The Servant

Joseph Losey’s The Servant is a meticulously crafted psychological thriller. It begins as an intimate portrait of affluent London life: a young, wealthy man hires a personal valet to bring order to his daily routine. But with each successive scene, the film reveals new layers of ambiguity, and the relationship between the two men gradually slips beyond its seemingly clear-cut boundaries.

Tony is carefree, charming and used to a life of comfort. Barrett is discreet, capable and impeccably polite. It does not take long for their relationship to become something far more unsettling than a conventional arrangement between employer and servant. Matters are further complicated by the presence of Tony’s fiancée, Susan, who makes no attempt to hide her dislike of Barrett.

The Servant is hypnotic in the way it steadily undermines any sense of certainty, showing just how deceptive appearances can be.

Joseph Losey remains one of the most fascinating – and today surprisingly seldom discussed – figures in twentieth-century British cinema. An American who emigrated to Britain, he made his most important films there, including The Go-Between and Accident. The film is adapted from Robin Maugham’s novel, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter, the distinguished playwright and future Nobel Prize winner in Literature – something clearly felt in the film’s taut dialogue and in the tensions simmering beneath the surface of every exchange. Dirk Bogarde delivers one of the most celebrated performances of his career. Honoured with, among other distinctions, three BAFTA Awards and nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, The Servant remains one of the most unsettling and uncompromising achievements of 1960s British cinema.

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Joseph Losey (1909–1984) – American film and theatre director. Blacklisted in Hollywood during the McCarthy era in the early 1950s, he left the United States and continued his career in Europe, working mainly in the United Kingdom. He collaborated frequently with playwright Harold Pinter – later a Nobel Prize laureate in Literature – who wrote the screenplays for several of Losey’s most important films. Losey won the Palme d’Or for The Go-Between (1971) and César Awards for Best Film and Best Director for Monsieur Klein (1976).