As the opening credits played at a screening of the 50th
anniversary restored version of Joseph Losey’s film, The Servant (1963), I sat in my seat in the third row of the Film Forum
next to my daughter Kajsa and reflected how something in the visuals spoke to a
bond between us. Not just that I raised
her, but that I raised her to watch with me certain kinds of movies. The gray skies and leafless trees in those
opening shots, filmed in pristine black and white on streets of posh London
townhomes, betokened a kind of shared cinematic space of the soul. It felt like an eternal world of Saturday or
Sunday matinees, where the world outside—of no matter what era or time in our
lives—could be held at bay while we pursued an imaginative
interaction with worlds preserved on celluloid.
On that note, I began my viewing of the film rather bathed
in nostalgia, not only for our comradely viewing of so much vintage art-house
cinema in Kajsa’s early teens through her twenties and beyond, but for that
space one inhabits as a willing revenant to the cinema of yesteryear, a space
that feels like eternity. It could
simply be a matter of certain neurons sparking that hadn’t sparked since
whenever last I sat before smooth dissolves of black and white shots, but it
felt more telling. I don’t mean “it’s
1963 again,” exactly. Since, to be sure,
I have no real recollection of 1963—except, ok, a grim November day and hushed
and stunned and sniffling adults gathered before a television set. But that’s not where I was while I sat in the
Film Forum. That recollection is from me
talking now. In my seat, I was only
aware of being transposed to a world known to my inner landscape as “black and
white Britain.” I gratefully entered.
The early going of the film seems paced to make us drink
that world in. Losey’s oh-so-crisp
images in the early going seem bent upon making us savor how things look. It’s a feast of textures. And the voices—the partly rushed and
swallowed syllables of the manservant Barrett (Dirk Bogarde), the lilting and
outgoing capriciousness of the upper-class and tony Tony (James Fox)—immediately
clue us in to the distance between these two men. These two men and Susan (Wendy Craig), the
fiancée of the latter.
With the introduction of “the female element,” the film’s
pace becomes that of opening moves in a soon-to-be-sinister game, one I was
quite willing to let go on for the entire afternoon. Let’s watch how Barrett insinuates himself
between these two brittle lovebirds, with Tony only too conscious of how much he
stands to lose if he lets his bachelor domain come under the sway of the woman
he has not yet got around to marrying.
And Susan—why shouldn’t she be irritated by the way that servant is
constantly underfoot, so cunningly serviceable.
And Barrett, well, yes, Barrett.
Dirk Bogarde is one of the greatest film actors of that era, able to
communicate so much with just the smallest hint—like whether or not his
eyeballs shine or grow cold, like whether or not a few stray hairs flip across
his brow, or whether or not his lips curl ever so slightly—or precisely
when. At this point, we’re watching the
mouse putting the cats through their paces.
The film doesn’t stay there, though. And at some point in the next
segment—featuring big-eyed, mobile-mouthed Sara Miles as Barrett’s alleged
sister Vera, a maid who makes a different kind of threesome with Barrett and
Tony—I began to think that the change was a sop to viewers who want more sex,
less frigidity. It was as if, unable to
show an actual romance between Barrett and Tony, the film had to introduce a
surrogate—“the sister.” Of course, we
soon learn, as Barrett lets Vera tart the place up a bit, that the two are
lovers and in league to seduce their superior.
But why? That’s not quite clear,
and that’s where the headgames really begin.
Miles’ Vera is not nearly subtle enough for Barrett as he was when we
assumed he was gay, and so everyone has to come down to a more deliberately
carnal level. Certainly, that has its
place in any ménage à trois, and it's not like the species
is ever likely to outgrow it. So, yes, Vera,
then, as the game little piece promoting class relations and giving her
supposed fiancée, Barrett, the thrill of consorting with his master
through their access to the same bit o’ stuff.
All well and good—after all, Susan is rather left out of
things as she’s too uppity for anything like what Tony’s willing to get into
behind her back. And isn’t that always
the way? In any case, a trip to a lovely
estate out of town finds Tony and Susan as hot for each other as they ever
were—except that Tony seems to pine for his townhouse. A surprise return in the middle of the night
and…who’s been sleeping in my bed and – why here they are, still in it! This scene is captured by Losey with all the
discomforting irony of the situation.
Don’t you hate it when you come home with your lady love only to find
that your “man” is above stairs in your bed making “incest” with a near
relation whom you’ve been having cordial relations with yourself upon occasion? What can you do, lord and master that you be,
but stand at the foot of the stairs feeling, well, humilated and impotent as
you hear their quite-at-ease-thank-you voices drifting down to stick daggers in
your most vulnerable spots, while your not-yet-missus stands there looking as
though she were watching an immolation, concerned that it’s bad form. And then, when the shadow of the naked “Man” stands
there between you two…
Where can we go from there?
Tony can call Barrett for a dressing-down but, since Susan stoically
refuses to depart, that also means certain revelations—particularly when delivered
by a blubbery Vera who, after all, was genuinely keen, you see—will cause no
end of ill will in Tony’s above-board relationship. So, yes, he can send Barrett and his strumpet
packing—his manservant’s cheeky “I’m well within my rights” still ringing in
his ears—and then try to get back to where he once belonged. Until a chance meeting in a pub when Barrett,
now enduring a service position that feels like hell after the bliss of his
former employer, tells him how Vera ran off on him and begs to return.
A return with a difference we can say, for now the two—master
and man—disport themselves one minute like a bitchy couple and the next like
frat boys on a bender or brothers mucking about till mummy comes home. We could say the film is lurching back to the
path it might have been on at the start, but then it can’t stay there either. We can’t have them live happily ever after
with each other when they can’t possibly have been in school together! Bring back Susan.
And return she does, just in time to catch one of those
orgiastic set-pieces that were all the rage after La Dolce Vita (1960)—decadence isn’t for kids, kids, because it’s never
really much fun, particularly when all the participants really do know better—and, when Tony goes to
pieces, why there’s no one to master him like his man. Au
revoir, Susan, it’s been swell.
Each segment of this little psychodrama has its own visual
feel and presentation, and the transformation of Bogarde displays reserves of
psychological nuance that beggar most actors’ grasp of the relation between
externals and internals. There is lots
of fun with mirrors and compositions of two and three and four characters,
knowledge about what lighting does to faces that is nothing short of revelatory
and, for real comic glee, a scene in a restaurant that lets us tour a few
tables to eavesdrop on the psychodramas we might be following instead of this
one—while Harold Pinter, who makes these characters speak the way they do,
shares a bottle with a bird at a table in the corner.
There’s also a visit to some bohemian coffee
bar where a white guy with a moustache—quite outré—bangs out the
blues. Clearly, the class system is
going to hell, the thin end of the wedge, and all that.
When I was a teen, what I loved best was the 1967-68 period
when it all went technicolor, psychedelic even.
Now, I find in the artefacts of the early Sixties a more subtle grasp
of the seismic shift because things have to be more subtle when you can’t just
let it all hang out. Looking back
through the constraints is liberating, perhaps?
In any case, as the very short end credits played we returned to 2013
and our vicarious and possibly cathartic contemplation of the masterly control
certain artists were capable of bringing to the messy shambles of sexual and
societal roles—for our continued amusement.
Yes, it felt like old times, in so many ways.
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