Based on Harold Pinter’s celebrated play, THE BIRTHDAY PARTY stars the great Robert Shaw as Stanley, the put-upon tenant - with the menacingly enigmatic Patrick Magee and Sydney Tafler as the unwelcome strangers out to make Shaw’s barely marginal life a perfect hell. An underrated master of adapting stage drama to film (see THE BOYS IN THE BAND), Friedkin pushes Pinter’s savage material to the limit here, creating an unnerving sense of despair and paranoia.

Circa 1936, con artist Robert Redford goes to his mentor, Paul Newman, for help when their mutual friend is whacked by the henchmen of numbers racketeer Robert Shaw. Newman decides to get a gang together that will put a complex scheme in play to fleece homicidal high-roller Shaw of a small fortune. The sterling cast includes Charles Durning, Ray Walston and Eileen Brennan. The epitome of the 1970s buddy film, THE STING won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Screenplay (by David S. Ward), Costume Design, Art Direction and Music (Marvin Hamlisch, adapted from Scott Joplin’s ragtime tunes).

Sean Connery’s second 007 outing finds Bond scouring exotic Istanbul for an elusive Lektor decoding machine. He’s helped by sly Pedro Armendariz and seductive Russian spy Daniela Bianchi, and hunted by Aryan super-killer Robert Shaw and sinister, butch Lotte Lenya as stiletto-toed Rosa Kleb.