I speak carefully when I say that [The Proust Screenplay is] incomparably the best screen adaptation ever made of a great work and that it is in itself a work of genius—minor compared with the source, as Pinter surely would be the first to scornfully insist, but I would insist that this screenplay [of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu] far surpasses anything conveyed by the term "adaptation" and becomes a re-composition in another art. This is by far the best of his screen writing and not just because it comes from a titanic novel: look at most screenplays from great novels. Pinter has touched genius in some of his plays; here, touched by a giant genius, he rises in the film form, technically and imaginatively, to the level of his best theater work.

A lover of Proust can take the stand that the novel should not...