Rheum at the Top

The Guest. Into a junk-filled room atop an otherwise empty house in West London totters an old derelict named Davies. Clothes flap on his bony frame like weather-beaten posters on a board fence. A bristling compendium of social evils, he is dirty, mephitic, bigoted, violent, treacherous. "I been left for dead more than once," he rasps. For 15 years he has been trying to make a trip down to Sidcup "to get my papers. They prove who I am, I can't move without them papers."

While waiting for a break in the weather, as he puts it, Davies--played with uncluttered perception by Donald Pleasence--burrows into the refuge offered by a former mental patient (Robert Shaw), the elder of two misfit brothers. Shaw collects things--bales of newspapers, a disconnected faucet, a kitchen sink, a bud vase full of screws--and he speaks and moves with the stony detachment of a man who will never again disturb the balance of his uneasy truce with life. His goal is to build a workshed out back: "Then I'll be able to do a bit more with the house." The younger brother (Alan Bates) retains some link to the workaday world but expresses his frustration in bursts of sadistic mockery. Davies sets the brothers one against the other in order to hold onto his job as caretaker. Finally they turn him out, and all three men are thrust back into the nightmare isolation whence they came.

With only a smidgen of a plot to drive them, this unholy trio thrashes out a sometimes funny, sometimes corrosive drama based on Harold Pinter's London and Broadway stage success, The Caretaker. It is still morbidly fascinating to watch. And what made the play important remains perfectly clear: dialogue so richly human that every vile syllable sounds like a cry for help, plus superb acting of their original roles by Pleasence, Shaw and Bates.

But if the playwright's bleak study of mankind may be an allegory subject to highly colorful interpretations, it may only be an exercise in ambiguity. The movie falters, too, because the flaws of filmed theater become obvious when ever Director Clive Donner and Scenarist Pinter try most earnestly to "open up" the play in cinema terms. A room sealed against the real and imagined terrors of the outside world is the natural hell of Pinter's characters, and a legitimate theater is an intimate place to share them. To set them roaming into the street or off to a neighborhood cafe for breakfast, arbitrarily adds action but dissipates the mood so brilliantly sustained onstage. Though this screen adaptation leaves gaps that an ambitious camera must try to fill, popping out for a bit of fresh air is not necessarily the answer.

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