The Servant
Joseph Losey (1963)
Tony (James Fox), a rich young bachelor, has recently moved into a new home – a big house in London SW3 – and employs Barrett (Dirk Bogarde), a self-described ‘gentleman’s gentleman’, as his valet. The two men get on well from the start though Tony’s well-bred girlfriend Susan (Wendy Craig) takes an immediate dislike – she’s snooty yet uneasy – to Barrett. The latter persuades Tony that extra domestic help is needed in the Chelsea mansion and brings Vera (Sarah Miles), supposedly Barrett’s sister, into the household. Vera is actually Barrett’s lover; she seduces Tony and starts sleeping with him too. When Susan and Tony return unexpectedly early one night, they discover Barrett and Vera in Tony’s bed. Tony angrily chucks them both out into the street but not before Barrett has revealed to Susan that Tony has had sex with Vera. When they next see each other, in a nearby pub, Barrett pleads for another chance and Tony relents. The rift between him and Susan means the two men have the place to themselves for a time, with Barrett increasingly dominant and Tony increasingly dissipated and dependent on him. The end of The Servant sees Susan, in spite of a last ditch attempt to salvage her relationship with Tony, vanquished and leaving the house, Vera back in residence there, and the exchange of master-servant roles between Tony and Barrett complete.
Although Harold Pinter’s screenplay is adapted from Robin Maugham’s 1948 novella (of the same name), the set-up and confrontations of The Servant suggest a Pinter original – the newcomer who threatens the established domestic order, the sexual (in this case, sexually ambiguous) power games. Besides, with so much of the action occurring in a single location, it’s easy to think the piece began life in the theatre. The film is stronger when Pinter, rather than Joseph Losey, seems to be the chief author. As a socially acute drama of possession, it’s compelling and richly entertaining. Details in the opening scenes – Barrett literally pushes at an open door on his first entry to the house, where he finds Tony asleep – are symbolic and predictive but with a reasonably light touch. In the closing stages, when the balance shifts into baroque class critique more typical of Losey, The Servant becomes obvious and turgid. The finale of the orgy chez Tony, involving a collection of mannequin-like women as well as Vera and, on the margins, Susan, goes on too long. But not long enough to do much damage to the film as a whole. Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1971) followed but this is the best of the three collaborations between Losey and Pinter.
Dirk Bogarde several times played cultured, classy men who, for various reasons, were weary and weakened. It’s quite an irony that he gave his most inventive and enjoyable performance as the socially lowly usurper Hugo Barrett. From Barrett’s first appearance in outdoor clothes – belted raincoat and pork pie hat – the characteristically elegant Bogarde wears his lower-orders outfits expressively. His shabby suit and sleeveless pullover fit him like a skin; it’s no surprise that Susan nastily asks Barrett if he uses a deodorant. The Mancunian accent seems thoroughly absorbed; the camp inflections are deft; Barrett’s ever-so-‘umble self-effacement always verges on bitter sarcasm. A lapidary actor, Bogarde brilliantly conveys the tiny but definite signs of Barrett’s taking offence, as he often does. In the ménage à deux part of the story, his housewifely nagging of layabout Tony is very funny. An adamantine will underlies all the splendid external elements of the characterisation. As Barrett, Bogarde even just about overcomes his usual tendency to lose emotional power whenever he increases volume.
All four of the principals, whatever one usually thinks of them, are at the top of their game. James Fox, in one of his first screen roles, has never been better than he is as Tony, whose entitlement and helplessness he captures equally naturally. I guess I first saw The Servant in the mid-1970s and recall being surprised to find Wendy Craig in it: by then, she was virtually inseparable from the scatty middle-class mother she’d played successfully in television sitcoms. As Susan, Craig combines offensive disdain for Barrett with fearful vulnerability: she’s excellent when the two things fuse in her domestic power struggle with him – peremptorily demanding he make her lunch, reinstating a vase of flowers he’s banished to the background. Even Sarah Miles is good: her neurotic presence is more interestingly expressed in a slutty character like Vera than it was in most of the sensitive heroines she went on to play.
One sometimes senses Joseph Losey’s impatience to get on to what he sees as the meat course: exposure of the traditional British class system as not only decadent but moribund. Nevertheless, Losey too does some of his best work here, with the considerable help of Douglas Slocombe’s black-and-white photography. The large convex mirror that hangs on Tony’s living-room wall and distorts the reflections of those seen in it provided the film’s best-known images but Losey and Slocombe make use of other mirrors too, including a reflection of winter trees in a deep puddle in the street outside the Chelsea mansion. The standing water presumably materialised near the end of the film’s shooting schedule, most of which coincided with Britain’s big freeze of 1962-63: there are several short outdoor sequences in which snow is falling or on the ground. Another fine image is Barrett’s shadow on the staircase when Tony and Susan come back to find the servants in flagrante delicto. It’s clear that Barrett is naked: that he holds his ground in the bedroom doorway is a potent expression of defiance; that his shadow, rather than his actual body, is seen, gives him a sinister authority.
I may have misunderstood the director’s intentions in them but I liked the few extended sequences away from Tony’s house, an indication both of how claustrophobic the film’s main setting becomes and of how successfully Losey changes tempo outside it. Tony and Susan twice visit the country pile of Lord and Lady Mounset (Richard Vernon and Catherine Lacey). On the first occasion, an indoor scene featuring the visitors and their hosts, in which the actors hold stylised, almost frozen poses, anticipates the arrangement of bodies in the climactic orgy sequence at Tony’s house but is enlivened by Pinter’s amusing absurd dialogue about South America (Lady Mounset obstinately confusing ‘gauchos’ with ‘ponchos’, etc). On the second visit, Tony and Susan play around in the snowy grounds of the estate: Losey no doubt despises their silly self-indulgence but the effect is oddly poignant. (Back at the house, the occasionally vicious ball game that Tony plays with Barrett on the staircase anticipates the indoor rugby set piece in Accident.) An earlier sequence in which Tony wanders back from a pub to what he expects is an empty house also has a sympathetic quality: the solitary Tony seems to head home only because he has nowhere else to go. (Vera is waiting there, ready to seduce him.) The score by John Dankworth is effective although Cleo Laine’s vocal, repeatedly put on Tony’s record player, is overused. Dankworth appears briefly in the film as a band leader. A restaurant scene provides cameos for, among others, Patrick Magee (funny as a bishop) and Harold Pinter.
21 July 2018