Butley

Looking disheveled and hungover, English literature teacher Ben Butley (Alan Bates) returns to London University following a long weekend holiday. He shares his tiny office there with Joey Keyston (Richard O'Callaghan), a homosexual former student and protégé who now holds an assistant lectureship and who also lives in Butley's flat. After avoiding numerous students who come for their tutorials, Butley angrily quizzes Joey about his weekend, which was spent with his new boyfriend Reg, and torments him about his chances for promotion at the school. This is interrupted by the arrival of Edna Shaft (Jessica Tandy), an elderly colleague whom Butley delights in ridiculing. Butley is shocked, however, when she announces that she has finally finished the book she's been writing on Byron for almost 20 years and that it will soon be published, reminding him that his book on T.S. Eliot remains unfinished.

Butley is then visited by his estranged wife Anne (Susan Engel), who left him after a year of marriage and took their infant daughter with her. She announces that she is planning to get remarried, but when she informs him that her intended is a friend of theirs named Tom, whom Butley calls "the most boring man in London," he tells her that he will contest the divorce. When Joey returns, Butley berates him for not telling him about Anne and Tom, which he was aware of. Later, when an irritated Edna comes in to complain about Butley stealing one of her tutorial students named Gardner, Butley shifts the blame to Joey, jeopardizing his professional standing. When Reg (Michael Byrne) comes to meet Joey, Butley insults him and tries to break up his relationship with Joey, but he is taken aback when Reg tells him that he's a publisher who is friends with Tom and that he's going to publish Tom's novel. He's also stunned when Reg announces that Joey is planning to move in with him. Butley provokes Reg into hitting him, and Joey leaves with Reg. Gardner (Simon Rouse) arrives for his tutorial, but a shattered Butley sends him back to Edna, saying "I'm too old to play games with the likes of you."

Reprising his Tony award-winning role from the Broadway production of the play (which he originated in London), Alan Bates gives a bravura, tour-de-force performance that is simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking. He's so skillful--changing the pitch of his voice and his facial mannerism depending upon whom he's talking to, and mimicking others--that he manages to make the odious Butley not only sympathetic but likable while delivering a devastating barrage of intellectual insults, epigrammatic witticisms, and sing-song quotations from books and nursery rhymes. It's a fearless and unflinching performance about a tortured soul intent on destroying everyone with whom he comes into contact. He plays half the movie with a piece of tissue on his chin (from a shaving cut) and the other half with the blood dripping down his face, constantly coughing and wheezing, and doing everything else to make himself appear as unpleasant and unattractive as possible.

Harold Pinter, who directed the play in London, makes an auspicious film directing debut, and garners excellent performances from his superb cast. He "opens up" the play only minimally (the satiric opening where the hungover Butley struggles to leave his flat, then annoys passengers on the underground by stealing a seat and blowing smoke in their faces), but wisely keeps the action confined to Butley's shabby office, which is the setting for virtually the entire film. The result is necessarily theatrical, but not stagy, and it effectively preserves a great performance and a great play, which was the intention of producer Ely Landau and his American Film Theatre series in the early 1970s, when they presented 15 film adaptations of acclaimed contemporary plays. (Profanity.) leave a comment