The Birthday Party (1968) on Netflix
PG-1319682h 3mComedyDramaThriller
Stanley lodges at a seaside boarding house. Meg gives him a toy drum for his birthday. Two menacing strangers, Goldberg and McCann, offer to host a party he insists is not his.
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- Netflix4.1/5
- IMDb6.4/101,391 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes100%
Trailer
Plot summary
Stanley, a man in his late thirties, is staying at a seaside boarding house run by Meg Bowles. A neighbor, Lulu, brings a parcel holding a boy's toy drum, and Meg presents it to him as a birthday present. Two strangers, Goldberg and McCann, arrive at the house, and Meg tells them the day is Stanley's birthday. They propose a party for him. Stanley says the date is not his birthday, but the visitors press him with unanswerable questions and carry on with the celebration. Meg's husband Petey is away playing chess.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Birthday Party (1968)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- While making The Birthday Party, William Friedkin had his only tense exchange with Harold Pinter in a year of working together when director Joseph Losey saw the film and asked, through Pinter, that a mirror shot be cut as too close to Losey's own style; Friedkin refused.
- The film earned rentals of $50,000 in North America and $350,000 in other countries, and after all costs were deducted it lost $725,000; on its first day it did just $110 worth of business, the producer recalled.
- The original choice for the part of Goldberg was the actor Zero Mostel, but he was not available.
- William Friedkin said Pinter's "ambiguous kind of storytelling" was "more powerful than nailing things on the nose," and five years later he applied that lesson to The Exorcist, leaving its ending less clear than William Peter Blatty's novel, in which good triumphed over evil.
