The Servant
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
If one movie has continued to haunt me since I first saw it on TV decades ago, it’s The Servant. I have seen it time and again over the years, and the experience is always unsettling, eerie, and seductive. It’s one of the darkest films I’ve ever seen—and one of my favorites.
Made in England in 1963, the movie was directed by Joseph Losey, an American ex-pat who was blacklisted in Hollywood for being a member of the Communist Party. Working from a screenplay by the brilliant playwright Harold Pinter, the film stars Dirk Bogarde, James Fox, Wendy Craig and Sarah Miles. Dirk Bogarde began his movie career as a matinee idol in Great Britain, but by the 1960s he was specializing in dark arthouse films, and this became his forte. Next to his starring roles in classic films like Death in Venice, The Night Porter, and The Damned, The Servant ranks as one of his greatest performances.
From the moment the sister moves in, Tony finds himself trapped in a sinister, sexually charged power struggle.
In the film, Bogarde plays Hugo Barrett, a servant who’s hired by Tony, a wealthy young man who has just bought a gorgeous townhouse and wants a live-in valet who will attend to his every need. Barrett moves in and soon proves himself indispensable because Tony seems incapable of taking care of himself. The only trouble is that Tony’s girlfriend Susan doesn’t like Barrett very much. She resents the way that he lurks around Tony’s townhouse, accidentally interrupting them when they want to be alone, or how he casually overrules her interior design ideas with ideas of his own. At first the tug-of-war between them seems tame, but Susan begins to believe that Barrett’s behavior is far more devious, as if he wants to drive a wedge between she and Tony. When Barrett convinces Tony to hire his sister as a live-in cook, we realize that Susan’s fears are well-founded. From the moment the sister moves in, Tony finds himself trapped in a sinister, sexually charged power struggle from which there might be no escape.
One of the delights of The Servant is watching how all the elements of the film work as one to convey the story’s emotional battleground. Creeping shadows become the sinister, suffocating atmosphere of the townhouse once Barrett moves in. When action is seen through the vertical supports of a long handrail, the image becomes the bars of the prison in which the characters are trapped. And faces reflected in a convex mirror are distorted, suggesting their real nature behind the masks they wear. But most of all, Pinter’s dialogue is wonderfully barbed, enigmatic, and filled with hints at the homoerotic dance between Tony and Barrett.
I give The Servant a compelling and creepy four out of four stars.
