By 1963 Joseph Losey was already a cause-celeb art film director, and his career was finally stabilizing. An American transplanted in England by the blacklist, he spent ten years working under other names, often without artistic control. His newest pictures were the producer-altered Eve and the delayed / butchered These Are the Damned. The Servant would become the film most closely associated with the Losey brand. Adapted from a slim 1948 book by Robin Maugham, the sly story of psychosexual domination was Losey’s first collaboration with the playwright Harold Pinter. They would work together twice more, on the celebrated films Accident and The Go-Between.
Made just as the British art film was coming to its peak, The Servant is a dark tale about psychological domination in a class system. Described by its director as a version of Faust, the provocative and sexy film creates a sickly feeling of degradation apart from its nagging homosexual undertone. For two hours we struggle to interpret the relationships on view. The main character is a modern bachelor situation free of the need to adhere to tradition. No family influence bears down on him. Yet he chooses to continue a tradition associated with an earlier era.
Back in London from work in Africa, the well-to-do Tony (James Fox) leases a townhouse and hires the impressively proper valet-butler Hugo Barrett (Dirk Bogarde) to ‘do everything’ for him. Barrett takes charge and soon the house is a showplace of taste and organization. Something’s amiss, even if the dense Tony is slow to sense it. Barrett has ordered his master’s life to the point that Tony’s fiancée Susan (Wendy Craig) feels vaguely threatened.
Is there more happening below the surface? Barrett’s solicitude includes a streak of premeditated malice. He begins by passing off the playful, seductive Vera (Sarah Miles) as his sister. As Barrett’s control and influence over Tony increase, things seem headed in an unpleasant direction …
Impeccably filmed and highly detailed, The Servant is a fascinating, creepy little gem — we keep wondering if and when its characters will turn to violence. The performances can’t be faulted, especially that of Dirk Bogarde. Hugo Barrett’s every expression demands analysis. Initially a hardworking, dutiful and sympathetic fellow, he endures a lot of priggishness from the fussy, privileged Tony. But we always feel there’s something lurking behind his deference and humility.
We soon the the shape of their relationship arc, the rise of one personality to dominate another. What begins as a ‘turnabout’ tale that might win our approval, twists into something quite different. Its a kind of revolution from within.
Harold Pinter’s writing tended to frustrate viewers expecting defined situations and ‘readable’ characters. To him all interpersonal communication was a mystery. The emotionally merciless film keeps us guessing as to what’s really happening between Tony and Hugo, Susan and Vera. A standard drama would just present their behaviors and then pass judgment. Losey stays morally neutral, with the aim of ‘willing’ them toward their true characters. The most adult observation, is that many people aren’t sure if they have characters that could be called ‘true.’ The vulnerable Tony is making it up as he goes along.
Losey gave this loose character approach a full workout in Eve, with Stanley Baker and Jeanne Moreau. The Servant is more satisfying in it has more forward momentum. Tony and Hugo’s emotional and sexual ‘crimes’ certainly get our attention. Pinter and Losey fill the margins with potent examples of the domination of one personality over another. In a restaurant we see a mother bullying a daughter, and a Bishop tormenting an underling. Tony’s relatives Lord and Lady Mounset (Richard Vernon & Catherine Lacey) are so convinced of their own importance that they insist on being right in all matters. They pompously call South American cowboys ‘Ponchos’ and discourage any further discussion. Like the other well-to-do folk, Tony and Susan enjoy the privilege of being served as if it were some kind of entitlement.
Servant Barrett knows master Tony’s inner weakness. He uses sex to get the upper hand by placing the irresistable Vera in Tony’s path. She’s played by a very young and expressive Sarah Miles, seven years before Ryan’s Daughter. This leads to the famous erotic scene with the revolving leather chair, where Tony collects his special favors without thinking of the trap that comes with them.
Tony’s corruption and fall happen so easily that Barrett almost seems to be justified in his actions, as if he were taking revenge for downtrodden servants everywhere. But Barrett may also be a sociopath. Is he working his way from one ‘master’ to another? Susan sees only part-way through his games, and has too much faith in the weak Tony and his boasts about big business in Brazil. Tom Milne’s Losey interview book talks about fine points of class with Susan. Losey admits that it’s a problem: Susan can’t be taken as an upperclass ‘lady’ because she’s not instinctively commanding enough.
La Dolce Losey.
When Susan walks into the dissolute orgy-to-be at the end of The Servant, the whole spectrum of class distinctions is up in the air. She is dumbfounded to discover a drunken Tony preparing to party with several prostitutes, with Hugo Barrett delightedly inviting her to stick around. The whole setup is dangerous. Susan doesn’t quite consider herself Tony’s equal, so she doesn’t know how to react. She ends up acting in an instinctual way that she couldn’t herself explain. Losey has brought his story to a perverse, sinister impasse — he really does know how to turn a scene into a major provocation.
That said, Joseph Losey didn’t always command the dramatic control seen in The Servant. Its character dynamics never veer toward overstatement, as in the much-praised Time Without Pity. We wince at Oliver Reed’s overdone incest-fever in These Are the Damned. Losey focuses on significant objects, distorting reflections and emotions that threaten to burst through his characters’ veneer of self-control.
The director holds our attention with the basic look of his film. His command of the image is arresting — every shot shows the intent of a storyteller with a point to make. With Douglas Slocombe behind the B&W camera and Richard McDonald in charge of the townhouse interiors, we’re always in a very specific place — with a freewheeling ’60s bachelor trying to reinvent himself as an old-school man about town. Along the way we discover stylized angles — reflections, etc., that look like something Nicolas Roeg might come up with.
The power struggle between Dirk Bogarde and James Fox is a relationship governed by rules of dominance. It’s sexual in nature, with dynamics that suggest themes of class and of homosexual frustration. The actresses realize that the sex relationships include some vague detours, although the firecracker played by Sarah Miles surely thinks her feminine power will prevail.
The Servant didn’t play well on old TVs because only a large screen could pull us into the specific compositions of Losey’s closed little world. We’re constantly trying to determine what personal agendas are in play — is anybody truly candid about their motivations? The Losey-Pinter style is too controlled for some, but many critics of the 1960s doted on its ambivalent quality.
When new, the seduction involving the fancy chair became the film’s key promotional hook. Images from that scene often accompanied reviews. Playboy magazine was quick to single it out, fixating on the concept of ‘the Bachelor Pad and How to Use It.”
The film’s restrained and thoughtful music score uses a pop vocal as an active character. It sounds completely different at different times. Cleo Laine sings it at one point; she also sang ‘Thieving Boy’ to major effect in Losey’s The Concrete Jungle.
