Joseph Losey’s film about a young gentleman and the manservant who takes his house from him, room by room, is as cold and as good as its reputation. Only the last half hour, which turns the screw too hard, keeps us from the top mark.
Joseph Losey made The Servant from a novel by Robin Maugham, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter, and the story fits in a sentence. Tony (James Fox), young, rich and idle, buys a house in Chelsea and hires a manservant, Hugo Barrett (Dirk Bogarde), who, without raising his voice or breaking a rule anyone could name, ends up in charge of it. The poster called it a terrifyingly beautiful motion picture and gave the phrase an exclamation mark. We do not usually take posters at their word. This one was close, and the film is as good as its reputation.
Bogarde is the reason to see it. Barrett arrives in a dark coat with a bowler in his hand, finds his new employer asleep in a deckchair in an empty room, and waits. For most of the first hour he plays at half volume: the “yes, sir”, the small bow, the eyes that stay a moment too long on the back of Tony’s head. Watch the scene in which Tony and Susan are on the sofa and Barrett keeps finding reasons to come in, with flowers, with the curtains, with a tray. Nothing he does could be complained of. That is the method, and Bogarde never winks at us about it.
Wendy Craig’s Susan is the only person who sees what is happening, and she has no words for it except rudeness. She asks Barrett whether he uses a deodorant. She is also right. James Fox has the harder job, because Tony has to be pleasant enough that we mind and hopeless enough that we believe it, and he plays him as an overgrown boy who wants looking after. His one plan is to build cities in the Brazilian jungle, which he explains over dinner to Catherine Lacey’s Lady Mounset, who would rather talk about ponchos, and Richard Vernon’s Lord Mounset, who would rather not talk at all. Tony agrees with everyone.
The house is the other lead. Richard Macdonald’s production design gives it a staircase that turns twice on the way up and a convex mirror in the hall that bends anyone standing near it, and Douglas Slocombe shoots the stairs from below so that whoever is on the landing has the advantage. Snow sits in the windows and the lamps light one face at a time. Reginald Mills lets scenes run past comfort in the first half, so that a pause at the foot of the stairs becomes a threat. John Dankworth’s score is cool jazz, with one song, a woman’s voice over piano, that Tony puts on the gramophone until we dreaded the needle going down. Beatrice Dawson keeps Barrett’s black jacket immaculate while Tony goes from suit to cardigan to dressing gown.
Then Barrett’s sister, Vera (Sarah Miles), arrives to be the maid, and the film has its best scene. Tony comes down to the kitchen late. Vera is at the sink, a tap is dripping, the radiator is up too high, and she says it is hot in here. Miles plays it with a blank appetite, and Fox sweats. We watched Tony cross that kitchen and wanted to shout at the screen, which we do not make a habit of. The tap did it: Losey holds on it, drip after drip, while a man’s life is rearranged for him.
The second half takes a turn we will not describe, and then another. What we can say is that the film’s tone, exact for most of its 116 minutes, goes broad at the end. The house fills with bored people lying about, Bogarde is allowed to slur and sprawl, and the camera roves as though the point had been made and only the volume needed raising. Most critics take this as the climax. We think it is where Losey stopped trusting the tray and the tap. There is also the question of what Barrett wants from Tony, which the film knows and will not say aloud. It could not, in 1963.
Losey made Accident and The Go-Between with Pinter afterwards, both quieter and more grown-up. Neither has a scene as frightening as a man asking whether he may draw the curtains. It is a 12 certificate. There is no blood in it. We came out feeling as though there had been.
