MUBI's retrospective Outlaw Auteur: Joseph Losey is showing November 14 – December 26, 2018 in the United States.
The Servant
Wisconsin-born Joseph Losey began his career in New York theater in 1933, where he quickly established himself, working alongside playwrights Sinclair Lewis and Bertolt Brecht as well as directing Charles Laughton. Turning to the silver screen in 1947, he directed his first feature, The Boy with Green Hair and worked consistently in Hollywood over the next several years, directing such films as a remake of M. Then The Red Scare hit and left Joseph Losey blacklisted. Blacklisted meant no work, and no work meant no money, so he left America, eventually settling in London. Interviewed a year prior to his passing, he spoke of the blacklisting: “Without it I would have three Cadillacs, two swimming pools and millions of dollars, and I’d be dead. It was terrifying. It was disgusting, but you can get trapped by money and complacency. A good shaking up never did anyone any harm.”
This may sound like a man who has made peace with his past in the autumn of his years, but this is no mere passive statement. Such issues have been at the heart of Losey’s cinematic explorations his entire career, and can perhaps best be analyzed through a series of pictures he made in Britain during the 1960s. Losey well understands that in order to have “a good shaking up” one must first be settled. He takes great care to establish the settings his narratives seek to disrupt. The credit sequence of 1960’s The Criminal, a serviceable enough escapist caper meets Angry Young Man picture, features fluid camera movements that establish the geography of a prison, depicting a vision of prison life that is, while brutal, undeniably a world with its own politics and organized agenda. One quickly becomes familiar with the physical quarters and cellblocks, as well as the relationships with the guards, and the intricate power structure and economy amongst the cellmates.
Likewise, 1963’s The Servant commences with a tracking camera following Dirk Bogarde’s Barrett as he visits the location of his new employer (and the setting of the film). Barrett witnesses a house in disarray: no furniture to speak of and much thrown about. A well-to-do named Tony (James Fox) has, without much of a reason or identity, moved into a large house with too much time and too much money. He is all class and privilege, an idealist who talks loftily of bringing villages to foreign lands, but never seems to be actually doing anything. He quickly becomes reliant on Barrett for everything: for his upkeep, for his food, for his news. He even relies on Barrett to style the house and give it character.
A British encampment during World War I is the setting of King & Country, from 1964. Losey creates a dismal and oppressive world: it is constantly raining, the sun never shines, and shadows permeate all around. Rats are a constant fixture, and comfort is not. Dirk Bogarde as Captain Hargreaves receives an assignment to defend an army private accused of desertion. Losey does not complicate this tale: The army private had enough and left his post. In the world Losey creates, no man can blame him this decision. Hargreaves begins the tale discussing proper etiquette towards a senior officer and ends up, symbolically and literally, in the trenches with the army private for his final act.
These carefully concocted worlds, structured along the lines of class and rule, are worlds of people and situations constantly renegotiating for position and power. These are worlds of deceit and passive aggressiveness; of cons, tricks, and wagers. Losey states this point most succinctly in the masterful prologue to The Criminal in which he makes this structure physical in a game of poker. Three men play. The first bets, a second man raises, and the third man folds. The first man raises over the top. The second man calls. A tense showdown occurs before the cards turn over: the first man has a full house; however, the second has four of a kind. All the winnings to the second man, which are then revealed to be a pile of matches. Jailhouse economics. It is an apt beginning for a tale full of bluffs and false calls about lives full of bravura moves for little gain. Johnny Bannion (Stanley Baker), positioned so well in this world, makes his only mistake when he tries to break free and move beyond it.
King & Country observes a man-made world of rules and loyalties that cannot get out of its own way. The army private deserted. The punishment is death by firing squad. Nobody wants, nor seems to believe, this man should die. Yet they cannot seem to get out of the way of their laws and determinations.
Losey is interested in men and male relationships. Not simply relationships of machismo, but rather subtle, insinuating relationships—men happy in a world of men, in which women only complicate things…and were they really ever needed anyway? The world of prison makes perfect sense to Johnny Bannion: he runs the show. It is a world of men, favors, and grift. Outside these walls, however, he quickly finds himself in over his head. In love with two women, one of which leads to his downfall, he leaves a cozy life of prison politics for an early grave.
Losey would further his investigation into homo-social structures when he teamed up with screenwriter Harold Pinter. Their collaborations would subtly shake up sixties cinema with their tales of class and sexuality, probing homosexual dynamics and investigating social roles.
The Servant, adapted by Pinter from a Robin Maugham novel, pivots around an intense hand of poker in which class, position, needs, and desires are wagered. Tony has the money, position, and status. Barrett has the ability to run the house, the knowledge, and an insight into Tony’s sexual desires. They call and bluff at each other’s importance until their eventual destruction.
While Barrett nearly single-handedly runs not only the household, but also Tony’s life, Tony often reminds him that he is just a manservant. By the culmination of the film, however, Tony’s dependence on Barrett is so total that when Barrett threatens to leave, Tony breaks down and apologizes in a powerful scene climaxing in the servant yelling at his employer to just go and get him a damn drink! Pinter and Losey subvert the power dynamics here, and question which class—elite or servant—are ultimately the more powerful in society.
Accident
Pinter and Losey next worked together on 1967’s Accident, which begins and ends in tracking shots on a leisurely idyllic household (Losey is very much a fan of book-ending shots), about to be compromised by unspoken desires and forbidden curiosities. In this maddeningly quiet film, Stephen, an academic tutor (again played by Bogarde), unsatisfied in his career (he wants to be on TV, of course) takes out his insecurities on William (Michael York), a young student. Bogarde and his middle-aged friends refuse to admit to their desires, even as they work against each other to those ends. Dishonesty and deception farther the schism between them until the accident of the title shatters all.
Accident first introduces us to the tutor and student as they sit just too close to each other at a window and talk about a woman the student is in love with. It is all very touching—they do touch—and while they speak no words of this, and the camera is quick to spread its gaze heterosexually on the female component, there is something intimate in this opening shot that the viewer carries through the film. Likewise, Stephen’s jealousy of his friend Charley (Stanley Baker), and their relationship with each other and their wives (and, inevitably, a new student, Anna) has a waft of the incestuous.
Later in his career, Losey would introduce women into these mad worlds and try to bring about some order. In 1982’s The Trout a female character states that if a male character “had dared to sleep with men, he might have fewer problems.” Later, she goes on to say, “Nowadays heterosexuality and homosexuality mean nothing. You’re either sexual or you’re not.” Losey’s trademark drunks and mad men fill The Trout—however, the women here are the only sane, thinking people in the film.
It is ultimately lost men, tormented by issues of class, sex and general malaise, that is at the heart of Losey’s cinema, featured in tales of boozy dreamscapes and melodic moods unfolding at their own pace. They are tales of people trapped within their lives, circumstances, and relationships that are likely to disturb the viewer. Still, disturbing as they may be, give them a watch; a good shaking up never did anyone any harm.