In his expansive body of work as a playwright, Harold Pinter dissected the language of power with a scalpel. Characters speak in clipped, ambiguous sentences, laden with meaningful pauses, and in doing so they occasion seismic shifts in status. A well-chosen word or gesture can entirely reshuffle relationships; or previously laconic characters may suddenly overwhelm the others with barrages of language impossible to counter. In his parallel career as a screenwriter, Pinter’s collaborations with director Joseph Losey led to three films that provided a visual corollary to his linguistic power-plays: in The Servant, Accident, and The Go-Between, Losey enlivened Pinter’s screenplays with aesthetic precision and dynamism. The Servant, the first and the best of their collaborations, centers a clearly demarcated power dynamic: a live-in servant and his employer. What ensues is a claustrophobic, psychosexual drama in which the servant insinuates himself into the master’s life so completely that the relationship flips on its head. Implicit within the domestic intrigue is a broader social critique, specific to mid-20th-century England but also perpetually relevant — that the structures and labels meant to separate individuals into social roles are often flimsier than they seem.
The Servant, adapted from a novella of the same name by Robin Maugham, follows Hugo Barrett (Dirk Bogarde), a handsome and taciturn middle-aged man who is hired as the manservant to Tony (James Fox), a wealthy young man who has just bought a townhouse in London. Barrett takes pride in his culinary abilities and taste in interior décor, and he attends to every detail of the home’s decoration and of Tony’s domestic life. Tony, who is vaguely involved in an implausible project to clear swaths of the Brazilian rainforest to build cities intended to be populated by impoverished people from Turkey, quickly becomes reliant on Barrett, to the chagrin of his girlfriend Susan (Wendy Craig).
Bogarde was a former matinée idol who, at this point in his career, was transitioning to more complex roles in arthouse films. He was also a gay man, and while he was necessarily not public about his sexuality in 1963, The Servant marked his second film in quick succession with gay themes. In 1961, he starred in Victim, a social issue drama about a barrister who is blackmailed for his homosexuality, which marked the first clearly sympathetic portrayal of the topic in mainstream British cinema. The Servant is more oblique in its treatment of a homoerotic power dynamic, such as that 1963 audiences could have easily ignored the subtext-laden relationship between Barrett and Tony. Yet the sexual tension between the two is still undeniably palpable.
When Barrett first meets Tony for his job interview, he walks into the house and finds him asleep in a chair. Losey shows Bogarde’s reaction to Tony’s unconscious figure: Bogarde looks down on Tony with a steady gaze, sizing him up as he slowly wakes, a subtle indicator of the sexual intrigue that will course through their relationship for the film’s duration. While Barrett’s foremost aim is to create a power center in the household by making himself indispensable to Tony, Bogarde’s performance communicates a roiling attraction to him that lies just barely under the surface. As Tony, James Fox portrays a character with a much simpler psychology: apparently living on his own for the first time, Tony behaves like a spoiled child, constantly whining to Barrett, but is also weak and susceptible to Barrett’s devoted care.
Blonde and slim, Fox’s youthful beauty offsets the more complex good looks of dark-haired Bogarde, whose face is here just beginning to show the signs of age. Tony’s attractiveness and wealth, in combination with his easily bendable personality, make him a prize to be won — and as such, Barrett and Susan struggle to gain his loyalty. Susan, a woman of Tony’s social class played with a sharp persistence by Wendy Craig, clocks Barrett’s game immediately, and makes a series of repeated attempts to draw Tony back into her orbit.
Losey communicates the sexual and social tension between these three characters with aesthetic sophistication and a keen understanding of Pinter’s distinctive rhythms. In collaboration with director of photography Douglas Slocombe, who shot the film with crisp and dramatic black-and-white photography, Losey effectively uses camera angles and careful blocking to communicate shifts in status. One visual motif especially captures just how slippery the relationships are in the film: shots are often captured through warped or curved surfaces, such as in a convex mirror angled down at a room, or through a glass of claret. The funhouse-mirror quality of these shots communicates — none too subtly — that the social and interpersonal roles the viewer has assumed for these characters are in a constant state of distortion.
Some of Losey and Slocombe’s most memorable compositions appear after a fourth character enters the frame: Vera (Sarah Miles), Barrett’s “sister,” who he has convinced Tony to hire as his live-in maid. Vera is actually Barrett’s fiancée, and Barrett uses her as a pawn to drive a wedge between Tony and Susan by inducing her to seduce Tony. In one crucial scene, Vera comes upon Tony in the kitchen. Tony, who had expected her and Barrett to have taken the day off, is surprised by her presence, and the longer they talk, the more tension builds between them — expressed aurally by the sound of a dripping tap. The scene reaches a climax when Vera hoists herself onto the kitchen table and positions herself so that her half-bare legs are pointed toward Tony. The low-angle shot places Miles’ legs in the foreground, and as they flirtatiously discuss the shortness of her skirt, they mutually lean in for a kiss. Elsewhere, another scene sees Tony initiating sex in a wingback chair: shot from behind, the chair fills the frame, and Vera — pale in contrast to the dark leather — splays out across the chair, her head and legs dangling off either side.
Susan eventually wrests control back and becomes Tony’s fiancé, but when the couple walk in on a post-coital Barrett and Vera, who then gain the upper hand by revealing both their own relationship and Tony’s affair with Vera, Susan leaves Tony in distress, and Tony fires Barrett. Alone and self-pitying, Tony eventually hires Barrett back, upon which their power games shift into overdrive. Losey — in an acceleration of the film’s previously deliberate pace, edited with precision by Reginald Mills — shows them bickering like a married couple, playing childlike games, screaming at one another, and having intimate, loving conversations. Bogarde lets loose from his previously calculated performance in the final act, unleashing an unpredictable, passionate, and manipulative personality that presses a reliant Tony into submission. By the film’s end, Tony is a passive guest in his own home, perpetually drunk (and presumably high), absolutely dependent on a triumphant Barrett.
The reversal of power carries a wide array of narrative and thematic implications. Filmed in the 1960s as the culture of England was rapidly changing, The Servant is in some ways “a drama about social change and modernity,” as noted by Colm Tóibín in an essay for the film’s release in the Criterion Collection. Tony, a wealthy man with vague imperial ambitions, hires a manservant because it is the kind of status symbol the members of his parents’ generation would have enjoyed, despite living in a society where live-in servants were becoming obsolete. If Tony is a symbol of naïve belief in outdated systems, Barrett is a symbol of covert disruption, knowing the social codes of the upper class well enough to infiltrate their ranks and supplant them. Yet the commentary that Losey — who, it should be noted, moved to England in 1953 after being targeted by HUAC for his membership to the Communist Party — and Pinter put forth in The Servant is more complex than that of a member of one class supplanting another. Class, social roles, sexual mores, modernity and tradition, and the ownership of property are all tied together in The Servant, with assumptions about each subverted repeatedly. That most of this occurs within one household, in the context of a single employer-employee relationship, only intensifies the experience: the domestic sphere is, after all, where power and social roles are negotiated and altered every day. For all its thematic layers and aesthetic intrigue, one of the most unnerving, enticing insights of Losey and Pinter’s masterwork over 60 years after its release is simply that social upheaval starts at home.
Part of Kicking the Canon — The Film Canon.
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