Accident, The Servant & The Go-Between

Lincoln Center is in the midst of an overarching Joseph Losey retrospective, showing films from his pre-Blacklisted Hollywood period, through to his adaptations of Don Giovanni, and Brecht’s Galileo.

I’ve been interested in Losey since I first saw the second of his three collaborations with Harold Pinter, Accident (1967), a marvel of the 60’s Euro Art Cinema: cold, elaborately structured, cruel. Since then I’ve seen the other two Losey did with Pinter, The Servant (1962) and The Go-Between (1971) and they’re worthy of a little discussion.

The Servant is the one that made Losey a star. Before, he was well appreciated by good auteurists like Andrew Sarris and the Cahiers du Cinema crew, but from what I understand, this one brought him to the widest attention. The film is well steeped in the sorts of class struggle which brought Losey under the eyes of the Committee for Un-American Activities, and led to his fleeing America for Europe in order to continue to make films in early 50’s. Dirk Bogarde stars, as he does in Accident, as Hugo, a servant hired to attend to a Tony, a young, well to do Englishman, played by James Fox. Bogarde’s performance is uncanny, he moves between well-mannered butler and low-born brute within the same scene, as he slowly works his way into the household, bringing his wife Vera, played by Sarah Miles in as maid to seduce Tony. The class element seems to have some slightly politically allegorical overtones, an article in Senses of Cinema points in this direction, but the tension between the two men seems more universal.

The seduction highlights what ties all three films together: sex as a weapon. In The Servant the seduction is used to throw off the power dynamic between master and servant, though Tony employs Hugo, Hugo can manipulate Tony through Vera. In Accident two professors are tied within their contempt for each other through a student, whom both have been fucking. This thematic plays a somewhat minor, but important role in The Go Between: a young boy, the “go-between” of the title tries to use his privileged position as secret messenger to learn about sex from one of the two persons between whom he is passing letters. This variety of cruelty ought be no surprise to readers of Pinter (The Homecoming, The Birthday Party) who specializes in men finding ways to destroy each other. The menace of The Servant even finds its way into the set design, in that the very furniture of the house oppresses the characters. Characters are routinely overshadowed by the massiveness of the pieces of furniture, they fight over who has the right to control the way the house is to be decorated. The set pieces are cold, solid and omnipresent, while the characters themselves are often awkward, fickle and nervous: the seduction scene between Tony and Vera is by no means graceful, the tenaciousness and awkward hesitancy of Vera would almost be comic were Losey not cutting between a dripping faucet that becomes louder and louder through the course of the scene. The pair, sweat in discomfort, and fumble on tables, with the metal of the kitchen contrasting the skin and lumps of the lovers. When the film “turns”, and the power relationship between the two men shifts, you can see it manifested in the condition of the house itself, what was formerly immaculately kept, has gone to ruin and disorder; Hugo and Tony play vaguely sadistic games amongst clutter and filth.

Compared with Accident and The Servant, The Go-Between is a minor film, it takes place primarily on an estate in the English countryside, and has a few of the class issues prominent in The Servant, but aside from a few choice moments, the film rests awkwardly in its framing device: an old pair, sorta remembering a summer in their youth, which only really breeds confusion and anachronism (“Huh? Why is there a TV in late, vaguely Victorian England? Oh, right, we’re flashing forward.”) It’s the last film they did together, and in my mind is well overshadowed by the other two. But those earlier two are masterworks of subtle emotional evisceration.

~ Nirav Soni