Colpeper wrote:I'm looking forward to those extras. As in other adaptations by Harold Pinter, his dialogue in The Pumpkin Eater is so distinctive that someone unfamiliar with the source (as I am with Penelope Mortimer's novel) might at times forget that it is drawn from another writer's work.
The unforgettable hair salon scene with Anne Bancroft and Yootha Joyce, which Mr. Deltoid mentioned earlier in this thread, is an example where I felt totally drawn into a Pinter world. That reaction was obviously rather unfair to Mortimer, presuming that some form of the scene exists in the novel.
Actually, that particular scene is pretty much unique to Pinter - one of two key scenes. If I remember rightly, the encounter is very briefly alluded to in the novel, but the dialogue is all Pinter - and doesn't it show?
(
Not a complaint - in fact, I was very careful when overseeing the SDH subtitles on this one, as I wanted them to be syllable-precise given how forensic Pinter's dialogue can be. In the end, that wasn't possible, as there were too many scenes with children all shouting at the same time, but I hope I achieved it when the adults were talking.)
It will be fascinating to learn about the adaptive process traced from the novel's inspiration to the final script and realization.
This is where getting Jeremy Mortimer was a real coup - as someone who lived through the real-life events that inspired his mother's novel (albeit as a child), he's pretty much the perfect guide, and the 32-minute running time alone reveals how generous he was with his time and reminiscences. And both Mortimer and Neil Sinyard tackle the differences between novel and screenplay in some depth - one key difference being that the novel is a first-person monologue whereas the film isn't. In fact, that's just reminded me of the second unique-to-Pinter scene: the confrontation between Peter Finch and James Mason in the club, which obviously couldn't have been in the novel as it wasn't personally witnessed by its narrator.
