in the series, a classic chiller directed by Terence Fisher and featuring one of Peter Cushing’s best performances.
Frankenstein Created Woman is textbook Hammer, inviting the viewer to snuggle in front of the television under a cosy blanket. Unthreatening and warming, a well made film with recognisable settings, costumes, music and archetypal characters – all the familiar trademarks of the studio. That’s not to say that the film doesn’t look low budget by today’s standards. Its charm aside, the sets do look like they are ready to be folded away ready for the next production, and the costumes belong to the wardrobe that clothed the entire oeuvre of the studio. Even the rosé wine featured throughout this film that wasn’t drunk or spilt was probably carefully rebottled.
Nevertheless this is a horror film that has worn well over the decades. Frankenstein Created Woman is quite methodical in setting up its plot, reminding of The Curse of the Werewolf (1960) which has a similarly long preamble to the main story. It works very well here, and those who might find the early part plodding will be rewarded when things begin to fit together rather neatly towards the end. The film begins with a raving man being led to the guillotine. A small boy revealed to be the condemned man’s son is seen watching the execution, and when events jump ahead several years we see him again as Hans (Robert Morris), a young man in love with a disfigured girl called Christina (Susan Denburg). Hans works for Baron Frankenstein, who sends him out one night for a bottle of champagne following a particularly successful experiment (he has managed to be revived after freezing himself for exactly one hour. Yes, Baron Frankenstein always was a little weird).
As usual, Peter Cushing is superb as Baron Frankenstein, portraying the usual sharp wit and driven ambition that doesn’t quite tip him over into insanity. He is joined by Thorley Walters as his bumbling associate Dr Hertz. Walters plays a very baffled Watson to Cushing’s particularly sharp Holmes, and the two complement eachother quite perfectly throughout the film. Indeed, it’s a shame Hammer chose not to continue their partnership in the later films (Walters does turn up in Frankenstein Must be Destroyed but plays a different role). However it’s Cushing’s film and without his sublime acting it’s difficult to see how Hammer would have been so enduring and successful.
The quest for the Baron’s champagne sets things moving as Christina’s father happens to run the nearby inn. Three top-hatted scoundrels call in, the sort who are generally disagreeable in how they put their feet up on the tables and light smelly cheroots. Even worse, the type who demand their wine (to be put on credit) served by the innkeeper’s daughter. Their bullying turns nasty when Hans gets into a brawl with them and later, when the drunken trio return for some after hours drinking, Christina’s father disturbs them and they beat him to death. Hans is convicted of the murder and sent to the guillotine. Christina drowns herself. All a bit grim, but perfect for the Baron, whose latest experiment just happens to involve raising the dead. Together with Dr Hertz, he repairs Christina’s crippled body and, for good measure, implants the soul of Hans into it.
Susan Denburg is excellent as Christina in, surprisingly, the last of only a handful of film roles. This film does indeed create the type of starlet Hammer later used as a selling point for their films, the buxom young ladies employed for such titles as Lust for a Vampire and Twins of Evil. Resurrected by the Baron, Christina sets out on murdering the three top-hatted scoundrels who set the horrible ball rolling in the first place and this is all executed (pardon the pun) rather satisfyingly. And look out for Yes Minister’s Derek Fowlds as one of the above mentioned top-hatted victims.
The horror critic Alan Frank rated Frankenstein Created Woman quite highly in his 1982 Horror Film Handbook:
The last Hammer film to be made at Bray reworks Bride of Frankenstein to good effect. Fisher’s direction, impressive settings and a neat performance from Cushing make it a first-rate addition to the genre.
Frank also quotes a review from The Times:
Scriptwriter John Elder and director Terence Fisher have a nice sense of the balance between horror and absurdity and the film has the courage of its own lunatic convictions.
Surprisingly, other than mentioning that the film formed part of a double X double-bill with The Mummy’s Shroud in summer 1967, Hammer’s own celebratory 1973 The House of Horror has little else to say about the film. But perhaps it is time that has set Frankenstein Created Woman apart, where in a world now saturated with so many in your face explicit horror films we can recognise real quality.
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