The Servant (1963)

The Servant (1963):

Yeah, the 60s! Now we're talking.

So, is this Harold Pinter’s film or Joseph Losey’s? Going into it, you would guess Pinter will dominate, but Losey has such a good time with perfectly crafted shots and long takes that it ends up being a nice partnership (I am assuming the shots are not dictated in the screenplay). It plays out, on one level, like a film noir, a psychological thriller about con artists laying a trap for their victim, with beautiful double-layer dialogue where one character incorrectly interprets another character’s remark as innocent when we know it’s sinister, or where both know that the remark was vaguely seductive, a trick I don’t think I’ve seen anyone pull off in recent films. But the mood seeps obscurely from psychological thriller to psychological horror. Dirk Bogarde’s character Hugo Bennet is so nasty – in effect, the Devil - that you’d think this was a right-wing warning about the perils of the lower classes forgetting their place, and all the way through you never forget this film’s inalienable Englishness, however many longing, flirtatious glances it casts at European art films. American audiences would probably find the idea of a main character who just doesn’t do anything, that lets the disaster happen to him and then surrenders when it does, a lot more frustrating than it ever would be for an English one, but the film’s climax does its best to make us feel some outrage at the depths of his degradation, and helps us along with a look of contempt from his spurred girlfriend, followed by her horrified sobs.

This spectacle of a man not fighting back, who can never stand up for himself even when his debasement and abasement should be intolerable, tickles our anxious little frustrations at not seeing the hero we’re accustomed to seeing, even if we never consciously expected to see one in a Pinter-written Losey film.  His defencelessness borders on a kind of blasphemous irony where the meek disinherit the earth. It’s hard to watch, and yet on a forthright political level, with furrowed brow and set mouth, we’re obliged to say that this effete feckless sybarite is getting what he deserves. From the start it’s obvious, not only from Tony’s laziness but his caricature “callous capitalist” jungle project that he plainly has no handle on, that Tony is not going to be someone to root for, so we never get too upset with his downfall, but there’s still a residual discomfort in watching him get bullied by an increasingly macho tosser, and by the end we’re inclined to tell the whole lot of them to fuck off. Safe to say, then, Pinter wasn’t interested in any kind of straightforwardly political film at this point (that would come much later), and everyone gets it in the neck regardless of class. Speaking to Barrett with hideous arrogance seems to present the posh girlfriend as a hate-figure, yet we know Barrett is up to no good and wonder if this kind of authoritarian treatment will save the poor aristocrat from doom. It doesn’t, because Barrett calls in Vera to break up the dangerous alliance and seduce the mark.

You could certainly read it as a call to revolution if you wanted, the implication being clear that the upper class parasites are so decrepit with their own decadent ennui that a mild breeze would sweep the fuckers into history. That interpretation’s easy enough, it’s just not quite how the film feels. All four characters get tarnished with some hateful characteristic like a medieval allegory of sinners, so Tony choosing his man-servant over marriage doesn’t feel like a worker’s victory or even a gay wink (sorry, liberals). It’s more like the ending of a Gothic haunted-house film where the evil of the house absorbs its occupant into a ghastly eternal limbo. Maybe it’s his own nightmare of the lower orders and their moral degeneracy reflected back on him out of his own guilt. To paraphrase Grady in The Shining, “I’m sorry to differ with you, sir... but - you are the servant. You’ve... always been the servant...” Ooooh.

Yes, two films in a row that remind me of The Shining. This one is not part of the catalogue as I watched it on the Talking Pictures channel. Have a look out for it, they tend to come round more than once.