The distorted images in a convex mirror on the living room wall of a well-furnished luxury home in London reflect some uncomfortable truths about the British class divide.
Beneath an apparently civilized veneer, The Servant (Joseph Losey,1963) evokes a power struggle with a homoerotic subtext. One critic pronounced it “a kind of Sadeian prison theatre in which the class system is picked apart in clashes of manners and morals.”
Freely adapted from a 1948 novel by Robin Maugham, this was the first of three movies directed by Joseph Losey to be based on screenplays by Harold Pinter. Losey found exile in the UK in 1953 during the McCarthy era after being blacklisted by Hollywood. Pinter was an Englishman motivated more by the language of human interaction than the rhetorical conventions of agitprop. His writing is so distinctive that an eponymous adjective was coined to describe his style. Sinister ‘Pinter-esque’ pauses are a recurring feature of stage plays that have been characterised as ‘comedies of menace’. Pinter’s ambiguous dialogues and brooding silences highlight the way in which communication often takes place beyond words, something the Swedish writer Per Wästberg called “the abyss under chat.”
Pinter’s rage against the complacent upper classes is evident from his venomous screenplay. Tony (James Fox) epitomises the unmerited arrogance that often comes from inherited wealth and privilege. He boasts pompously of planning to construct low-income housing for the people of Asia Minor but does no work to bring this project to fruition. This pipedream merely serves to emphasise his idleness.
Hugo Barrett (Dirk Bogarde) is his punctilious manservant full of very specific design tips e.g. “Mandarin red and fuchsia is a very chic combination, sir”. Barratt’s obsequious professionalism and intelligence contrasts with his master’s self-satisfied smugness and stupidity. Slowly but surely the power relations between these two men are reversed. The strong implication is that power and privilege are ubiquitously corrupting influences.
What we are witness to is not merely a fictional guide in how to overturn an archaic class structure but a suggestion of a rottenness at the core of the supposedly civilised society. The rich overlord is seen as an such an anachronous figure that the film carries the hope that he is representative of a dying breed. The continued appeal of Downton Abbey proves that this dream is far from being realised.
This is the third of a series of blog posts tied to mirror images in British films based on themes contained in a soon to be published book entitled “Mirror Visions – From the New Wave to the New Wyrd. Reflections on British cinema.”
AMERICAN RUST by Philipp Meyer (Pocket Books, 2010)
