Sep 291963
 
four reels

Upper-class slacker Tony (James Fox) decides he needs a manservant, so hires the efficient Barret (Dirk Bogarde), who seems almost as anachronistic as Tony, but additionally there is something sinister about him. Tony’s sharp and disdainful fiancée Susan (Wendy Craig) is immediately antagonistic toward Barret, though to little effect. He brings his wanton sister Vera (Sarah Miles) into the household as a maid, who quickly seduces Tony. From there, things get strange.

There’s something wrong with everyone and everything in The Servant. I felt it first as a tic, then a hum, and then it burrowed into my bones. It’s a drama, about an upper-class toff and his valet, but it plays like a dark thriller, as if filled with child murders and the Illuminati. It shouldn’t be this tense, but it is. I can’t think of another film that is this disturbing without an eyeball being sliced open.

The novel, by Robin Maugham, took an old-school elitist view, with the rich being the ones holding society together. Playwright Harold Pinter wrote the screenplay, warping that story to his own designs, adding in the absurdity and guilt which were his trademarks, and tearing at the uselessness of the upper-class. Director Joseph Losey was the right man for Pinter’s sensibilities. An American expat, he’d escaped the communist witch hunts and was ready to do something different. Being an outsider seemed to have given him a better eye for the British class system, or maybe it just meant he lacked the social norms that kept so many Brit directors from calling out their own way of life.

Filled with angst, suppressed sexuality in multiple forms, power and powerlessness, The Servant shows a worthless and crumbling aristocracy and a hungry working class ready to eat them. It’s sometimes called a satire, and I suppose it is, and parts do seem funny, but only in the darkest way.

While Tony is the one having his life torn apart, he is never sympathetic. Nor is Susan, although she is perceptive enough to know something’s wrong. I’m not sure anyone is really sympathetic (which isn’t a shock coming from Pinter), but if anyone, it is Barret. He’s slimy and treacherous, but I was on his side, as much as I can side with anyone in this cold, emotionally distancing movie. I wanted him to win, though for most of the film I wasn’t sure what the goal was. The characters act as much for the metaphor as they do for their own motivations, which isn’t a criticism here. It’s a surreal, sideways kind of film.

Film historians claim it had a major role in changing British cinema, making it darker and more modern, and freeing up some of the sexuality that had been held  at bay. I don’t know what it changed. I do know that The Servant was uncomfortable and captivating in 1963, and it is now.

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