ABSTRACT

In The Quitter Memorandum, adapted by Pinter from The Berlin Memorandum by Adam Hall, this early screenplay already addresses the issue of torture that has become the centerpiece of Pinter’s recent plays. Yet this early in his career and for more than a decade afterward Pinter would maintain, “I find nothing more boring than an ideological work.” (Marks, 17) He said he looked for ways to find other levels of a work he considered an “unabashed thriller,” as Quiller, a Western agent, penetrates a Nazi spy ring and is drugged, tortured, then seduced by a woman who, ambiguously, may be a spy. Interestingly, however, Pinter stripped the novel of many of its Holocaust references in order to forward the story line, a point nicely detailed in “Pinter’s Spy Movie” by Bernard Dukore, whose analysis of Pinter’s transposition of the story from the novel to film provides insight into Pinter’s art of adaptation generally. (Dukore, 10-16)

In the film, Pinter found ample opportunity to explore his own traditional powerplays in the domineering behavior of interrogators and in Quiller’s admirable resistance to victimization. What separates Quiller from his recent counterparts in Pinter’s plays is Quiller’s colossal, indomitable will, which allows him to spring back to life with the ease of a cartoon character no matter how severe his torturers’ beating or drugging, then to triumph unequivocally in the end. Here Pinter still pulls punches so that Quiller is never broken, his tongue never cut out. Pinter is able to indulge in some cinematic stereotypes coming as close as he ever would to allowing the good guy/bad guy dichotomies free reign. But Pinter’s own experience and involvement with Amnesty International later would instruct him that in real life under brutal torture the human body and spirit can be scarred, squelched, reduced to pulp.