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Critics reviews

THE SERVANT

Joseph Losey United Kingdom, 1963
Much like Pinter’s stage plays The Dumb Waiter, The Birthday Party, and The Homecoming, the film circles around themes of role-playing, class dynamics, and interpersonal subterfuge, evading any definitive reading while somehow remaining emotionally direct at all times.
January 25, 2019
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The fusion of Pinter’s stark approach to image and language with Losey’s sensitivity to spaces and objects brings to this low-budget grand vision an authentic creepy power.
June 27, 2018
Both [Eva and The Servant] have impressive but obtrusive jazz scores (by Michel Legrand and Johnny Dankworth, respectively) that seem designed to smother or at least simplify the intellectual issues with emotional bombast, and the almost abject reliance on Antonioni's notions of decadence (especially strident in Eva) makes the arabesques of the camera movements not so much circles around a void as pirouettes around a borrowed void.
March 21, 2016
arts•meme
Viewed in the light of his plays, with which it shares more than his screenplays for cinema, "The Servant" is one of Pinter's great comedies of menace ("The Caretaker," "The Birthday Party"), where an outside intruder disturbs the seeming calm of private lives, and class structures are overturned. Pinter adapted Robin (son of Somerset) Maugham's novella of the same time, and made it entirely his own.
August 29, 2013
Losey's ripping comedy of breakdown, a master class in ominous mise-en-scène richly absorbed by Polanski and Roeg. Bogarde and Fox carry it with them into Death in Venice and Performance, respectively.
August 5, 2013
Often pleasingly nasty, the observations about class in The Servant occasionally lose their bite, the satire dulled by the film's too-obvious role reversal between overlord and hired help.
July 23, 2013
If gayness remains figured as a malignant force in The Servant (a half-acknowledged deviance here mobilized in the pursuit of manipulation and personal gain), there's also something undeniably thrilling about watching it wind its destructive path, vivified by Losey's taut pacing, stylish formal play, and distressing-as-ever atmospherics.
July 22, 2013
A perfect storm of perversity, pre-Persona identity transference, prole pole-positioning and mutually assured psychological destruction, Losey's masterpiece immediately transformed the director from has-been Hollywood exile to European auteur. Everything hits just the right note of louche Britannia, from Losey and cinematographer Douglas Slocombe's visual expressionism... to screenwriter Harold Pinter's pause-as-power-play dialogue to the actors' character assassinations on class assumptions.
July 18, 2013
Losey's ingredients are one part aristocratic film, one part angry-young-man movie—jus as the former was shoving out the latter in 1960sEngland. Yet rather than a mere historical benchmark indicating a cultural shift, The Servant adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Mixing techniques as surely as it mixes class (graceful dolly shots are placed side by side with the handheld photography), the picture's clever formalist juxtapositions evoke the hysterical confusion of a culture in upheaval.
July 17, 2013
Re-released in conjunction with its 50th birthday, this once-edgy and outre shocker now suffers from a severe lack of subtlety and the knowledge early on that there is only really one way this story can go. In fact it's not that this story is unsubtle, more that its subtlety is cloyingly self-conscious. That said, as a dramatic, psychosexual two-hander, Dirk Bogarde and James Fox make for fine sparring partners
March 21, 2013
Bright Lights Film Journal
In one of the most enigmatic films to come out of Great Britain, The Servant, both artists along with screenwriter Harold Pinter succeeded in rendering a study of human power, its limits as well as its possibilities.
May 1, 2005
The film is very studied and smooth, even though it deals in sexual hysteria; it could use some of the roughness and drive of Losey's early work.
January 1, 1980