The Servant

An intimately crafted psychological drama, The Servant is a remarkable film that deserves to be seen by all. Written by Harold Pinter, based on a novel by Robin Maugham, it is a stunningly intelligent dissection of two men, the upper crust Tony (James Fox) and his new servant, Hugo Barrett (Dirk Bogarde). Through these two characters, Pinter's script unravels sharp ups and downs of class warfare and sexual games, as the two men constantly play a tug of war for power in all forms. When they first meet the two seem to hit it off quite well, falling comfortably into their positions of servant and master.

However, once Tony's fiancée Susan (Wendy Craig) comes into the mix and disapproves of Barrett, things start to become more conflicted. Then, Barrett's "sister" Vera (Sarah Miles) comes to move in and her true nature, as Barrett's lover, throws an even stronger rift between the two and their class positioning. The intrusion of these women sets off a descent from their idyllic lifestyle and the two men spend the rest of the time clashing with one another, the walls slowly closing in on this gripping and powerful study.

Director Joseph Losey makes great work of his tools here, using a lot of unique camera techniques like splitting the focus and viewing the characters through reflective surfaces rather than directly, which all serve to heighten the already high tension. The structure is bizarre and the final act gets surprisingly dark and borderline surreal, as the two engage in a series of fascinating interactions to further dissect the state of their dynamic. The Servant would be absolutely nothing without the performances of it's two men, and they both deliver in equal measures. The women are both superb as well, Craig being sharp and vicious, Miles being naive and sensual, but it's the boys show all the way through.

Bogarde is breathtaking, convincingly portraying the "gentleman's gentleman" of a butler at first but slowly turning more sinister and terrifying as time passes on. He plays all sides of this character with total life, always remaining a mystery to the audience as we are never sure whether he is fooling Tony and us or if he's being sincere at any given moment. There's a scene between him and Susan where she digs into him and the pain on his face, the emasculation, actually allows the viewer to feel deeply for what could have been a very unlikeable character.

Fox is no dull edge either, meeting Bogarde with a heartbreaking descent, falling from the mannered and composed young man we first meet into the shriveled and destroyed wreck by the end. The shifting dynamics between the two are always engaging, and Pinter embeds the film with just the right amount of emotion, comedy, terror and homoerotic subtext. It's a shattering work, marvelously performed by everyone involved.

I first watched Losey's most famous work - but not quite his best, in my opinion - on the big-screen at London's National Film Theatre in 1999, just a few months after star Dirk Bogarde's death; it's certainly one of the latter's most significant roles (along with the homosexual composer of DEATH IN VENICE [1971], perhaps his most representative), though I still feel that VICTIM (1961) is the finest film he's ever been associated with!

Even so, Bogarde's performance (recipient of the BAFTA award) is understated most of the time - which rather suits his enigmatic title character, a self-described "gentleman's gentleman" but actually harboring sinister ambitions. Interestingly, when Joseph Losey fell ill in mid-production, the directorial chores were thrust into the hands of the leading man until his recovery - who, amusingly, initially turned Losey down by saying that he "couldn't direct a bus" if his life depended on it!

While he was still some years away from the deliberate formalism that virtually characterized all his later output, Losey's style is here more controlled - for lack of a better word - than in, say, THE CRIMINAL (1960) or EVA (1962); this may have been due to the 'failure' of the latter (see my review elsewhere), or perhaps his collaboration with screenwriter (and influential playwright) Harold Pinter may have had more to do with this than anything else. Still, Douglas Slocombe's sleek black-and-white cinematography (also a BAFTA award winner) of the gloomy London settings - abetted by Johnny Dankworth's wistful score - is certainly among the film's most notable assets.

James Fox's fine performance as the usurped master of the house led him to short-lived stardom (and even copped the young actor the "Most Promising Newcomer" award at the BAFTAs); his career went on an extended hiatus some years later (which ended in the mid-Eighties) following his traumatic experience on the set of PERFORMANCE (1970), curiously enough a film dealing with a similar role-reversal situation! Though the women are subservient to the central relationship between Bogarde and Fox, both Sarah Miles and Wendy Craig serve their characters well; especially interesting is the battle of wits between the latter (as Fox's upper-class girlfriend) and Bogarde, whom she mistrusts from the get-go and is obviously proved right beyond her wildest imagination!

For a two-hour dialogue-driven film, the plot is pretty sparse - typically of Pinter, dealing in symbolism rather than presenting a straightforward narrative (despite being based on a novel by Robin Maugham) - but the tension between the various characters holds the viewer's attention all the way...though the final descent into depravity and degradation comes off as rather too abrupt and now seems more farcical than shocking (as it must have seemed at the time)! The cast also includes bit parts by two alumni of Losey's THE CRIMINAL - co-star Patrick Magee and screenwriter Alun Owen, sparring amusingly as a couple of clergymen in a bar! - as well as Pinter himself (a former actor in his own right, appearing as a 'society man' in the same scene, actually one of the very few set outside Fox's mansion).

There's a hilarious scene in which James Fox goes with Wendy Craig to visit her "mummified" high society parents. This enables Bogarde and Miles to live it up at the house during their absence. However, they cut short their visit and catch them romping about in their master's bedroom, whereupon he sacks them on the spot. This leads to the film's best scene, in my opinion: the chance meeting in a bar between Bogarde and Fox (who has, in the interim, fallen on hard times) where the Mephistophelean Bogarde paints a pitiful picture of himself which, inevitably, leads the lonesome Fox to engage his services once more. The way Losey shoots this marvelous sequence is masterly - with a minimum of camera movement and the actors strategically placed within the frame.

Trivia note: I own a British periodical from the early 80s called "The Movie" - a collection of essays strung together more or less by theme and running for an impressive 158 volumes - in which THE SERVANT was among the films chosen for a two-page critical evaluation, accompanied by a detailed synopsis and illustrated by numerous stills; I've leafed through it and read the review (written by Derek Prouse) so many times that these images from the film have become fixed in my mind and, as I lay watching, I was actively looking out for each one of them!

About midpoint Tony's girlfriend Susan asks servant Hugo, "What do you want from this house?" It's a direct and pointed question that's ambiguously answered ("I'm just the servant, mum.")

That ambiguity carries the dramatic tension along its murky but intriguing path, as a strange play of power and manipulation unfolds. Yet after a series of quirkly developments transpire and the tables of manservant and master are reversed, what's the real gain?

What was there in the house in the first place that was worth all the fuss and bother to acquire? Satisfaction of taking over the master role?

Whatever the goal, it all seems a tawdry victory. After the shoe's on the other foot and a few points are scored in this cheesy power game, where's the spoil?

What does drive this drama is Pinter's genius for inventing small talk that gives the illusion of grandeur Losey's direction is right on the mark, and the production design, score, photography--and the acting--are all top drawer.

As in his subversive play, "The Homecoming," Pinter manages to hold the attention with his unique pregnant pauses and hypnotic ambiance, which are actually illusionary. It could be a play about something very important or about nothing.

One thing is for certain: once "The Servant" is seen, one never quite forgets it.

This remains Dirk Bogarde's defining cinematic role.

The song ' All Gone ' is played periodically through the duration of ' The Servant ' and it somehow sums the whole thing up. The period of the early sixties are long since gone, but the class divisions remain for better or worse ( mainly worse ) and in that sense the film is entirely relevant to today. I have seen this film only twice in my life, but giving myself a Joseph Losey ' season ' as they used to do, once upon the time, on the UK's BBC, but that too seems to be gone, reminds me of what we have lost in the cinema. Is it one of Losey's best films ? With certain reservations I think it is, and the merciless depiction of so-called ' order ' disintegrating into ' disorder ' sticks to the mind like glue. Except for a few exterior shots of Chelsea and a snow bound countryside the claustrophobia of the house in which the drama plays is palpable. You need air after watching this and to call it a drama is a bit of an overstatement. It is half way Harold Pinter and half way Samuel Beckett. Everything happens, and nothing happens, and the perennial Jean-Paul Sartre's ' Huis Clos ' and Harold Pinter's theatrical work in general, plus Samuel Beckett's ' Waiting for Godot ' come to mind. A closed universe without escape. Society's divisions of class and the trap of human life in itself are clearly visible. I am reluctant to give any spoilers except to say a manservant overwhelms the master of a house, and the temptations of losing control are too overwhelming for the master to resist. James Fox is excellent as the master, too passive to fight back and Dirk Bogarde gives arguably his best performance as a slightly camp manservant, and the obvious ( to me ) bisexuality between them also binds them together. Women are ' used ' in this scenario and to a certain extent Wendy Craig loses her righteous dignity and Sarah Miles as Bogarde's accomplice sinks further and further into self-degradation. It is perfect casting and Losey knew exactly what he was doing in choosing the actors. A party scene played as if it is in a mortuary appears dated, but looked at closely and listened to attentively it is entropy exemplified. A woman in black appears to hand out drugs to keep the master in a perpetual coma, and the other women in the room can barely move never mind indulge in any sexual acts. To sum up Losey sees a world collapsing into its inevitable oblivion. We the viewers watch, and despite having little background information about the characters we can draw own conclusions about what we are seeing, and like the people in the film gaze into mirrors as the only moorings to reflect our existence. A must see film but is its pessimism too hard to bear ?

Back in the late 1960's or early 70's I discovered this creepy psychological drama on local late-night TV. Once seen, it's never quite forgotten, and it's fascinating to see it once again beautifully restored and uncut in its new DVD release. Aspects of it stick with you years later, most especially the dark, moody torch song with some bizarre lyrics which is played repeatedly throughout the story on Mr. Tony's record player, seeming more sinister with each successive playing. By the time of its final hearing near the end of the movie, its effect is so oppressive that it's a relief when the record player is violently shoved off the table. One telling detail is in the scene where Mr. Tony is left alone after Barrett and Vera are expelled from the house, and his fiancee Susan also disappointedly leaves him. He dejectedly goes to an upstairs bedroom, and on the wall above the bed we see pictures of male body-builders.

The cast is uniformly excellent. This was apparently James Fox's film debut, as his credit indicates `Introducing James Fox.' He was obviously an experienced actor, though. In contrast, four years later he was affecting an American accent, singing and dancing, and amazingly, looking even younger in `Thoroughly Modern Millie.'

This is the sort of role that I always associate Dirk Bogarde with. The way Barrett's malevolent character is gradually revealed, not just through the script, but through Bogarde's facial expressions and body language, is a credit to this great actor's skill. This is one dangerous guy.

`The Servant' is a real gem of early 60's British film.