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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
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Pif, LLC
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The Servant (1963)
Reviewed by Nick Burton
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Based on a novel by Robin Maugham and directed by American expatriate Joseph Losey (who fled Hollywood to make films in the UK after being blacklisted in the McCarthy hearings of the '50s), The Servant is the first film boasting a screenplay by playwright Harold Pinter. If the film has a prevailing sensibility, it is that of Pinter rather than Losey; the film is rich with Pinter's elliptical, often cryptic dialogue and pregnant pauses that, depending on your opinion, either marks or mars his work. Set in London, The Servant is ultimately a class struggle played out as a power shift between a young Brit twit and his seemingly faithful manservant as they jockey for control over a London townhouse. Alternately chilling and darkly funny, the film has a dark, sometimes surreal edge that in many respects prefigures the suburban nightmares found in films by directors like David Lynch. |
 The Servant Starring: Dirk Bogarde Directed by:Joseph Losey VHS Tape - $9.99 Not Rated |
James Fox plays Tony, a wealthy young land developer helping to clear hundreds of miles of South American jungle – one of those well-respected men Ray Davies and the Kinks sing about – who has just acquired a new two-story townhouse and a servant named Barrett (the late but always great Dirk Bogarde). Barrett seems the right combination of devoted butler and prissy maid, adept with cooking and decorating ("Mandarin red and fuschia is a very chic combination this year, sir," Barrett suggests), and doting enough on Tony to raise the suspicions and ill will of Tony’s well-to-do fiancée, Susan (a wonderfully icy Wendy Craig). In fact, Barrett seems to make Susan’s flesh crawl despite the fact that Tony is perfectly satisfied with him.
Barrett asks Tony if his "sister" Vera (a young Sarah Miles), can come to stay and work as maid, and Tony agrees. When Vera arrives, Tony becomes immediately distracted by her earthy manner, and when Barrett leaves to visit his parents, Vera makes her move to seduce Tony. Returning home late one night, Tony and Susan catch Barrett and Vera in flagrante delicto in the master’s bedroom, and the truth comes out: Vera is Barrett’s fiancée. Barrett, in front of Susan, declares that Tony and Vera have been at it too. Tony kicks them both out of his house.
We next see Barrett at a pub, where he asks Tony to forgive him and take him back. Vera, he tells him, has taken the manservant for his money and left him, and he needs his job back. Tony accepts, but this time, the roles of master and servant start to change perceptibly. It is Barrett who now complains that the house should be cleaner, and the two are soon engaged in a weird game of symbiotic one-upmanship, replete with Pinter’s stock-in trade – repressed and deep running homosexuality. Here, Barrett confesses a male friendship as a feeling he had once in the army: "That’s funny," Tony says, "I had that feeling myself there too. Once." Soon Barrett and Tony are playing violent games of Cricket on the stairs at night, yelling at each other, and generally acting like a bitchy married couple.
Into this atmosphere, Susan returns, worried about Tony and with a message from Vera, who is pregnant - or so she says - by Tony. But by this time Tony is a ghost of his former self, and Susan returns in time to see his final transformation into Barrett’s dog. At a surreal, almost Fellini-esque party held at Tony’s flat, we see Tony - now Barrett’s buddy "Tone" - mindlessly groping some socialite types while Barrett tries to get the only thing of Tone’s that’s still not his - Susan.
Barrett doesn’t get Susan – though Pinter and Losey make sure we see that Susan is a bit turned on by Barrett’s power before she rejects him – and the last scene of the film has a bitter sting of reproach that would be more expected of a Hollywood film than that of something by Pinter and Losey. (Imagine if they had granted Barrett complete victory over Tony - what a film that would have been.) Still, The Servant is done with such meticulous attention to style and mood - you could hang laundry on Pinter’s ellipses - that it draws you in to Barrett and Tony’s unhealthy little world effortlessly. That it does not go as far into that world as it might seems a small complaint in the end, and it’s worth seeking out for the great performances by Fox and (particularly) Bogarde. It remains a fascinating film whose dark mood will linger long after it ends.
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Nick Burton lives in Newport Beach, California. His fiction has appeared in many small press and web publications, including: Chronicles Of Fiction, Pauper, and of course Pif.