The Caretaker

A film that would have been very, very boring if it had other actors in the cast. For me, Robert Shaw was the main reason to see it. Then Donald Pleasence and Alan Bates. All three did an excellent job in a confined space, just a room, no action, just dialogue, 1 hour 45 minutes, just talk. Their charm, of all three actors, make this movie easy to watch.

The Caretaker is a truly great play and lends itself only to minimal tinkering for the screen. Thank goodness, that's what the makers of this film decided to do, so the film is barely an adaptation. One or two short scenes are moved out of Aston's claustrophobic attic room, but for the most part we're stuck in there, just like the play. I'm too young to have seen the original cast on stage, so it is good to see how Alan Bates and Donald Pleasence must have plied their craft on the stage. Robert Shaw does an excellent job of Aston, a part that is often under-rated as it is best performed under-stated. I have seen two fine productions of this play on the stage, back in the 70's I saw Max Wall play the lead and more recently the mighty Michael Gambon supported brilliantly by Rupert Graves as Mick and Douglas Hodge as Aston. If you can get to see a great production of this play, I recommend it for the stage rather than film. In the absence of a fine cast just down the road, this film is a super second best.

This three-hander piece has no plot to speak of and, given author Harold Pinter's (typically) obscure intentions, attention must be paid constantly (not an easy task, having to contend with both the heavy British accents on display and the rather low volume of the audio itself); after having gone through the various supplements on the exemplary BFI DVD, the meaning of it all is still very much open to interpretation!

The performances, however, are extremely impressive and the fact that all three actors had already appeared in the various stage versions certainly helped: Donald Pleasance and Alan Bates have showy roles that are often broadly comic, but a brooding Robert Shaw is unusually subdued for the most part - though the character's speech about his traumatic spell in hospital, where he suffered at the hands of a sadistic doctor, is as riveting as the actor's celebrated (and similarly quietly-spoken) one about the transportation of the Atom Bomb in JAWS (1975). Though making only minute concessions to cinematic conventions, Donner's handling (abetted by the stark cinematography of Nicolas Roeg and some weird ambient sounds by Ron Grainer in place of a score) ensures that the whole doesn't come across as merely a piece of filmed theatre; it still feels at odds even with the contemporaneous "Kitchen Sink" films of the British New Wave, with which style THE CARETAKER has forever been identified!

Pinter's dialogue - alternately scathing and compassionate - is remarkably adult for its time, and the project only came through with the intervention of some celebrated admirers of the play: Richard Burton, Leslie Caron, Noel Coward, Peter Hall, Peter Sellers and Elizabeth Taylor, among others! I've watched the following Pinter-scripted films: THE SERVANT (1963), THE PUMPKIN EATER (1964), THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM (1966), ACCIDENT (1967), THE BIRTHDAY PARTY (1968), THE GO-BETWEEN (1970), THE LAST TYCOON (1976) and THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN (1981); however, only THE BIRTHDAY PARTY was adapted from his own work (also featuring Shaw and largely revolving around three eccentric characters) and it's similarly intractable - if still required - viewing.

This is an extraordinary film and I have been looking for a tape or DVD for some time. Bates is perfectly cast, Pleasance is ideal and utterly memorable, and Shaw is simply brilliant. It is one of the finest films I've ever seen of it's type. Does anyone know if it's maybe hung up in some sort of litigation or has a property rights thing going? It's a real shame that people who weren't around in the 60's can't see it. I think that in some ways this finds each of the actors and even Pinter at their very best. I recommend this to anyone exploring Schopenhauer, Sartre, Beckett, or Genet. It's in my top 100 films ever made. --tatkhj

Apart from the scenery and huge cast, this has all the ingredients of a Cecil B De Mille epic. Three men, (two of which are brothers and a cunning almost invited guest) struggle for power and dominance in their dingy little house. In my opinion it says something about the predicament of human behaviour what ever their surroundings.Its dark, sometimes funny and you can almost smell the decay.