Sharp Cut: Harold Pinter’s Screenplays and the Artistic Process

Best known as one of the most important playwrights of the twentieth century, Harold Pinter has also written many highly regarded screenplays, including Academy Award-nominated screenplays for The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Betrayal, collaborations with English director Joseph Losey, and an unproduced script for the remake of Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 adaptation of Lolita. In this definitive study of Pinter’s screenplays, Steven H. Gale compares the scripts with their sources and the resulting films, analyzes their stages of development, and shows how Pinter creates unique works of art by extracting the essence from his source and rendering it in cinematic terms. Gale introduces each film, traces the events that led to the script’s writing, examines critical reaction to the film, and provides an extensive bibliography, appendices, and an index.