“YOU CAN’T GET GOOD HELP THESE DAYS.”

By Raymond Benson

These days, filmmaker Joseph Losey doesn’t get the acclaim he deserves. An American who showed great talent in Hollywood in the early 1940s and was well on his way to a lucrative and respectable career, got sidelined by HUAC—the House Un-American Activities Committee. Because Losey had ties with the early Communist Party in the U.S., he, along with many, many other artists working in Tinsel Town, was blacklisted. He fled his native country to the United Kingdom, where he remained until his death. Losey made films in England and France, many of which are admired films noir. In the 1960s and beyond he moved toward making provocative art films, working with writers such as Harold Pinter and generally pushing the envelope in the cinema.

The Servant (1963) is one of those art films that Losey made, and it was his first collaboration with playwright Pinter (they did three pictures together). Based on a 1948 novella by Robin Maugham, The Servant is also one of Pinter’s first attempts at screenwriting. Pinter had been enjoying some success in the theatre since the late 1950s but was still not yet a fully established theatrical superstar at that time (this would occur a couple of years later). His own adaptation of his play, The Caretaker, was also made in 1963. Pinter took Maugham’s novella and re-tooled it to emphasize the class warfare that is going on in the subtext of the story, as well as adding what can only be described as the Pinter’s Theatre of Menace—a sense of subtle, unnerving threat that exists in most all of his work.

The story is about a wealthy international real estate developer, Tony (James Fox, in a debut role), a bachelor who hires a manservant, Hugo Barrett (Dirk Bogarde). They get along splendidly at first, although Tony’s girlfriend, Susan (Wendy Craig), senses something off about Barrett and wants Tony to get rid of him. Tony refuses. Barrett one day convinces Tony to hire his sister, Vera (Sarah Miles), to be a maid. Vera seduces Tony one night when Barrett is away. But then one day Tony and Susan come home to the flat and find Vera and Barrett in bed together. Turns out they’re not brother and sister at all. And then the tale takes a sharp left turn into nightmare territory as relationships change and power dynamics are reversed. To reveal more would spoil the creepiness of what happens next.

The Servant is a powerful, disturbing film. The crowning touch is the superb, unsettling performance by Bogarde, who won the BAFTA award that year for Best Actor (the film was nominated for Best Picture). The movie was ignored by the Oscars, but Pinter did win the award for Best Screenplay by the New York Film Critics Circle. Today, the movie resides at #22 on the BFI Top 100 British Films of the 20th Century list.

Losey’s perceptive direction masterfully uses mise-en-scène in a carefully staged sense of place that is claustrophobic and austere. He treats the theatre-of-the-absurd goings-on with absolute sincerity and realism… a perfect approach to Pinter’s exceptional dialogue and the mood established by the piece.

The Servant is very much an adult film, something that couldn’t have been made in America in 1963, and it’s a bit surprising that Britain’s censors weren’t all over it. But, then again, everything lies in the subtext. What you don’t see on screen can’t be censored, can it? The film is a brilliant display of shocking subject matter done in an ordinary, matter-of-fact presentation.

The Criterion Collection’s new Blu-ray release features a new 4K digital restoration with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack. It shows off the striking black and white cinematography by Douglas Slocombe, a longtime British DP who later won three Academy Awards (including one for Raiders of the Lost Ark).

Supplements include a new, interesting overview of Joseph Losey’s career by film critic Imogen Sara Smith; a rare audio interview with Losey from 1976; a revealing 1996 interview with Harold Pinter; vintage interviews with actors Dirk Bogarde, Sarah Miles, James Fox, and Wendy Craig; and the theatrical trailer. The enclosed booklet contains an essay by author Colm Tóibín.

The Servant is for fans of Joseph Losey, Harold Pinter, and, especially, Dirk Bogarde, who owns this motion picture. His portrayal of Hugo Barrett surely upends the old adage that ‘you can’t get good help these days.’

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