The Servant: A Cruel Servility

This dramatic material met its match in the daring filmmaker who ultimately brought it to the screen in 1963, under the same title as the novella. Director Joseph Losey first set his sights on Maugham’s book in the previous decade. His career as a feature-film director had begun in the late 1940s in Hollywood with such movies as the war allegory The Boy with Green Hair and a studio-assigned remake of Fritz Lang’s M, both of which were underappreciated at the time. But by 1951, he had been named before the House Un-American Activities Committee as having ties to the Communist Party—he had, in fact, joined in 1946—and found himself unemployable in the United States. After settling in London in 1953, he made his first two features in the United Kingdom under pseudonyms, as collaborators feared being associated with him. In the midfifties, he became interested in The Servant as a potential project. After waiting several years to acquire the rights, he began working on a film adaptation with screenwriter Harold Pinter, who was then one of the leading young playwrights in England, and actor Dirk Bogarde, with whom he’d first discussed the novella after collaborating with him on The Sleeping Tiger (1954).

Pinter’s screenplay demonstrates his facility for writing dialogue that on the surface seems inconsequential. He relished the half-finished sentence, the non sequitur, the repeated phrase. His aim was to create an uncertain, often ominous, atmosphere. Silence, for him, was a weapon. A line of ordinary speech left room for an actor to establish an aura of menace or mystery. The less articulate a character was, the more trouble they might cause. As Losey wrote, Pinter understood “how often the human creature uses words to block communication.”

Perhaps the most complex aspect of the film is its gnarled view of sexuality. In his 1994 book Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life, David Caute writes that Bogarde “remembers asking a rather inebriated Losey and Pinter whether The Servant was to be a homosexual picture—neither answered.” The actor himself saw “nothing homosexual in it.” Nonetheless, his companion and business manager, Anthony Forwood, “was nervous about the prospect of Bogarde acquiring a homosexual image in the cinema,” since the actor had played a closeted character in Victim (1961).

In Pinter’s script, as brought to life by Losey’s direction, sexuality is not merely fluid or suggestive; it is a form of power, a struggle. Tony and Barrett are involved in a game that is about who commands whom as well as who seduces whom. Seduction is a means of self-assertion, more potent than money or class.

Losey directed Bogarde to exude a coiled, ironic inner life and a nervous complexity. When it came to Fox, though, he emphasized the blankness of his beauty. Pinter gave the character no flavor in his speech, no texture 
in his responses. Tony is all vacuous appetite, and he is open to suggestion.

The men’s sexuality floats, just as one sequence floats into another. Tony is attracted to two young women: Susan (Wendy Craig), his posh girlfriend, and Vera (Sarah Miles), Barrett’s supposed sister, who is northern English and more openly sexy and earthy. One of the standout sequences in the film depicts Tony, in a skimpy dressing gown, making out with Vera in a revolving leather armchair. During filming, Losey had also kitted Fox out in a pair of fur boots, much to the annoyance of Miles, who refused to play the scene if the actor wore them: “Oh, you great stinking queer,” Losey reported her as saying, “you think I’m going to play the scene with you in that grotesque costume, you’re crazy.” The fur boots were removed.

The characters in The Servant are eerily isolated. Beyond the plush home in which most of the film takes place, we don’t see much of London. But in addition to the occasional shots of the long street where the house is situated, there are two interior scenes set in public places—one in a restaurant, one in a bar—that are stylized and feature peculiar characters who have nothing to do with the plot saying inconsequential but hilarious things. These scenes add to the sense of weirdness and artificiality in the film; it’s as if all the characters in them are playing little power games of their own. Such moments also occur in Losey and Pinter’s other collaborations, as when the university dons gather in Accident (1967) and when the posh family has supper in The Go-Between (1971).

The Servant’s sense of estrangement often arises from its compositions as well. Just as Losey lights faces and objects with directness and clarity, he also plays exquisitely with shadow. When Tony and Susan return from the country unexpectedly, they see a light on in Tony’s bedroom and realize that Barrett and Vera are cavorting in the master’s own bed. The time is now right for a full confrontation, and this is the point at which we see Losey and Pinter at their most ingenious and subtle. As Tony stands on the stairwell looking upward, Susan, in the same frame, stares straight ahead. What appears is not Barrett but his silhouette. He is standing in the doorway. It seems he is naked. The odd camera angles and the use of light and darkness make the scene arresting, intriguing, and mysterious. Seen in shadow, the bars on the stairs look like the bars of a cage.

The film’s force arises from Barrett’s protean energy. He can change and change again. At times, his accent becomes more emphatically northern English, especially in a scene where he complains of Tony’s messiness and laziness. But he can also soften his tone, sound more southern English. He is a chameleon, his sleek subservience giving way to charm until he is menacing and dangerously unknowable. He is a frightening, heavily ironic harbinger of what might happen were the English class system to erode to a point where no one knew their place.

In its first half, the film moves slowly, depending for its power on the suggestive glance, on sudden small conflicts, and on the camera giving us time to take in many psychological moods and shades, particularly when it concentrates on just two characters. It seems, at certain moments, that the men might attempt to murder each other, and their failure to do so becomes a source of fierce tension.

And then—following the scene in which Barrett, having been dismissed after Tony discovered him with Vera, pleads with his former master to rehire him—the dynamic shifts. After he goes back to work for Tony and returns to the house, Barrett swiftly transforms. He is no longer willing to be ordered about. He becomes the master, and Tony a willing prisoner in his own house.

Earlier, Tony had been paying attention to Susan and Vera, but now the primary relationship is between him and Barrett. Late in the film, Barrett cooks a meal for Tony, and the two men behave like lovers, or, as Barrett puts it, “old pals.” Not once, not even when he turns his back, does Tony take his eyes off Barrett. Tony is now the man with the gaze. And when Barrett tells him that he has only had that feeling for another man once before, when he was in the army, Tony responds: “That’s funny. I had the same feeling myself there too.” Then he pauses and says, “Once,” in a melancholy tone, making the memory more exact and concrete.

We then watch the men play a scary game of hide-and-seek, with Barrett taunting Tony by saying, “You’ve got a guilty secret.” But that is as far as their gay games will go. Into their peaceable kingdom, chaos will return. Vera comes back, and so does Susan. There is much shouting and some screaming. Bogarde’s body language, his voice, the way the camera catches his face, and his very relationship to the space around him—all have become more flexible, more open, more masterful. He is in charge of not only the household but also the film itself.