Colin Gardner,
Joseph Losey.
British Film Makers, Manchester University Press, 2004.
ISBN: 0 7190 6782 0 (hb) £47.50
ISBN: 0 7190 6783 9 (pb) £15.99
328pp
(Review copy supplied by Manchester University Press)

When a series of critical studies announces its aim to “present in lively, authoritative volumes a guide to those film-makers who have made British cinema a rewarding but still under-researched branch of world cinema,” the fact that one of said volumes is devoted to Joseph Losey is no surprise. Yet at the same time declaring Losey a British film-maker is more than slightly problematic.

Born in La Crosse Wisconsin, Joseph Walton Losey began his career in the theater and had made a smooth transition to the cinema when the communist witch-hunt era of the immediate post-World War II period (yes, he had been a party member) spurred him to hop the pond. After several very interesting films made under a number of pseudonyms (Andrea Forzano, Terence Hanbury, Victor Hanbury, Joseph Walton) he finally managed to assert himself on his own in 1957 with Time Without Pity – a brilliant psychological suspense melodrama that cemented his reputation with the “MacMahonist” group in France. Several more works of interest followed, climaxed in 1963 by The Servant – arguably the most important British film ever made, both for its particular aesthetic achievement and the manner in which it nailed both the national character and the workings of the class structure – both reeling at the time from the Profumo scandal (obliquely referenced in the film via the use of a wing-backed chair.) Clearly screenwriter Harold Pinter was pivotal in this, and they proved to be a team producing Accident (UK, 1967) and The Go-Between (UK, 1970) afterwards. Yet the sinuously insinuating camera movements and interest in sexual degradation in Losey’s oeuvre both preceded the Pinter collaboration and continued in its wake. Moreover for all his apparent “Britishness” Losey (for tax reasons) moved to France where he made the quinessentially French Monsieur Klein (France/Italy, 1976) – every inch The Servant‘s Gallic equivalent.

But then there are those other Losey works to consider. What “country” do the likes of Eva (1962), Boom(1968), Secret Ceremony (1968), The Romantic Englishwoman (1975), The Assassination of Trotsky (1972) and (most bizarrely striking of all) Modesty Blaise (1966) belong to? Obviously there’s no simple answer, and Colin Gardner doesn’t try.

While supplying more solid information than any critical study to date on Losey pre Time Without Pity British career (he’s especially good on The Sleeping Tiger), the sexual dynamics of The Servant eludes Gardner who claims “there is little evidence to suggest that this is anything other than a sexless union,” clearly ignoring the visual ‘call back’ of a dripping faucet in the Vera (Sara Miles) seduction scene in the film’s climax when Barrett (Bogarde) discovers Tony (James Fox) in a bath tub during a game of “hide and seek.”

In an interesting conclusion Garner notes “In the wake of Austin Powers and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction such innovations [as Losey engineered in the course of his career] may appear very tame, but read in light of Losey’s artistic odyssey from social realist to high modernist this early venture into stylistic schizophrenia was extremely darting.” Indeed it hasn’t been bested by the likes of Tarantino. Only Wong Kar Wai is his true cultural heir. But Wong retains a sunny air beneath all his pessimism about human nature. For Losey there is naught but cheekily sardonic gloom.

David Ehrenstein
USA.

Created on: Thursday, 2 March 2006 | Last Updated: 2-Mar-06