The Servant

Criterion is doing a Joseph Losey film fest.

Two of Losey’s collaborations with Harold Pinter rank high on my list of all-time favorite movies: The Go-Between and The Servant.

I watch The Go-Between at least once a year—usually, just after I watch the 1981 TV serialization of Brideshead Revisited.

Love! Loss! Redemption!

Some things never get old.

I hadn’t seen The Servant for years before I watched it again last night, though.

It did not disappoint.

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The Servant is a kind of palimpsest onto which homoeroticism is superimposed on top of an analysis of the British class system.

Or perhaps it’s the other way around.

The film was made in 1963.

In the early 1960s, films that evoked homosexuality had to use many layers of metaphor indeed.

Just nine years earlier, the brilliant English mathematician Alan Turing had eaten a poisoned apple and killed himself. Turing had been imprisoned, disgraced, and chemically castrated for acts of “gross indecency” in connection with his homosexuality.

Indeed, the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 actually kinda proves (for those of you who weren’t around) what huge blows for personal freedom were struck during those opening salvos of the now oft derided Swinging Sixties. A lot changed. (So all you Boomer-hating Millennials can just go fuck yourselves!)

The film’s plot is very simple: Tony (James Fox) engages Barrett (Dirk Bogarde) to be his man servant. Tony’s girlfriend Susan takes an instant dislike to Barrett. Barret brings in reinforcements—Sarah Miles as Vera, never more delightfully slutty in her short skirts, stiletto heels and peekaboo bangs. High jinks ensue.

Nothing overt is made of the relationship between the two men, but it couldn’t be more obvious if Losey had devoted a whole half hour to butt-fucking closeups.

After Barrett and Sarah decamp, Tony throws himself on Sarah’s bed, burrowing down to catch whiffs of her scent; taped to the wall above the bed are pages torn from bodybuilder magazines.

“I had a friend like you once,” Barrett tells Tony awkwardly over breakfast, and looking down bashfully, Tony concedes that he had a friend like Barrett once, too.

Tony tries to reestablish his ascendency from time to time. “Look, Barrett, don't forget your place. You're nothing but a servant in this house.”

“Servant?” snarls Barrett. “I'm nobody's servant. Who furnished the whole place for you? Who painted it for you. Who does the cooking? Who washes your pants. Who cleans the bathhouse after you? I do! I run the whole bloody place! And what do I get out of it? Nothing!”

Tony ends up abjectly apologizing: “I’m grateful, honestly. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Tony descends deeper and deeper into alcoholism as the film progresses. One of the most riveting scenes in the movie takes place just before the end: The two men are playing hide and seek in the now trashed house; Tony is cowering, frightened, behind a pair of drapes. “I see you,” crows Barrett. “I know your dirty secret. I can smell a rat!”

One imagines an alternative screenplay exists in which Vera’s character has not been heterosexualized but remains the world’s most fetching twink.

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The film also examines class relations, specifically in the interactions between Barrett and Susan, a Sloane Ranger with no apparent attractions or skills other than an unshakeable belief in her own superiority.

The British class struggle seems a bit anachronistic, at least to this American, though the film is so well-crafted, I was willing to suspend my disbelief and buy into it. I will give The Beatles this: They made working class Brits much cooler than upper class Brits, at least to international eyes. The British class system has always mystified and frustrated me: Why didn’t Mellors just push Clifford Chatterly’s wheelchair off a cliff? I’ve always wondered. Lady Chatterly wouldn’t tell.

But as I say, the film is superbly put together. The acting, the cinematography, the set design, the script, even the sound engineering—that steady drip, drip, drip of water signaling the buildup of sexual tension.

Throughout the film, a particular jazz recording is used over and over again: Cleo Laine singing what sounds at first like a standard torch song, but every time the song is played—by Tony lifting the phonograph needle onto a vinyl record—it is subtly different, in the lyrics, in the instrumental accompaniment, in Laine’s own phrasings.

Watch on YouTube

Also, there are any number of amazing shots in which the audience is watching things happen in one of those concave mirrors, which were all the rage in the 18th century and which are part of the inherited furniture with which Tony initially decorates his Chelsea townhouse.

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I noticed something else this time round, too—possibly because I’d seen The Kindness of Strangers—Pinter’s collaboration with Paul Schrader—so recently.

Part of Pinter’s genius is that he was able to write the most amazing incidental scenes. The best scene in The Kindness of Strangers—a really underrated movie—is the scene in which the doomed couple wander into a Venice bar late at night, and the camera scans the faces of the bar’s other customers, picks up their stray conversations, much as the film’s viewer might if he or she wandered into the same bar.

It’s a psychological fact that the human brain tries to supply the missing information when it overhears one side of a conversation; this leads to all sorts of interesting fabulations, delusions and presentiments. Of all the writers with whom I’m familiar, Pinter is the one who uses this human tendency best. There are several scenes in The Servant where the audience hears dialogue that appears to be completely irrelevant to what’s going on. Pinter is counting on the audience to supply its own relevance. Which, of course, we do.

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The Servant was made more than 60 years ago.

And looks it.

By no stretch of the imagination does the film seem at all “contemporary:” It’s made in black and white and the score seems over the top.

And yet, the film does not seem dated.

What it seems is timeless.

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In other news, the rain finally stopped yesterday, so I went out for a tromp. I had the Walkway all to myself, which was a first-time experience.

The Walkway was once a railroad bridge and is surrounded on all sides by extinct industrial buildings. Art Photo™ alert! Except my iPhone camera can never capture what my eye sees:



I am trying to readapt myself to bunker mentality: Covid numbers are still quite low in Dutchess County, but there’s no reason to think they won’t start to soar any day now. People are very conscientious about wearing masks here, but we’re very close to NYC.

I was planning to spend Thanksgiving in Ithaca with RTT, but now I’m wondering whether I should.