The Sleeping Tiger

Joseph Walton Losey (January 14, 1909, La Crosse, Wisconsin – June 22, 1984, London) was an American theater and film director. After studying in Germany with Bertolt Brecht, Losey returned to the United States, eventually making his way to Hollywood.

While in Hollywood, Losey co-directed the original U.S. production of Galileo, by Brecht, with Brecht himself as the other co-director. Charles Laughton, who had worked with Brecht on the translation / adaptation, performed the lead role. In the context of that production, Losey also made a half hour film based on Galileo’s life.

During the McCarthy Era, Losey was investigated for his supposed ties with the Communist Party and was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studio bosses. His career in shambles, he moved to London, where he continued working as a director.

Even in the UK, he experienced problems: his first British film, The Sleeping Tiger, a 1954 film noir crime thriller, bore the pseudonym Victor Hanbury, rather than his own name, in the credits as director, as the stars of the film, Alexis Smith and Alexander Knox, feared being blacklisted in Hollywood due to working on a film he directed. He was also originally slated to direct the 1956 Hammer Films production X the Unknown; however, after a few days work on the project, star Dean Jagger refused to work with a supposed Communist sympathiser and Losey was moved off the project.

In the 1960s, Losey began working with playwright Harold Pinter, the collaboration beginning what would be a long friendship and a successful career for Pinter as a screenwriter. Losey realized three films from Pinter’s screenplays, The Servant (1963), Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1971), all of which have made a mark in the traditions of British, European, and American art house cinema. The Servant won three British Academy awards. Accident won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury award at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival. And The Go-Between won, among others, the Golden Palm Award at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, four prizes at the 1972 BAFTA awards, and ‘Best British Screenplay’ at the 1972 Writers’ Guild of Great Britain awards. Each of the Pinter-Losey films examines the politics of sexuality, gender, and class in 1960s and 70s Britain. In The Servant, a manservant named Hugo Barrett (Dirk Bogarde) facilitates the moral and psychological degradation of a member of the nouveau riche named Tony (James Fox); Accident explores male lust, hypocrisy, and ennui amongst the educated middle class as two Oxford tutors named Stephen (Bogarde) and Charley (Stanley Baker) competitively objectify a pupil named Anna (Jacqueline Sassard) against the backdrop of their seemingly idyllic lives. In The Go-Between, a young working class boy named Leo Colston (Dominic Guard) is involved in both facilitating and undermining a socially transgressive affair between an upper class woman named Marian Maudsley (Julie Christie) and a working class farmer named Ted Burgess (Alan Bates).

Losey’s move from The Servant to the subsequent two films saw him experimenting increasingly with the mechanisms of cinema, in particular a rendering of time that was not linear but layered and thus exemplary of the subjective experience of memory. Although Losey’s films can in the main be described as naturalistic, The Servant’s hybridization of Losey’s signature Baroque style, film noir, naturalism, and expressionism and both Accident’s and The Go-Between’s radical cinematography, use of montage, voice over, and musical score amount to a sophisticated construction of cinematic time and narrative perspective which edges this work in the direction of neorealist cinema. All three films are marked by Pinter’s sparse, elliptical, and enigmatically subtextual dialogue, something Losey often develops a visual correlate for and occasionally even works against by means of dense and cluttered mise en scene and peripatetic camera work.

Pinter later worked with Losey on The Proust Screenplay (1972), an adaptation of A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust; however, the finances were never found to realize a film before Losey died.

In 1975, Losey realized a long-planned adaptation of Galileo (aka Life of Galileo) by Brecht. Galileo was produced for television and financed in part by the American Film Theatre, though it was shot in England.

In 1979 Losey filmed Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, shot in Villa La Rotonda and the Veneto region of Italy: this film was nominated for several César Awards in 1980 including Best Director. —Wikipedia