The Caretaker

The Caretaker (1964)

Aston, a quiet, reserved man, lives alone in a top-floor cluttered room of a small abandoned house in a poor London district. He befriends and takes in Mac Davies, an old derelict who has been fired from a menial job in a café. In time Aston offers him a job as caretaker of the house. Aston's brother, Mick - a taunting, quasi-sadist - harasses the derelict when his brother is away, countermanding his orders...

Date of release
1964-01-21
TMDB
7.4 / 10 (14)
Runtime
1h 45m
Genres
Drama
Director
Clive Donner

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: The Caretaker

The Caretaker is a 1963 British drama film directed by Clive Donner and starring Alan Bates, Donald Pleasence and Robert Shaw. It was based on the Harold Pinter play of the same name.

Production

The film was made by a partnership of six people, none of whom took payment: Clive Donner, Donald Pleasence, Alan Bates, Robert Shaw, Harold Pinter and Michael Birkett.

No distributor expressed interest in funding the film, which meant it was unable to attract investment from the National Film Finance Corporation, because it was unable to give money to projects without a reasonable chance of a commercial screening.

Composer Ron Grainer was tasked to produce not a score but a sequence of sound effects, often metallic in nature, but which also include the sound of a drip which occasionally falls from the attic ceiling and a squeak as Aston uses a screwdriver. Grainer used his previous experiences working with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the creation of the sound picture.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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