It was made by the Coen brothers, whose own taste for slight provincial surrealism veers close to that of Mackendrick, but, far from refining his work, they have devised one of their coarsest pictures to date.
And now in "The Hothouse", written in 1958 but not staged until 1980, Mr Pinter plays the coarsest character of them all, Roote, the corrupt head of an indeterminate institution where the inmates and the staff are exploited to the point of torture and death, a theme he was to develop in a sparer and more political way in his later "Mountain Language".