Viewed in the light of his plays, with which it shares more than his screenplays for cinema, "The Servant" is one of Pinter's great comedies of menace ("The Caretaker," "The Birthday Party"), where an outside intruder disturbs the seeming calm of private lives, and class structures are overturned. Pinter adapted Robin (son of Somerset) Maugham's novella of the same time, and made it entirely his own.
Robert Koehler
August 29, 2013