“Why is it that at a bachelor’s establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne?”
—Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest.
If you want a roseate take on the British class system, where the overlords (and mistresses) are mostly benign and well mannered, and the loyal servant class remains contentedly belowstairs, then watch Downton Abbey. If you want a truer, albeit cynical, picture of how England’s strict social barriers began to fray after two World Wars and the upheavals of the Swinging 60s, The Servant is your cup of builder’s tea.
Imagine if Jeeves and Bertie Wooster had passed through a dark mirror. Waiting for them on the other side was the playwright Harold Pinter and the blacklisted American director Joseph Losey. Based on the 1948 novella by Robin Maugham, nephew of W. Somerset Maugham, the 1963 British film stars a charming but sinister Dirk Bogarde as Hugo Barrett, a gentleman’s gentleman, and James Fox as Tony, the clueless aristocrat whom Barrett manipulates, humiliates, and ultimately destroys, outsmarting him at every turn and preying on his weaknesses until their roles are blurred, then reversed.
The film, unlike the novella, is set in the 1960s. Tony, a man distinctly out of step with the changing times, buys a run-down town house in London with plans to restore it, and decides to hire a manservant. Barrett, his new butler, is handsome, roughly the same age as Tony, and affects an upper-class accent to hide his Northern English, working-class roots. At first, he is the perfect manservant—cooking, cleaning, mixing the cocktails, helping Tony dress and undress, and drawing his bath. But soon he begins to take control of his passive master, who is half-heartedly pursuing a hazy urban-development plan in Brazil—more hobby than habitat for humanity.
The two men become as intimate as clubmates, or roommates, or even lovers (Maugham describes Barrett’s “rosebud lips, which gave him the look of a dissolute cherub”). Bogarde, a gay man who resisted entering into a “lavender marriage” for the sake of appearances, would certainly have recognized the homoerotic charge between master and servant, servant and master, adding an element of danger to the film; homosexuality was still a crime in Britain.
This is not Tony’s ancestors’ world. Indeed, the film is infused with the shock of the new: John Dankworth’s jazzy score featuring a song sung by his wife, Cleo Laine; Carnaby Street’s new fashions and hairstyles; newly imagined relationships between the classes; new sexual mores. As the Irish novelist Colm Tóibín noted, “Pinter’s script is about a new kind of England in which the expression of servility could be bathed in irony and cruelty. The film dramatizes a kind of role-play in which no role is stable or easy to define.”
The grimness of postwar England was giving way to a flashy new era in which middle-class and working-class boys such as Mick Jagger and George Harrison could afford to buy up vast, neglected English estates and become the new aristocrats. The explosion of British pop music made stars and darlings of all sorts, turning the strict social order on its head, and ushering in an era of permissiveness, drug-taking, and sexual experimentation. Tony tries to cling to the old order while Barrett uses the new permissiveness to undermine Tony’s world, introducing him to drug-laced parties and sexual adventures, all under the watchful, disapproving eye of Tony’s girlfriend, a posh, sensible girl named Susan Stewart (played by Wendy Craig). Susan quickly recognizes a rival in Barrett, and the two struggle for Tony’s soul.
Imagine if Jeeves and Bertie Wooster had passed through a dark mirror. Waiting for them on the other side was the playwright Harold Pinter and the blacklisted American director Joseph Losey.
Losey had begun his film career in the 1940s with The Boy with Green Hair and a remake of Fritz Lang’s M. By 1951, the House Un-American Activities Committee had targeted Losey for his early membership in the Communist Party. Suddenly unemployable in Hollywood, he decamped to London in 1953, where his first English feature was made under a pseudonym. He cut a striking and very American figure in late-50s and early-60s Britain. Bogarde later described Losey’s tall frame, often dressed in blue jeans and workman’s shirt, a red handkerchief knotted around his throat, lingering at a bar with one cowboy boot resting on the rail.
Bogarde had first met the director 10 years earlier when he was cast in Losey’s The Sleeping Tiger. “I knew nothing about him,” Bogarde recalled, “save that he was an American refugee from McCarthy … [and] that his assumed name … was Victor Hanbury.”
Losey acquired the rights to The Servant and wrote a film adaptation with Harold Pinter, with Dirk Bogarde in mind to play one of the two leads. Bogarde was already considered a box-office heartthrob with his success as Dr. Sparrow in a series of English comedies with titles such as Doctor in the House, Doctor at Sea, and Doctor in Distress. But the actor was hoping to recast his image in more serious dramas.
With Bogarde set to play Barrett, they had to attach an equally exciting actress for the part of Vera, the working-class woman whom Barrett employs to seduce and bring down his boss. Losey quickly thought of 21-year-old Sarah Miles. Though a small role for the up-and-coming but much-in-demand young actress, she accepted it. (One of the more memorable scenes in the film shows Tony and Vera making love in a leather armchair, filmed from the back so all you really see are Sarah Miles’s expressive bare legs.)
If Bogarde had found Pinter’s script a hard slog at first, the film’s financial backers found it incomprehensible. “We wrestled The Servant to the screen,” Bogarde wrote in Snakes and Ladders, the second of six memoirs he was to write before his death, in 1999. Things did not look promising for The Servant. But after securing commitments from Miles and James Fox, the filmmakers gathered the cast in Bogarde’s suite at the Connaught. Over coffee and Bloody Marys, The Servant began to stir, though the financing still hadn’t materialized.
Desperate calls were made, and just enough money was raised to start filming. But the strain, and the bitterly cold weather—the coldest in years—proved too much for the embattled director. One week after shooting began, Losey collapsed with pneumonia. From his sickbed, he asked Bogarde if the actor would take over directing the movie. “I could give you instructions by telephone,” Losey explained. “I’ve worked a lot of it out.”
Over the next 10 days, with constant calls to Losey, Dirk Bogarde filled in for their bedridden director, whom the cast seemed more determined than ever to serve. “It was,” Bogarde would later write, “one of the most extraordinary expressions of loyalty and devotion that I have witnessed in this sometimes tawdry profession.”
When a gaunt and weakened Losey finally appeared on the set, he was greeted by an ovation that Bogarde found particularly moving.
“Lying on an iron bed, wrapped in blankets and a long woolen scarf which Wendy Craig had bought for him … attended by a slightly bewildered, and ignored, nurse,” Bogarde wrote, “[Losey] got on with the job.”
“I am an actor who works from the outside in,” Bogarde wrote in Snakes and Ladders, and Bumble Dawson’s designs for Barrett’s clothes—a tight-fitting, shiny serge suit, black shoes that squeaked (a delightfully sinister detail), and a porkpie hat with a jay’s feather, as well as “a Fair Isle sweater, shrunken, darned at the elbows, a nylon scarf with horses’ heads and stirrups,” helped him build the disturbing character. “A mean, shabby outfit for a mean and shabby man,” he wrote.
The actor also drew inspiration from his vast wanderings. Barrett’s gait was based on a Welsh waiter who once served him in a Liverpool hotel; his cynical gaze was taken from a car salesman he glimpsed loitering against a Buick on Euston Road. With Losey, he observed, “there [was] no waste of chatter … about motivation.” You just got on with it. It was the same with Pinter, the future Nobel Prize laureate, whose scripts were “honed and polished” long before the first day of shooting, and reminded Bogarde of “a beautifully laid-out scenic model railway.”
In his screenplay for The Servant, Pinter employs his trademark silence and non sequiturs to create a vague and unsettling atmosphere. As Losey recalled, Pinter understood “how often the human creature uses words to block communication.” Tony’s town house itself functions as a character, isolating the two men in their cat-and-mouse game of dominance and servitude. The shadow of staircase railings lashed across a wall seems to imprison Barrett and Tony in their struggle.
With The Servant completed, the question remained: Who will see the movie? “No one wanted this effort,” Bogarde later wrote, “no one was even prepared to give it a single showing … It seemed that the whole endeavor had … been in vain.”
One week after shooting began, Losey collapsed with pneumonia. From his sickbed, he asked Bogarde if the actor would take over directing the movie.
Bogarde despaired in the elegant gloom of the Connaught, where he kept a more or less permanent suite. The grand, Victorian-era hotel in the heart of Mayfair was a world away from the actor’s life in the country, with its dogs and walking sticks, its Wellingtons and long tramps across the fields. At the Connaught, it was all “dark suits and head waiters; duty in an elegant form,” not unlike the world of The Servant.
Meanwhile, Losey set out to rescue his film from the distributor’s dusty shelves, gathering up his cannisters and arranging for small, select screenings, for which Losey and Bogarde paid the rent on theaters. The screenings were a great success and encouraged Losey to take his orphaned film to Paris. There, Florence Malraux, daughter of the novelist André Malraux, then France’s minister of cultural affairs, herself an actress and soon to be married to the director Alain Resnais, quietly arranged additional screenings for influential people in Paris. People will talk—and they did, enthusiastically, about the film.
Good fortune finally appeared in the form of an executive named Arthur Abeles, who at the time was the head of European distribution for Warner Bros. Bogarde recalled that Abeles, embarrassed by the “stupidity of his fellows” in ignoring such a brilliant and challenging film, chose to run The Servant in his vast theater in Leicester Square.
It could have been a scene straight out of the film when Bogarde’s stand-in banged on the star’s dressing-room door, bearing a clutch of reviews.
“They lay before me, the verdicts on our work … I locked the door and leant against it with The Times … my back hard against the primrose paint,” Bogarde recalled. “The last two paragraphs of John Russell Taylor’s review were difficult to read because of tears. But I got the point. The moment which I had never thought would come had come at last.” The press had breathlessly declared the film a masterpiece, exalted James Fox as a film star of the future, and Joesph Losey as a true master of the cinema.
To celebrate, Bogarde choreographed a marvelous party in the hotel’s drawing room. Losey stood somewhat apart from the merrymaking, tightly clutching his drink, and bowing his head to listen to the words of praise, “flushed with the pleasure he was so good at concealing,” Bogarde remembered. “My heart rose with delight at his quiet triumph.”
At the party, Bogarde embraced his parents and brought them over to meet the director. He was holding onto an empty glass, which Bogarde quickly refilled, when Basil Dearden, a journeyman filmmaker out of Britain’s Ealing Studios, approached the two men. Dearden suddenly dropped to his knees on the Connaught carpet in homage to Losey. “Just tell me … how can I make a film like this?” he asked Losey. “How would I go about it? How should I even start?”
“Shall I tell you?” Losey replied. “Well; first of all you take your son away from Eton, sell all Melissa’s furs, get rid of the house and the pool, get rid of the cars, pack a couple of suitcases and move into a small flat and think things over. That’s the only way I know, Basil … no overheads; just the film.” A socialist to the last!
Losey and Bogarde would remain friends for life, despite some rough patches, and Losey’s uncanny gift for making enemies of those who liked and admired him. Bogarde kept in touch. On one such call, in 1984, Bogarde was on the telephone asking after his friend’s health at the very moment Losey died.
In a touching and honest letter to Losey’s wife, Patricia, written later that same June day, Bogarde wrote, “I didn’t expect Joe to die, for some silly reason. I suppose I thought that because he had been so very much a part of my life he would stay on, the grumpy, cantankerous, loving genius that he was.” But the “one thing I will always, always, remember him for was his blinding courage, his passion for the Cinema … and his burning determination to make magic on the screen.... Clever sod! Shitty bugger! Goodness HOW I shall miss him.”
Sam Kashner is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. Previously a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, he is the author or co-author of several books, including Sinatraland: A Novel, When I Was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School, and Life Isn’t Everything: Mike Nichols, as Remembered by 150 of His Closest Friends