Joseph Losey 9781526141569

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BRITISH FILM

Joseph Losey

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MAKERS

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Brian McFarlane, Neil Sinyard series editors

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Allen Eyles, Philip French, Sue Harper, Tim Pulleine, Jeffrey Richards, Tom Ryall series advisers

BRITISH FILM MAKERS

already published Jack Clayton neil sinyard Lance Comfort brian mcfarlane Terence Fisher peter hutchings Launder and Gilliat Michael Reeves

bruce babington

benjamin halligan

J. Lee Thompson steve chibnall

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Joseph Losey

BRITISH FILM MAKERS

Colin Gardner

Manchester University Press manchester

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Copyright © Colin Gardner 2004 The right of Colin Gardner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester Ml 7JA, UK

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www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for isbn 0 7190 6782 0 hardback isbn 0 7190 6783 9 paperback First published 2004 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

page vi ix x

list of plates series editors’ foreword acknowledgements

1 Introduction: Joseph Losey and the crisis of historical rupture

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2 Losey in exile: The Sleeping Tiger (1954), A Man on the Beach (1955) and The Intimate Stranger (1956)

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3 A question of background: class and the politics of impulse in Time Without Pity (1957), The Gypsy and the Gentleman (1957), Blind Date (1959) and The Criminal (1960)

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4 Dystopic malevolence and the politics of collusion: Evan Jones’s The Damned (1961), Eve (1962), King and Country (1964) and Modesty Blaise (1966)

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5 Harold Pinter’s time-image: The Servant (1963), Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1971)

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6 Three allegorical fables: Boom! (1968), Secret Ceremony (1968) and Figures in a Landscape (1970)

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7 Bertolt Brecht and Galileo (1974)

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8 Gender matters: A Doll’s House (1973), The Romantic Englishwoman (1975) and Steaming (1985)

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9 A second exile: Losey in Europe

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10 Conclusion

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theatre credits and filmography bibliography index

278 299 307

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List of plates

1 Becoming-animal: Frank (Dirk Bogarde) and Glenda (Alexis Smith) react with alarm to the discovery of their affair by Glenda’s husband, Dr Clive Esmond, in Losey’s first British film, The Sleeping Tiger (1954). (Courtesy StudioCanal, Paris.) page 85 2 Reflection of a death foretold: the face of David Graham (Michael Redgrave) is doubled in the prison glass as his condemned son, Alec (Alec McCowen), displays a calm fatalism in Time Without Pity (1957). (BFI Collections. Courtesy of Janus Films.) 85 3 Amour fou: Keith Michell and Melina Mercouri make their pact with the Devil in The Gypsy and the Gentleman (1957). (Reproduced courtesy of Carlton International Media Limited/LFI.) 86 4 MacDonald Carey is on the wrong end of an umbrella as Oliver Reed and Shirley Ann Field look on with sadistic amusement in The Damned (1961). © 1961, renewed 1989 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All rights reserved. Courtesy of Columbia Pictures.

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5 Eve (Jeanne Moreau) seduces a smitten Tyvian (Stanley Baker) by telling a fabricated tale of her childhood in Eve (1962). (Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Reproduced by kind permission of Plaza Production International, Paris and Kino International, New York.)

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6 ‘He’s a vampire too, on his Sundays off’: Barrett (Dirk Bogarde) sizes up his next victim, Tony (James Fox) at the beginning of The Servant (1963). (Courtesy StudioCanal, Paris.)

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7 ‘We’ll all be rat food before long’: Pte Sparrow (Jeremy Spenser) gives some creature comfort to Pte Hamp (Tom Courtenay) on the eve of his execution in King and Country (1964). (Courtesy BHE British Home Entertainment.)

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list of plates

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8 Monica Vitti and Terence Stamp strike a defensive pose in Modesty Blaise (1966). © 1966 Twentieth Century-Fox. All rights reserved.

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9 Forbidden games: Robert Mitchum ‘menaces’ Mia Farrow during one of her staged rape fantasies in Secret Ceremony (1968). (Courtesy Universal Studios.)

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10 The redoubtable Mrs Maudsley (Margaret Leighton) in Losey’s Palme d’Or winning The Go-Between (1971). (Courtesy StudioCanal, Paris.)

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11 Galileo (Topol) demonstrates his new (stolen) invention – the telescope – to the young Andrea (Iain Travers) in Losey’s film version of Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo (1974). (Reproduced by kind permission of Michael Kantor.)

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12 Class conflict meets sexual politics as Patti Love confronts Vanessa Redgrave and Sarah Miles in Losey’s last film, Steaming (1985). (BFI Collections. Courtesy of Columbia Pictures and World Film Services, Inc.)

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Series editors’ foreword

The aim of this series is to present in lively, authoritative volumes a guide to those film-makers who have made British cinema a rewarding but still under-researched branch of world cinema. The intention is to provide books which are up-to-date in terms of information and critical approach, but not bound to any one theoretical methodology. Though all books in the series will have certain elements in common – comprehensive filmographies, annotated bibliographies, appropriate illustration – the actual critical tools employed will be the responsibility of the individual authors. Nevertheless, an important recurring element will be a concern for how the oeuvre of each film-maker does or does not fit certain critical and industrial contexts, as well as for the wider social contexts, which helped to shape not just that particular film-maker but the course of British cinema at large. Although the series is director-orientated, the editors believe that a variety of stances and contexts referred to is more likely to reconceptualize and reappraise the phenomenon of British cinema as a complex, shifting field of production. All the texts in the series will engage in detailed discussion of major works of the film-makers involved, but they all consider as well the importance of other key collaborators, of studio organisation, of audience reception, of recurring themes and structures: all those other aspects which go towards the construction of a national cinema. The series explores and charts a field which is more than ripe for serious excavation. The acknowledged leaders of the field will be reappraised; just as important, though, will be the bringing to light of those who have not so far received any serious attention. They are all part of the very rich texture of British cinema, and it will be the work of this series to give them all their due.

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Acknowledgements

All books are heavily indebted to the scholarly research that precedes them and this one is no exception. Particularly useful in this case were the series of interviews with the director in Tom Milne’s Losey on Losey and Michel Ciment’s Conversations with Losey, the groundbreaking critical analysis of James Leahy, Seymour Hirsch, Raymond Durgnat, James Palmer and Michael Riley, as well as the two biographies of Losey by David Court and Edith de Rham. However, the theoretical basis of this book would have been impossible without the brilliant insights of Gilles Deleuze in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, which opened up Losey scholarship to a more immanent, Nietzschean analysis. The manuscript has benefited immeasurably from the input of the editorial staff at Manchester University Press, as well as the critical reading of Lary May, Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Minnesota, whose generous feedback helped me discover the true thesis of the book. This book evolved over several years out of a PhD thesis and I would like to acknowledge the invaluable support of my Dissertation Committee at UCLA, Nicholas Browne (Chair), Stephen Mamber, Teshome Gabriel and Samuel Weber, who helped pull this project into workable shape in its earliest stages and never doubted its realization for a moment. Many thanks also to the other faculty members in the UCLA Department of Film and Television – Janet Bergstrom, Vivian Sobchack and Peter Wollen – for their stimulating seminars and for supporting my candidacy for a Dissertation Year Fellowship that greatly facilitated the completion of the original thesis. A special mention also to Bob Rosen at UCLA for his inspiration during my first stint in the film programme during the mid-1970s, particularly for introducing me to Losey’s unique genius through his riveting lectures and screenings of The Servant. I owe a great deal of gratitude to Richard Hertz, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe and my graduate students at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, UCLA and UC Santa Barbara for intellectual and creative support over the past ten years and the opportunity to try out many of this project’s theoretical premisses in the classroom. Also to my fellow PhD students in the UCLA film and television program – Peter Bloom, Bernie Cook, Lisa Kernan, Lael Loewenstein,

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acknowledgements

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Anna Sara Meyer and Teri Webb – for crucial input and encouragement in the formative, prospectus stages of the dissertation. My research made extensive use of several libraries and archives and I would like to acknowledge the extremely helpful librarians and staff at the following institutions: Madeline F. Matz, Reference Librarian in the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division of The Library of Congress, Washington DC; Ann Stephenson in the Stills, Posters and Designs department at the British Film Institute; the UCLA Film and Television Archive; the UCLA University Research and Arts Libraries; the American Film Institute, the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; the Alderman and Clemons Libraries at the University of Virginia; and last but not least, Claire at ‘Eddie Brandt’s Saturday Matinee’ in North Hollywood. Special thanks are also due to Edward Dimendberg for tracking down video copies of otherwise unavailable films. Stills from Losey’s films are reproduced by kind permission of the following: StudioCanal (Paris), Janus Films (New York), Carlton International Media Limited/LFI (London), Columbia Pictures, Plaza Production International (Paris), Kino International (New York), British Home Entertainment, Twentieth Century-Fox, Universal Studios, Michael Kantor, and World Film Services, Inc. Every attempt has been made to contact the copyright holders. In the event of misattribution please contact the publishers. The research and writing of the manuscript was underwritten by a 1995–6 Dissertation Year Fellowship from the UCLA Department of Film and Television and a 2002–3 UC Santa Barbara Regents’ Humanities Faculty Fellowship. Part of Chapter 5 appeared in slightly expanded form as ‘Naturalism, Immanence, and the Primordiality of Class: Deleuze’s “ImpulseImage” and the Baroque Intriguer in Joseph Losey’s The Servant’ (Iris, No. 23, Special Issue: ‘Gilles Deleuze, Philosopher of Cinema’, 1997). Many thanks to David Rodowick for editorial help on the article. Finally, love and appreciation to my wife, Louise – this book is dedicated to her – and to Clara Sherley-Appel for her fabulous extra research.

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Introduction: Joseph Losey and the crisis of historical rupture

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History can be borne only by strong personalities, weak ones are utterly extinguished by it. (Friedrich Nietzsche)1

‘More English than the Brits’ proclaims one of the chapter headings in Michel Ciment’s seminal series of interviews with Joseph Losey. It’s probably a truism to say that all of us were taken aback when we first discovered that the director of such acutely class-conscious and quintessentially British films as The Servant (1963), King and Country (1964), Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1971) was born 14 January 1909 in La Crosse, Wisconsin and made his first five features in Hollywood prior to his eventual blacklisting and exile in 1952. How could a middleclass American, educated at Dartmouth and Harvard, have such an accurate insight into the arcane codes of the British class system and present them with such sensitivity for the nuances of idiom and regional differences? Even stranger: how could someone from the Mid-West who hated sport with a passion stage such cinematic and compelling games of cricket? With the power of hindsight it all seems to make perfect sense. After all, didn’t another displaced outsider – the Czech refugee, Karel Reisz – direct the apotheosis of English ‘kitchen sink’ realism, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)? Didn’t another blacklisted American, Cy Endfield, direct Stanley Baker in two of his grittiest class-conscious performances in Hell Drivers (1957) and Zulu (1963)? These examples suggest that displacement is the ideal state of aesthetic engagement with British culture, providing not only a necessary critical distance from the ideological orthodoxies of the class establishment – spawning an affecting sympathy for the underdog – but also a broader historical understanding of the crisis of personal and collective commitment that took centre stage in British intellectual life after World War II. As Losey’s biographer David Caute points out, ‘Losey’s life embraces a major crisis in political commitment (the 1930s) and public tolerance (the blacklist);

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his career, his oeuvre, spans the most fundamental cultural confrontation of the century – between Marxism and Modernism, between 2 progressive “realism” and the avant-garde subversion of optimism.’ It is a life ideally suited, perhaps, to understanding and dissecting a Britain racked by the uncertainties and trauma of decolonization (witness the Suez débâcle of 1956), and more importantly, a country undergoing rapid social and moral transformation under the aegis of a new affluence – remember Harold Macmillan’s famous dictum that Britain had ‘Never had it so good’! – as well as demands for a more open and classless society from the ‘Angry Young Men’ of literature and theatre. More significantly, many historians have argued that displacement is itself the central theme of advanced capitalism, whether one interprets it positively – as a postcolonial decentring of the western master narrative through a multiplicity of micro-narratives – or, more ominously, as paradigmatic of the loss of history. By this I mean the rupture of history as the catalyst of individual and collective identity, as the meaningful justification of political commitment and ideological continuity. As a victim of the blacklist, Losey’s life and work can also be seen as an expression and exemplar of this larger crisis. Losey is symptomatic because his experience is typical of an entire generation of leftist artists and intellectuals who, nurtured by the radical appeal of Roosevelt’s New Deal and the consensus politics of the Popular Front in the mid-to-late 1930s, found themselves marginalized ‘outside the groove of history’ as a consequence of the red-baiting hysteria generated by the Cold War. Like his fellow Wisconsin natives Nicholas Ray and Orson Welles, Losey began his directorial career in the leftist political theatre of the 1930s. From 1928 (when he became student director of the Dartmouth College Players) until 1939, the year of his first short film, Pete Roleum and his Cousins, Losey’s career was confined to either conventional dramatic repertory or political drama. Not surprisingly, given the director’s growing ideological commitment to Communism and Soviet agit-prop, his most significant work during this period – essentially Triple-A Plowed Under and Injunction Granted!, the two 1936 Living Newspaper productions for the Federal Theater Project – is largely dialectical in both form and content, tantamount to a straight marriage of Marx and aesthetics. This fusion reached its apotheosis in 1947 with Losey’s celebrated collaboration with Bertolt Brecht and Charles Laughton on the Hollywood and New York productions of Galileo (see Chapter 7). For Losey, as for many leftists of the period, Communism meant allegiance to the Soviet ideological model, and by extension, to Stalin’s policies. This meant accommodating Stalin’s contradictory succession

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of political U-turns and detours as the dictator’s policy shifted from the ‘socialism in one country’ policy of the early 1930s, through the Popular Front alliance of 1936, to a strategic isolationism following the MolotovRibbentrop pact of 1939. After Hitler’s ‘treacherous’ invasion of Russia in 1942, Losey switched positions yet again, promoting Soviet intervention against the Axis through the organization of Russian War Relief benefits. By the late 1940s and early 1950s however, formerly progressive and patriotic political positions had begun to be overturned by the excesses of Cold War paranoia into a subversive, even traitorous counterculture. Citing playwright Arthur Miller, historian Lary May notes that after 1945, the rules of social intercourse had quite suddenly changed. Attitudes that had merely been anti-capitalist, anti-establishment, were suddenly morally repulsive and if not actually treasonous then implicitly so … Once it was conceded that absolutely any idea remotely similar to a Marxist position was not only politically but morally illicit, the liberal, with his customary adaptations of Marxist theory and attitudes, was effectively paralysed.3

Ultimately, blacklisting and exile made it impossible for Losey to sustain an ideological critique within the Hollywood studio system of the Cold War era. Consequently, his career in Britain can be seen as an attempt to both express and repair this profound ideological and psychological rupture through a modernist cinematic form derived from the temporal narrative experiments of the European art-house tradition – most notably through directors such as Alain Resnais, Michelangelo Antonioni and Marguerite Duras – as well as the class-based vernacular of British film and drama. This trademark Losey style – what critics have traditionally labelled ‘baroque’ or ‘theatricality’ – is perhaps more accurately described as a formal excess that, to paraphrase Roland Barthes, ultimately brings us back to history, but a radically transformed one.4 The central thesis of this book is that, following his exile, Losey turned from the dialectical narrative language of his Popular Front and Hollywood sojourns to a more immanent, ontological filmic style in the British films, setting up an unresolvable tension or impasse between the two strategies, creating, in effect, a dialectics at a standstill. The result was a bold attempt to discover and recapture an immanent wholeness (as an affirmative dystopia) through the construction of a new kind of filmic form. The very structure of Losey’s cinematic language, as well as his narrative style and content, are thus directly related to the artist’s attempt to create a new, post-Cold War vision for radicalism and social change, as well as a personal atonement for the mistakes and misjudgements produced by the Old Left’s dogmatic loyalty to an

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inhuman Stalinism. How do we theorize and explicate this new filmic language? What is its connection to the politics of historical rupture? Finally, and most importantly, what were the repercussions of this experiment on post-war British cinema? Obviously we will tackle these issues throughout the course of this book, but let’s explore the issue of film language first. What exactly do we mean by ‘ontological immanence’? In this context, we are referring to a non-dialectical, holistic philosophy in which parts and fragments, for all their seeming contradictions, are nevertheless always an expression of an affirmative, practical, creative ontological whole. Immanence, most fully realized in the philosophy of Spinoza and Nietzsche, is crucial to any understanding of Losey. As the Spinoza scholar Yermiyahu Yovel points out, immanence views this-worldly existence as the only actual being, and the unique source of ethical value and political authority. All being is this-worldly and there is nothing beyond it, neither a personal creator-God who imposes His divine will on man, nor supernatural powers or values of any kind. The laws of morality and politics, too, and even religion, stem from the this world by the natural power of reason; and recognizing this is the prelude and pre-condition for human emancipation.5

Immanence challenges the conventional transcendental doctrines of Judaism and Christianity, rejecting any binary opposition between inside and outside, spiritual and material, religious and secular, ideal and practical. Thus, ‘(1) immanence is the only and overall horizon of being; (2) it is equally the only source of value and normativeness and (3) absorbing this recognition into one’s life is a prelude – and precondition – for whatever liberation (or, emancipation) is in store for humans’.6 A key component of modernist and postmodern practice – particularly in the notion of the nomadic multiplicity or rhizome – immanence is closely related to naturalism and the primordial, which helps explain Gilles Deleuze’s provocative reading of Losey’s oeuvre as an example of the cinematic ‘impulse-image’, a non-dialectical world governed by violent libidinal drives. Human endeavour is powerless to represent or disperse these drives into specific actions or to make them felt, sensuous experiences. Instead, naturalism lies stagnant in the originary worlds and elementary impulses that lurk in the depths of determined milieux and concrete social contexts. In Losey, impulse underlies the hysterical atavism that surfaces collectively in the English seaside resort of Weymouth in The Damned (1961), or in Nazi-occupied Paris in Mr. Klein (1976). It is also manifested in Losey’s preference for violently abrasive, as well as chameleon-like actors. Through his groundbreaking roles in The Sleeping Tiger (1954) and The Servant, for example, Dirk

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Bogarde became an archetype for Losey’s subsequent exploration of the predator-interloper, the working-class or bourgeois changeling who transforms himself to fit every eventuality or situation. Similarly, Blind Date (1959), The Criminal (1960), Eve (1962) and Accident effectively exploit Stanley Baker, the son of a Welsh miner, as an actor gifted with ‘a very special violence which permeates or engulfs the characters, and precedes any action … It is a violence in act [en acte], before coming into 7 action.’ The Baker films thus create working-class prototypes of impulse, constituting an immanent third party in a triangular ménage of 8 sex, class and violence. Many critics would find this interpretation misguided, if not downright perverse, for it runs directly against conventional wisdom. After all, Losey was a self-declared Marxist, a committed advocate of Bertolt Brecht’s dialectically based Epic Theatre: how could his work be dialectical and non-dialectical at the same time? Losey himself belies this reading, confirming to Ciment that he is far more Hegelian than Nietzschean: ‘I have, since about 1930, seen life as a dialectic progression between contradictions. The invasion of one kind of life by another kind of life is a sort of contradiction which produces a further and different synthesis. It’s very Hegelian and maybe it’s a spurious explanation.’9 Spurious indeed! Despite his obvious left-wing ideological credentials, Losey’s focus on class dialectics at the level of narrative content is counterbalanced by this all-encompassing formal movement toward immanence, which is as much libidinal as conceptual, unconscious as conscious, reflecting the unstable excesses of the body as much as the conceptual bracketing of the compartmentalising mind. One could argue that this antinomy between immanence and contradiction is intrinsic to all narratives, insofar as they are driven by the intentionality of a conscious intellect as well as unconscious intuitive forces, ruled by bodily affect. Why should Losey’s cinema be any different from that of other narrative-driven directors? One answer is that instead of reducing narrative to the conventional Hollywood model of action-realism (a goal-driven combination of psychoanalysis and historical teleology), Losey foregrounds the impasse between binary opposites by giving equal weight to both dialectics and immanence through various estrangement devices (what Brecht called Verfremdungseffekt). This stalled dialectic between a progressive historicism on one hand, and an existential death drive on the other, has led critics to disagree radically on the character and objectives of Losey’s work. Thus, while French critic Gilles Jacob can cite Losey’s ‘unshakable faith in human nature’,10 stressing the fact that ‘a Losey film traces the passage 11 of a character from darkness to light’, Foster Hirsch sees his films as

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‘essentially negative, their sense of the possibilities of human nature and society deeply pessimistic. Certainly little joy of life emanates from 12 his work.’ Although a binary reading would see these views as contradictory, a methodology of différance would allow for both interpretations, that Losey, depending on context, is both a humanist and a fatalist, embracing both active and reactive forces. In this way, his work can lend itself to a simultaneous weave of feeling and concept, appealing as much to the gut as the intellect to produce a Nietzschean affirmation of creativity. Having forged a cinematic connection between immanence and impulse, we can now turn to their relevance to the Cold War politics of dislocation. How does Losey set the stage for his British career by utilizing these proto-modernist immanent strategies within the predominantly realist, politically repressive context of the Hollywood blacklist? Lary May argues that, like Hollywood’s other beleaguered Cold Warriors, Losey’s initial response to the profound historical rupture of the McCarthy era was to exploit film noir – in the form of allegorical melodrama and the crime film – as well as the utopian strains of the growing post-war youth counterculture, ‘to keep alive a critique of capitalism and repressive social roles’.13 Significantly, Losey was at the forefront of both genres. His feature film career began in April 1947 when he was signed by producer Dore Schary to a seven-year contract at RKO. For his début, he was slated to direct The Boy with Green Hair (1948), a project derived from Betsy Beaton’s magazine short story about racism, where a 12-year-old orphan’s hair turns green overnight as both symptom and symbol of his ‘otherness’. The boy, played by Dean Stockwell in the film, learns to embrace his difference against the pressures of small-town bigotry and take a stand for racial tolerance. The film’s initial producer was Adrian Scott, a future member of the blacklisted ‘Hollywood Ten’, who had established his reputation with Raymond Chandler’s Murder My Sweet (1944) and a series of controversial ‘message’ films directed by Edward Dmytryk (also one of the ‘Ten’).14 Scott had a personal interest in the project, having recently adopted an English war orphan, and was keenly interested in transforming the The Boy with Green Hair into an anti-war 15 film, focusing specifically on war’s harmful effects on children. For Losey, this created a problematic disjuncture in the story’s thematic continuity. As he later told Michel Ciment, ‘the story really was a fantasy about racial discrimination and that’s what the picture should have been about. But we all felt so strongly that there must be a world movement for peace that we tried to make a film about peace – which distorted the 16 basic material.’

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The project – co-written by Alfred Lewis Levitt and another friend of Scott’s, the Canadian-born leftist, Ben Barzman – was dogged with poli17 tical machinations from the start. Scott was the first casualty, forced to resign from RKO in November 1947 after receiving his subpoena from the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC). Schary replaced him with Stephen Ames, but the change proved to be more than ideological: it affected the entire aesthetic of the film. According to Losey, Scott ‘wanted at that time to have a more mobile camera, and to find ways of reducing the budget, so as to be less subject to Hollywood controls, and so when we began we were going to make the first colour, commercial big feature in Hollywood on 16 millimetre. We had the equipment and the lot, but that didn’t last beyond Adrian’s removal from the film for political reasons.’18 The original plan was to shoot most of the film on location in Eastmancolor for around $500,000. Ames, in contrast, wanted the film to be a showcase for the Technicolor process, in which he was a major investor. What could be a better demonstration than a gimmicky film featuring a boy whose hair turns green? Despite Ames’s directive, Losey darkened the film’s tone by introducing low-key lighting and dislocating the film’s small-town mise-en-scène in order to highlight middle America’s witch-hunt mentality, producing, in effect, a new genre hybrid: a Technicolor film noir in which Frank Capra’s American Dream becomes a paranoid’s worst nightmare. While The Boy with Green Hair constructed an ambivalent tension between the naturalism of absolute goodness and the spectre of violent impulse, the remaining films from Losey’s brief stint in Hollywood (1947 to 1952) are largely devoted to analysing the psychology of this dark flipside. In a series of four noir thrillers made during his tenure as a director of quickie ‘B’ pictures for Paramount, Columbia and United Artists, Losey explored the immanence of evil in both the collective (the racist small-town mob of The Lawless (1950)) and the urban individual (David Wayne’s child-killing psychopath in the remake of Fritz Lang’s M (1951); Van Heflin’s murderous Los Angeles cop in The Prowler (1951); and John Barrymore Jr.’s avenging son in The Big Night (1951)). Although usually working within the constraints of rapid shooting schedules, low-budget pulp formulas and Hays and Breen Office restrictions, Losey managed to renovate his generic material through dislocating noir strategies, particularly through temporal anomalies within both narrative and mise-en-scène. In this way conventional melodramas and thrillers could take on a more didactic tone, dissecting contemporary political and social problems through formal rupture without necessarily offering easy or stereotypical solutions. Losey’s analysis in these films is more clinically detached and

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dialectical than in his later, more baroque studies of social and political conflicts, for he tended to narrow the activist ideals of social responsibility and commitment to the more contrived, Manichaean oppositions of good v. evil, victims v. victimizers. All four films take the form of a manhunt, focused specifically on an outcast – either anti-social and psychopathic (The Prowler, and M), or marked by some form of social difference (George La Main’s callow immaturity in The Big Night, or Paul Rodriguez’s race and class in The Lawless). All four characters live in communities that enforce conformity and punish overt difference and transgression, so that their rebellion is always what Lorenzo Codelli calls an ‘impossible flight’ from the inexorable forces of law and order, which are themselves shown to be fractured by impulsive forces.19 Through strategies of rupture and displacement, Losey was able to appropriate the stock clichés of conventional melodrama and reconstruct them as allegories of Cold War hysteria and paranoia, implicating through allusion and historical contiguity not only the active witch hunts of HUAC and McCarthyism but also their passive counterparts, the complacent silent majority whose lack of voice and conviction against the blacklist marked them as equally culpable. Alas, Losey’s brief Hollywood career was itself to fall victim to these very same paranoid forces. Although Schary had signed Losey to a longterm contract, Howard Hughes purchased RKO in mid-production of The Boy with Green Hair and immediately began purging the studio of alleged Communists and fellow travellers. Like many other left-wing directors, Losey was approached to direct a piece of rabid red-scare propaganda entitled I Married a Communist.20 Losey later claimed the project ‘was a touchstone for establishing who was not “a red”: you offered I Married a Communist to anybody you thought was a com21 munist, and if they turned it down, they were.’ Losey promptly refused the assignment and later advised Nick Ray, who was also at RKO, to do the same. Hughes responded in characteristic fashion, holding Losey to the full tenure of his contract: ‘You’ll stay here seven years and you’ll 22 never work.’ Fortunately for Losey, Schary once again came to the rescue. After his firing by Hughes, the producer had returned to MGM as vicepresident in charge of production in June 1948. He now played a key role in freeing Losey from RKO, persuading Hughes to cut him loose in 23 mid-1949. It was while working as a screenwriter for Schary that Losey was approached by the ex-San Francisco Chronicle reporter and mystery novelist, Daniel Mainwaring (a.k.a. Geoffrey Homes), to direct a script for Paramount – The Lawless (released in Britain in May 1950 as The Dividing Line). Schary reluctantly agreed to release Losey for this

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independent production and this effectively marked the end of their 24 relationship and Losey’s brief ties to the studio system. Whether Losey would have sustained a long-term career as a Hollywood independent like, for example, his friend and cohort Robert Aldrich, is difficult to gauge. It became a moot point when, on 21 March 1951, the third wave of Hollywood HUAC hearings began under the chairmanship of Georgia Democrat John S. Wood. One of the more prominent names cited during this latest round of friendly witnesses was that of Joseph Walton Losey III. ‘Just as I was finishing The Big Night’, he recalled, Martin Gang [his lawyer] called me into his office and said ‘I want to tell you that you have been named by two people.’ They were people I had gone to Marxist classes with … Gang then again invited me to testify secretly and he said he thought he could get these witnesses to withdraw their testimony, and that’s the way the game was played, of course. I simply said ‘I’ll have to think it over’, and in three days I was on my way 25 to Europe.

The timing couldn’t have been worse, because Losey was about to sign a three-picture deal with Stanley Kramer to direct The Four-Poster, The Wild One and most significantly High Noon, whose merciless real-time narrative schema would have provided a fascinating dry run for the inexorable temporality of his later Time Without Pity (1957). Financing was to have been provided through Columbia Pictures and Harry Cohn.26 As it turned out, because of an administrative snafu, Losey and his second wife Louise were never actually subpoenaed. As Caute tells it, On June 13, HUAC dispatched his subpoena to the US Marshal, Los Angeles, demanding Losey’s appearance on 19 July. The authorities, however, went to the Loseys’ previous address … According to the FBI file, by the time the Deputy U.S. Marshal belatedly arrived at 12045 Maxwellton Road – more than five weeks after HUAC issued the subpoena – he was informed by the gardener that both Losey and Louise had 27 left town.

HUAC had every reason to be interested in Losey: his professional career and personal life had been inextricably interwoven with some of the left’s most prominent organizations and creative talent dating back to the early 1930s. The most obvious examples are his well-publicized association with Brecht and the fact-finding educational trip to Moscow in 1935. In addition, we can cite at least four other significant threads. Firstly, in the late 1930s, the Federal Theater Project had been one of HUAC’s major targets under its then chairman, Martin Dies. On 27 July 1938, for example, J. Parnell Thomas stated in the New York Times

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that the FTP was not only ‘serving as a branch of the communistic organisation but is also one more link in the vast and unparalleled New 28 Deal propaganda machine’. Later that year, when the Living Newspaper’s co-founder, Hallie Flanagan, took the stand to defend her position in front of the Dies Committee, the ideological content of the plays featured prominently in her testimony. In particular, Losey’s own Triple-A Plowed Under was attacked as blatant Communist propaganda. Secondly, Losey was also under scrutiny through his first wife, fashion designer Elizabeth Hawes, who had also designed costumes for the Living Newspaper. In May 1940, Hawes had worked as an editor for New York’s progressive tabloid, PM, and this led to the activation of an FBI file, citing her as a Communist sympathizer. She was also a member of the League of Women Shoppers, widely recognized as a Stalinist front. Thirdly, Losey eventually warranted his own FBI file, instigated less as a result of his marriage to Hawes than because of his close association with his former housemate and Galileo collaborator, the composer Hanns Eisler, whose Santa Monica home was under heavy surveillance.29 In his book, The Red Plot Against America, HUAC’s chief investigator, Robert E. Stripling, revealed that, ‘Our primary task was to uncover and subpoena Hanns Eisler. With Eisler served and heard in a 30 short executive session, we began calling in key Hollywood figures.’ Eisler was targeted after the February 1947 investigation of his brother, Gerhardt, a high-level member of the German Communist Party who had lived in the US since 1942. Both were denounced by their sister, Ruth, as heads of a network of Soviet agents. As Losey later admitted, ‘I helped to bring him into this country (as did Eleanor Roosevelt) and my sponsorship of Hanns Eisler was one of the things mentioned in my dossier.’31 Moreover, as early as July 1945, Losey had been reported to be an agent of Stalin’s NKVD (a.k.a. the GPU), and on 14 January 1946, J. Edgar Hoover signed a memo to the attorney-general to the effect that Losey was a contact for various Soviet espionage agents. Needless to say, in the wake of these overt and covert political gestures, FBI surveillance of Losey was escalated throughout this period. Fourthly, Losey was a close associate and frequent collaborator with the best writing and directorial talent in Hollywood Communist Party circles. These figures included John Howard Lawson, whose ex-wife Kate had given Losey his first break as a stage manager at Dartmouth, Lester Cole and Dalton Trumbo at MGM, Ring Lardner Jr., Edward Dmytryk, Francis Faragoh and John Wexley. Sometime in 1946, Losey formally joined the Communist Party. Whether this action was specifically triggered by a feeling of powerlessness in the face of his victimization, or instead reflects a broader need for the discipline of organized political commitment with the escalation

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of the Cold War, is hard to say. Losey later explained his reasons to Ciment:

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I had a feeling that I was being useless in Hollywood, that I’d been cut off from New York activity and I felt that my existence was unjustified. It was a kind of Hollywood guilt that led me into that kind of commitment. And I think that the work I did on a much freer, more personal and independent basis for the political left in New York, before going to Hollywood, was much more valuable socially.32

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It was probably the incremental combination of these four strands of political association that finally cooked Losey’s goose with HUAC’s third wave of investigations and guaranteed his eventual blacklisting within the industry. On 12 October 1952, Losey returned to New York after fifteen months in Europe, during which (in Italy) he completed his neo-realist fable, Stranger on the Prowl. ‘I came back when I finished the picture’, he recalled. I was here for about a month and there was no work in theatre, no work in radio, no work in education or advertising, and none in films, in anything. For one brief moment I was going to do the Arthur Miller play, ‘The Crucible.’ Then they got scared because I had been named. So after a month of finding that there really was no possible way in which I could make a living in this country, I left. I didn’t come back for 12 years … I didn’t stay away for reasons of fear, it was just that I didn’t have any 33 money. I didn’t have any work.

After spending the Christmas of 1952 in Rome, Losey arrived in London on 4 January 1953 to begin the next chapter of his political odyssey: permanent exile and a new career as a ‘British’ director, to which we now turn.

Notes 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 86. 2 David Caute, Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life (New York, Oxford University Press, 1994), p. xiii. 3 Cited in Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 216. 4 ‘Less terrorized by the spectre of “formalism”, historical criticism might have been less sterile; it would have understood that the specific study of forms does not in any way contradict the necessary principles of totality and History. On the contrary: the more a system is specifically defined in its forms, the more amenable it is to historical criticism. To parody a well-known saying, I shall say that a little formalism turns one away from History, but that a lot brings one back

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joseph losey to it.’ Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York, Hill & Wang, 1972), p. 112. Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Adventures of Immanence (Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1989), p. ix. Ibid., p. xi. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 136. ‘I have to bring out the violence in the actors’, confirms Losey. ‘And in Robert Shaw and Stanley Baker there is immense violence in them as people.’ Losey, in Michel Ciment, Conversations with Losey (London and New York, Methuen, 1985), p. 196. Joseph Losey, in ibid., p. 323. Gilles Jacob, ‘Joseph Losey, or the Camera Calls’, Sight and Sound, Vol. 35, No. 2, Spring 1966, p. 64. Ibid., p. 62. Foster Hirsch, Joseph Losey (Boston, Twayne, 1980), p. 220. May, The Big Tomorrow, p. 218. These included the anti-Nazi Cornered (1946) with Dick Powell; and Crossfire (1947), an indictment of anti-semitism with Robert Ryan and Robert Mitchum. Ben Barzman, ‘Pour Joe’, Positif, Nos. 293/4, July–August 1985, p. 10. Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 81. Barzman’s credits had included True to Life (George Marshall, 1942), and Give us this Day (Edward Dmytryk, 1949). His participation initiated a fruitful collaboration with Losey that would extend through Stranger on the Prowl (1952), Time Without Pity (1957), Blind Date (1959) and the first drafts of The Damned (1961). Losey, in Patrick Eason and Tony Rayns, ‘A Cinema Interview: Joseph Losey’, Cinema, No. 3, June 1969, p. 18. Lorenzo Codelli, ‘Un film retrouvé: Stranger on the Prowl’, Positif, Nos. 293/4, July–August 1985, p. 58. Written by Charles Grayson and Robert Hardy Andrews, the script was based on the life of Harry Bridges of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, who had been an instigator in fighting racketeering on the West Coast. It was eventually made in 1949 by Robert Stevenson and released as The Woman on Pier 13. Losey, in Tom Milne, Losey on Losey (New York, Doubleday, 1968), p. 76. Losey in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 82. According to the FBI, Losey was at that time officially employed as a writer, on a salary of $600 per month. See Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 84. Losey later claimed that he bought his own way out of his RKO contract. See Milne, Losey on Losey, p. 76. ‘Since then all my films in Hollywood and elsewhere have been independent’, recalled Losey. ‘Some of them had major backing but I didn’t work with any major studios, which means that I made much less money but had increasing independence for myself, which was the way I wanted to develop.’ Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 90. Losey, ibid., p. 126. Losey was subsequently named by two other informants: screenwriter Leo Townsend, whose credits include the 1946 Cole Porter bio-pic Night and Day and later Bikini Beach (1964) and Beach Blanket Bingo (1965); and Paul Benedict Radin, a radio and TV agent. See Victor S. Navasky, Naming Names (New York, Penguin, 1980), pp. 98–108; Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1983), pp. 390–2. It seems likely that had Losey stayed in Hollywood and ‘faced the music’, Gang would have irreparably

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compromised his unfriendly stand. Indeed, on 20 September 1952, Gang urged Losey to testify privately to HUAC. He refused. Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 106. It seems certain that company chairman, Sam Katz, wanted Losey to sign an antiCommunist loyalty oath as a necessary precondition for signing the Kramer contract. According to Caute, there is no evidence that Losey signed such an oath in 1951 and the Kramer project was eventually cancelled on 24 September. However, Losey did sign a similar statement to facilitate a pending deal with Columbia Pictures in September 1960. See Caute, ibid., pp. 105 and 135. Ibid., p. 106. Cited in Arnold Goldman, ‘Life and Death of the Living Newspaper Unit’, Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 9, January–March 1973, p. 80. Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 99. Cited in Edith de Rham, Joseph Losey (London, André Deutsch, 1991), p. 65. Losey, in Gene D. Phillips, ‘Hollywood Exile: An Interview with Joseph Losey’, Journal of Popular Film, Vol. 5, No. 1, 1976, p. 34. Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 108. Losey, cited in David Sterritt, ‘Joseph Losey: A Director who Worries about Blacklists and Why Film Art Takes a Back Seat to Commerce’, Christian Science Monitor, 18 July 1973, p. 11.

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Losey in exile: The Sleeping Tiger (1954), A Man on the Beach (1955) and The Intimate Stranger (1956)

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Paranoia for the exile is a prerequisite of survival. (Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses) Exile is life led outside habitual order. It is nomadic, decentred, contrapuntal; but no sooner does one get accustomed to it than its unsettling force erupts anew. (Edward Said, Reflections on Exile)1

The 1950s proved to be a difficult decade for Losey, a period marked by prolonged exile, the ever-lengthening reach of the blacklist – even in a country as unsympathetic to McCarthyism as Britain – and the constant fear of betrayal. ‘I was petrified,’ recalled Losey: And I had physical attacks. I thought that I was going to die. I thought that I had a heart problem. I used to have to leave the theatre because I was suffocating. I had to sit down in the middle of London traffic on the kerb because I couldn’t stand up. I couldn’t breathe. I went to various doctors – kind doctors who charged me little. I had no heart problem. And it was just sheer, absolute panic, because I had nothing … It was a terrifying period and probably terribly valuable for me. I had absolutely no preparation for being a pariah. I had no preparation for being a ‘Jew’, for being a minority person! And if I was a Communist then that was my 2 right to be a Communist, I thought.

Remarkably, US State Department harassment of Losey continued until as late as 1968. He was particularly vulnerable because his continued stay in Britain was directly dependent on the renewal of his American passport. He obtained a British work permit as a direct result of directing The Night of the Ball, an unsuccessful play by former London Times correspondent Michael Burn, which opened at the New Theatre, London in January 1955. Burn’s father, Sir Clive, was in close contact with Lord Monckton, the minister of labour. With the help of the Tory MP Sir Leslie (Dick) Plummer, they expedited Losey’s application, which was subsequently renewed at irregular intervals. Judging from

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Losey’s legal correspondence at the time, however, Caute doubts that Losey ever seriously faced deportation. Most of his problems were purely questions of work profile: until Leon Clore (Harlequin) and the Hyams Brothers, Phil and Sid (Eros Productions) allowed him to use his own name on Time Without Pity in 1957, Losey was forced to make 3 all of his early British features under pseudonyms. Surprisingly, this didn’t seem to bother Losey as much as one might expect. As he later explained to Gordon Gow,

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the pressure of not being allowed to use my real name in the first half of the 1950s wasn’t a thing I minded particularly. In fact I was rather amused by it. In the first place, anybody who was at all knowledgeable was aware that I was doing the film, so it was a completely silly fraudulent thing, out of which I got a certain pleasure. But obviously it is important to build up a name. It’s part of the cupboard of weapons one 4 uses in the fight. Because there’s a hell of a fight on every film.

On his initial arrival in England, Losey was assisted immeasurably by British film director Anthony Asquith, who helped open some doors to the British film establishment, and also by a fellow exile, the blacklisted but independently wealthy Carl Foreman, who offered him under-thetable work on the Aggie television series and introduced him to Edward and Harry Danziger, who offered similar uncredited employment. But as Caute points out, ‘a foreigner resided in Britain on sufferance – every employment had to be negotiated. On 12 January 1954 his residence permit was extended until only 31 March: “Allowed by Secretary of State to finish Sleeping Tiger.” When he re-entered Britain on 11 April, entry was granted only until 31 May.’5 While the American distributors, hounded by the ultra-conservative American Legion, were still extremely sensitive to the blacklist throughout the 1950s and first half of the 1960s, Losey at least found the British unions – notably the closed-shop Association of Cinematographic Technicians (ACT) – sympathetic to his plight. As he later told Richard Roud, ‘I shall be everlastingly grateful to [general secretary] George Elvin and various other people in the unions who gave me priority precisely because I was a political 6 resident … because of the situation in the US.’ According to Caute, ACT records indicate that Losey wasn’t admitted to the union until 16 October 1954, which suggests that he directed The Sleeping Tiger under a special waver from Elvin himself. No wonder he was grateful. While it is clear that the films of this period represent a scattered potpourri of projects undertaken by a director simply trying to survive, both economically and artistically, it would be a mistake to dismiss them as anomalous or peripheral to the central themes and narrative continuities

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of Losey’s seemingly more mainstream, ‘signature’ productions. For example, The Sleeping Tiger (1954), with its awakening of repressed sexuality via the ‘invasion’ of a psychiatrist’s home by a young delinquent, builds on The Prowler (1951), in terms of both the intruder motif and the use of an affluent bourgeois home as objective correlative, while also foreshadowing The Servant (1963) in both theme and actor (Dirk Bogarde). Also, in obvious reference to his own political and economic plight, The Intimate Stranger (1956) expands Losey’s naturalism by reframing his habitual triad of sex, class and violence through the displaced subjectivity of exile. Although a combination of dramatic bravura and cool, Brechtian precision had served Losey well in his Hollywood noir period, where emotional hysteria was used effectively as a didactic weapon to score points against a repressive and equally pathological symbolic order, with exile this signature becomes increasingly baroque, an excessive case of ‘style for style’s sake’. Losey’s discovery of Richard Macdonald, the design consultant who eventually collaborated on seventeen of his projects, is a crucial factor in the development of this ornate style, for Macdonald’s visual imprint is a major component of films as far ranging as The Sleeping Tiger and The Assassination of Trotsky (1972).7 According to Edward Said, this extreme predilection for the baroque, which reached its apotheosis with Eve and Boom!, is not an unusual phenomenon among artistic outcasts, for ‘wilfulness, exaggeration, overstatement … are characteristic styles of being an exile, methods for compelling the world to accept your vision – which you make more unacceptable because you are in fact unwilling to have it accepted. It is yours, after all. Composure and serenity’, adds Said, ‘are the last things associated with the work of exiles.’8 On the other hand, Said also reminds us that there is a lot more to exile than a simple question of aesthetics. Cultural and spiritual displacement ‘is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true 9 home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.’ So why is exile, and its corollary, historical rupture, such a seductive, affirmative motif of modernist culture? Why do we lionize its disjunctive, even destructive characteristics as somehow beneficial or redemptive, in many ways the significant trope of modern art? An obvious answer is that exile allows the artist to see ‘the entire world as a foreign land’, to reconstruct reality through new eyes, creating a plurality of vision that is culturally and ideologically multiplicitous. This is the traditional Brechtian argument: exile as a modernist form of ethnographic V-Effekt. For Said, in contrast, the real exile sees the aestheticization

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of rupture as a cruel affectation, ‘a display of modish attitudes’. We must be extremely careful then to draw a clear distinction between the affirmative effects of Losey’s uprootedness, which contribute to a progressive immanence in his cinematic art, and its devastating longterm psychological and material impact on his everyday life. After all, exile is not something one chooses, even if it can be harnessed and used to create radical new forms of subjectivity. Theodor Adorno understood the problem in more ‘existential’ terms. According to Said, in the key work of his American exile, Minima Moralia: Reflections of a Damaged Life, Adorno argued That everything that one says or thinks, as well as every object one possesses, is ultimately a mere commodity. Language is jargon, objects are for sale. To refuse this state of affairs is the exile’s intellectual mission. Adorno’s reflections are informed by the belief that the only home truly available now, though fragile and vulnerable, is in writing.11

If we replace the word ‘writing’ with ‘cinema’ we can partially understand Losey’s desire to sublimate the horrors of his own exile through a call to ‘art for art’s sake’, to a seamless aestheticism that is its own selfcontained ‘truth’. The operative word here is ‘partially’, for this apolitical and ahistorical tack was clearly an uncomfortable compromise for Losey. As Aijaz Ahmad has persuasively argued, when exile and imagination merge to create an artistic fiction, exile ‘itself becomes a condition of the soul, unrelated to facts of material life. Exile, immigration and professional preference become synonymous and, indeed, mutually indistinguishable.’12 It’s perhaps more accurate to see Losey’s British period in the 1950s and 1960s as an attempt to confront, if not overcome, this impasse of exile. The Sleeping Tiger, The Intimate Stranger and to a lesser extent A Man on the Beach (1955) mark the beginning of this stylistic excess, as a means both to explore and mitigate the realities of historical rupture and to draw a concrete analogy between exile and the cultural estrangement of class and gender division. Developed from a novel by Maurice Moiseiwitsch, disparagingly 13 described by Losey as ‘bedtime reading for senile stags’, The Sleeping Tiger was scripted by ‘Derek Frye’, a collective pseudonym to front the work of blacklisted Harold Buchman, as well as story assists from Losey and Carl Foreman. The film was made under cover for Nat Cohen’s Insignia with backing from Sidney Cohn’s Dorast Pictures, and Losey received an under-the-table salary of $1,500. The film’s credited ‘director’ was co-producer Victor Hanbury, a lesser-known British filmmaker from the 1930s who had graduated into film production during the war. ‘The English market wanted to employ me because first, they knew that

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I knew my job’, said Losey. ‘Second, they got me very cheaply; third, they thought I would make pictures for the American market; fourth, they thought I would attract American stars; and fifth, in some sort of 14 strange way they thought they could keep it all secret.’ Although the casting of Alexis Smith guaranteed some American interest, the real catalyst for Losey’s involvement was Dirk Bogarde, who agreed to costar and went to bat for the exiled director on the strength of a screening of The Prowler. The film is an odd but entertaining hybrid, what Raymond Durgnat calls ‘a low budget amalgam of two genres: the “young thug” story for 15 thick-ear fans, and the “bitch wife” story for the distaff side’. Losey directs with appropriate stylistic and gestic excess, setting up a V-Effekt between the gritty realism and topicality of the 1950s Teddy Boy phenomenon and the over-the-top emotional clichés of the conventional bourgeois melodrama. At first glance the film’s ostensible ‘sleeping tiger’ is Frank Clements (Dirk Bogarde), a smart young man from a respectable background – ‘army family, good school’ – who has turned to a life of petty larceny and hooliganism as a displaced Oedipal reaction to his hated father and stepmother. The film opens on a dark winter’s night as Frank and his accomplice Harry (Harry Towb) attempt to mug a pedestrian on a London street. Unfortunately for Frank, the ‘victim’ turns out to be Dr Clive Esmond (Alexander Knox), a noted psychologist with army judo training who easily disarms the would-be thug. Fade to Hampstead and Clive’s large mock-Tudor residence/infirmary, where his neglected American wife Glenda (Alexis Smith) arrives home early from a Paris vacation to discover Frank, suddenly fully domesticated, reading a book in the living room. With the help of his research assistant Carol (Maxine Audley), Clive has discovered that Frank already has an extensive police record for a series of violent crimes. Another arrest will almost certainly send the young man to prison. Convinced that this would be a shameful waste of a promising future, Clive strikes a bargain. If Frank will agree to spend six months at Clive’s house undergoing psychoanalytic treatment, he will keep the police out of it. Frank has become Clive’s ‘prisoner’, his Freudian guinea pig. This news is disturbing both to Glenda, who takes an instant dislike to this rude and brutish intruder, and to the family housekeeper, Sally (Patricia McCarron), who has already given in her notice in protest. Over a period of several weeks, Frank gradually insinuates himself into the household, alternating his time between Clive’s indoor ‘talking cure’ and therapeutic riding lessons with Glenda. His modus operandi is two-fold, combining a deliberate strategy of lies and dissimulation with the overly verbal and rational Clive, alongside a more instinctual and

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aggressive confrontation with Glenda. While Clive, like a true Freudian, attempts to trace Frank’s current pathological behaviour back to his childhood, to the conventional Oedipal conflicts with his father and stepmother, Frank strings him along with a series of fictitious cover stories, detailing a falsely harmonious, loving relationship with both parents. Meanwhile, he deliberately betrays Clive’s trust by slipping out one night to pull a daring jewel heist with his old partner, Harry. This severely compromises his mentor, placing Clive in conflict with another representative of the symbolic order, beetle-browed Inspector Simmons (Hugh Griffith), who doubts the efficacy of Clive’s experiment and is determined to nail Frank for the robbery. In contrast, Frank seduces Glenda with a two-pronged appeal to her repressed animal instincts. Firstly, taking advantage of the workaholic Clive’s neglect of his wife, he takes her on a ‘date’ to The Metro, a Soho nightclub where the combination of steamy, erotic gyrations on the crowded dance floor and equally hot be-bop stirs her latent sexual attraction to Frank for the first time. But the moment is premature: frightened by her aroused feelings, she pulls back from intimacy and asks Frank to take her home. Secondly, he appeals to Glenda’s hidden taste for impulsive violence, not through direct confrontation but instead via a convenient displacement, by terrorizing her more easily victimized, working-class substitute, Sally. After witnessing a particularly nasty confrontation between the two, an incensed Glenda is about to strike Frank, but he fights her off and kisses her passionately. Her hatred quickly turns into lust and they fall into each other’s arms. Frank, a master intriguer, manipulates the affair to perfection, deliberately provoking both Clive and Glenda by playing them off against each other while making himself indispensable to their respective desires. Sally’s departure has now forced Glenda to do her own cooking and housework, in effect reducing her to the status of her own domestic ‘help’. Glenda’s symbolic demotion in class and social status is now linked to her parallel sexual submission when Frank makes an unsolicited pass while she is cooking in the kitchen. He also makes sure that they are caught ‘in the act’ by Clive, thereby ensnaring them both in his duplicity. Predictably, instead of abandoning the project and throwing Frank out, Clive suppresses his jealous anger and submits once again to his own professional ego: ‘I’d hate to give up on it at this point.’ Clive’s stubborn commitment to his research ensures his further neglect of Glenda. Her libido raging, she takes matters into her own hands by returning to The Metro that same night with Frank, where she dances along with the wild, be-bopping crowd. However, this time it is Frank who cuts the evening short, as if he were a guilty teenager worried

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about breaking Clive/the father’s strict curfew. This concern is a ploy, designed to bring home to Glenda both the fragile and illicit nature of their affair and Clive’s prohibitive, censorious role as primal patriarch. Frank’s cutting remark as they leave – ‘I’m ready for a showdown any time you are’ – is both a goad and a cynical reminder of Glenda’s marital entrapment. We now see at first hand what we suspected all along, that the film’s real ‘sleeping tiger’ is not the maladjusted Frank, but the seemingly strait-laced Glenda. She drives home like a woman possessed, speeding her Jaguar along the dark country lanes. After outracing a pursuing police car, she swerves off the road and screeches to a halt. As an embarrassed Frank sits helplessly, Glenda buries her head in the steering wheel and sobs uncontrollably. The sleeping tiger has finally stirred. The narrative reaches a head when Sally’s working-class fiancé, Bailey (Glyn Houston), turns up at the house to confront Clive with Frank’s abusive behaviour. Fearful that Bailey will go to the police and rob him of his precious guinea pig, Clive buys him off for £100. That night, Frank rifles through Clive’s desk and discovers the cheque stub. Furious at seeing his humanity reduced to a simple item of exchange for mutual profit, Frank decides to pay Clive back with interest. Donning a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, he holds up an Oxford Street office at gunpoint and hides the money in the back of the Esmonds’s stereo. When the ubiquitous Simmons arrives to investigate, Clive steps forward as his alibi, spinning an unconvincing cover story to the incredulous inspector. Clive’s selfless, ‘paternal’ loyalty, his going to bat for his patient at great personal and professional risk, is the exact symptomatic trigger required to unleash Frank’s buried childhood memories and cure his neurosis. After returning the stolen money, Frank breaks down and finally admits to Clive his hatred for his father, not only for replacing his mother with a despised stepmother, but also for conforming to those same strictures of law that Clive was loyal and brave enough to confront. According to Frank’s confession, when he was a child he had painstakingly saved up enough money to buy himself a bicycle. When the time came for his father to hand over the savings, he stubbornly refused to pay up, so Frank stole a bicycle instead. When, like Simmons, the police came to investigate, the father turned informer with the sanctimonious excuse that ‘justice must be done’. On his release from jail Frank tried to kill his father, but the latter was far too strong and beat him senseless in front of his stepmother. A week later the father died of heart failure, but the guilt-ridden Frank, suddenly seeing his long-time Oedipal wish fulfilled, unconsciously convinced himself that he was responsible. This, according to Clive, is

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the repressed source of Frank’s neurosis, which has subsequently produced a self-destructive chain of hate, guilt and fear. ‘Don’t you see Frank’, explains Clive, ‘all your life you’ve been following that pattern, living that pattern. Your youth, your strength, your hopes. All wasted in a lie. You didn’t kill your father.’ Overwhelmed by the truth of this cathartic revelation, Frank passes out. With Frank now safely reabsorbed into the Oedipal fold, the two men forge a powerful bond, Clive taking on the role of surrogate father. They are suddenly inseparable, taking long fishing trips in the country, and Frank attending Clive’s lectures. One evening, when Clive returns from a fishing expedition without Frank, the abandoned Glenda, doubly cast aside by both husband and lover, is beside herself with jealousy. She drives to the inn where Frank is staying and tells him that she’s ready to leave Clive and run away with him. Clearly ambivalent, Frank reluctantly agrees to cut his trip short. But that night, on returning to the house, he drops the bombshell: he’s turning himself in to Simmons in order to pay his debt to society. Furthermore, racked by guilt for betraying Clive, he’s breaking it off with Glenda. ‘Be human, be decent’, he pleads. ‘I’ve been sick all my life and he’s cured me. I couldn’t go on living like that any longer.’ Torn between a desperate desire to hold on to the man she loves and a vindictive need to punish him for his desertion, Glenda debases herself by figuratively stepping into Sally’s victimized shoes. Planning to goad the passive Clive into taking violent revenge, she bloodies her mouth in order to simulate another vicious attack by Frank. Ever the psychoanalyst, the doctor is on to her trick and deliberately plays out her scenario by pretending to shoot Frank: ‘That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?’ But Clive has misread Glenda’s symptoms and far from ‘curing’ her perceived persecution complex this piece of theatre merely exacerbates her sexual obsession with Frank. As she lies sobbing on the floor, she fires off a damning reproach against Clive, the scientific genius, the Freudian master, ‘the man who knew everything. The man who could work miracles but couldn’t keep his wife.’ The film thus shows how rarely people, especially professionals like Clive who are slaves to a quantitative method of analysis, understand themselves and their own hidden motivations. It seems that each character has their own sleeping tiger or hidden impulse that Frank – as an indifferent outsider – helps to bring to the surface. After Clive admits that Frank is still alive but has simply left to turn himself in, Glenda rushes out of the house and follows him in her Jaguar. With Clive and Carol in pursuit, she stops to pick up Frank on the street and then attempts to win him back by spinning a yarn about

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Clive discovering their affair and threatening to kill him. Disbelieving, Frank wants to turn back and discuss matters with Clive, but it’s too late for rational explanations. Speeding towards an oncoming truck, Glenda gleefully swerves off the road and suicidally smashes the car through a giant billboard. This deliberate intent to ‘take Frank with her’ evokes Robert Browning’s ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, where the obsessed lover kills his beloved in order to possess her for ever, thereby fusing desire with 16 death, Eros with Thanatos. But Glenda’s plan fails when Frank is thrown clear. As her husband and lover crouch over Glenda’s limp body, the camera pulls back from the wreckage, through the gaping hole in the billboard and out onto the street. Never one to pass up heavyhanded symbolism if it can be used for a didactic V-Effekt, Losey chooses a hoarding depicting the famous leaping Esso tiger. Like Hegel’s ‘Owl of Minerva’, Glenda’s ‘sleeping tiger’ springs fully to life only at the exact moment of death. Despite a seemingly labyrinthine plot, it is clear that the film breaks down into two parallel but incompatible narrative threads, linked by the common themes of exile and paranoia. These threads also happen to mirror Frank’s two forms of therapy, which Losey deliberately intercuts through dialectical montage: the verbal cure, represented by Clive’s psychoanalytic sessions, and the somatic, libidinal cure, in the form of the riding lessons (and ultimately sex) with Glenda. The first trajectory, concerned exclusively with the men, follows conventional Freudian lines whereby the delinquent Frank is gradually rehabilitated within the symbolic order in the form of two types of law: the psychoanalytic (the Oedipus complex, with Clive standing in for Lacan’s Name of the Father) and the politico-cultural (Inspector Simmons). Clive is thus the man of logos who integrates Frank, through the talking cure, into the psychoanalytic becoming-machine. Its symbol, as one might expect, is the phallus, its emblem the Oedipalized lone wolf/tiger, its model, that of the One (the castrating Father) and the multiple. Frank and Clive are reduced to what Deleuze and Guattari mockingly call the ‘Oedipalized wolf or dog, the castrated-castrating daddy-wolf, the dog in the kennel, the analyst’s bow-wow’.17 In contrast, the second trajectory defies conventional psychoanalysis and has no place within the Freudian or Lacanian schema. It is not centred at all, but is rather decentred through the multiplicity that is Glenda. Glenda is the film’s true becominganimal, a riddle of impulsive signs which cannot be framed within the film’s dominant phallocentrism. As a result of these incompatibilities, the film’s prevailing symptom, paranoia, cannot be reduced to the same (Freudian) model for both the man and the woman. Only Frank is ‘cured’ in the film, leaving Glenda as an unrepresentable narrative

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enigma, resolvable only through the extremely draconian measure of violent death. Let us take the male position first. Superficially, Frank’s paranoia manifests itself through a fear of punishment, and its corollaries, hatred and guilt. This is rooted in his brutal treatment at the hands of his father, which includes both his informing – turning Frank over to the police for stealing the bicycle – and his castrating sadism. It manifests itself in later life by Frank’s wilful disregard for the law and his inability to trust people in a position of authority. His ‘exile’ at the hands of Clive is therefore an enforced ‘house arrest’ in which he is compelled to come to terms with and accept the authority of the Name of the Father and his own role within the Oedipal melodrama, the love affair that Freud links specifically to paranoia and calls ‘the family romance’.18 According to Freud, this paranoia is but a conscious smokescreen for deeper-seated unconscious desires, for what lies at the core of the conflict in cases of paranoia among males is a homosexual wishful phantasy of loving a man … it is a remarkable fact that the familiar principal forms of paranoia can all be represented as contradictions of the single proposition: ‘I (a man) love him (a man)’, and indeed that they exhaust all the possible ways in which such contradictions could be formulated.19

Even within the unconscious, however, this homosexual desire is contradicted by delusions of persecution. ‘I (a man) love him (a man)’ instead becomes ‘I do not love him – I hate him.’ In the film, this is the crux of Frank’s repressed relationship with his father, and by extension, with Clive. When translated into conscious behaviour, the original drives can only be externalized through a series of displacements. The original desire now takes on a variety of forms, such as: (1) ‘He hates (persecutes) me, which will justify me in hating him.’ For Frank, this translates as ‘I don’t love my father/Clive/Simmons, I hate him, because he persecutes me.’ Alternatively, this can be projected further as: (2) ‘I do not love him – I love her’, thereby explaining Frank’s displacement of his homosexual love onto a heterosexual chain that skids from mother to stepmother to Glenda. Perhaps more accurate in Frank’s case is a variation on this schema in the form of: (3) ‘I observe that she loves me’, or ‘I do not love him (Clive) – I love her, because she (Glenda) loves me.’ A fourth possible scenario involves delusions of jealousy: ‘It is not I who love the man – she loves him.’ This is less applicable to Frank than to Glenda, whose paranoia could also be reduced to a Freudian schematic through her adverse relationship to Clive: ‘It is not I who love Clive, he (Frank) loves him.’ A final, fifth version would perhaps encompass Frank’s position

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at the end of the film as he leaves both Clive and Glenda for prison: ‘I do 20 not love at all – I do not love anyone.’ We see evidence of this structure of projection throughout The Sleeping Tiger, in which every action and relationship seems to be a displaced form of something else. Thus when Frank explains his hatred for his father because he was ‘a cheat, because he was mean, petty and cruel, because he was a bully, and a pompous hypocrite’, he could easily be describing Clive and the tyranny of psychoanalysis itself. Similarly, his description of his stepmother as ‘all ice on the outside and rotten inside’ mirrors his spiteful comment to Glenda: ‘You’re all safe and sound and smooth on the outside … but inside you’ve got nothing … You act as if nothing could shake you but in actual fact you’re a tight wire and it wouldn’t take very much to break you.’ Thus the film plays deliberate games with transference, where Frank doubles Clive and Glenda for his father and stepmother. It is possible that this may be simply a clever ploy of Frank’s to give Clive the Oedipal scenario he desires, but Clive is too good a therapist not to make use of this transference to unlock Frank’s repressed memory of the bicycle incident through a series of metonymic shifts. By extricating Frank from the ‘tight spot’ with Simmons, he makes Frank recall his own ‘tight spot’ during the armed robbery, which in turn triggers Frank’s involuntary memory of the bicycle ‘tight spot’ and his father’s betrayal. Like Freudian therapy itself, the film thus makes use of the complexities of narrative displacement to extricate itself from its own labyrinthine unconscious entanglements. The Freudian structure of the plot’s predominant male trajectory is further reinforced by Losey’s mise-en-scène, which makes ample use of visual and aural images to express Freud’s second main characteristic of disguise: condensation. As one might expect, the film’s dominant symbology is overdeterminedly anal and phallic. The Esmonds’ Hampstead house, for example, is an objective correlative of Clive’s unconscious, not Glenda’s. The clean, tidy lines of the furniture and decor, and Clive’s uncluttered, well-organized office with its jutting desk lamps and phallic figurines reflect his own anal-retentive and genital erotogenetic tendencies, his controlling desire to overcompensate for the fugitive rhizome of the unconscious by surrounding himself with the harmonious symmetry of a fixed geometric grid. This is epitomized by the Miró print on his office wall, which piques the interest of the nosy and equally anal Simmons. Here the surrealist’s chaotic tangle of biomorphic forms is safely contained by the rigid geometry of the picture’s frame, a metaphorical doubling of Clive’s own ‘containment’ of the unconscious through the framing powers of psychoanalysis itself. Clive’s bedroom,

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which is temporarily occupied by the unpredictable Frank, is dominated by a large circular window (prefiguring its use as a central motif in Galileo (1974), The Servant and Boom! (1968)) and a phallic, obelisk-like sculpture, once again reflecting the doctor’s attempt to confine his patient through the spatial hegemony of balanced geometry. Frank and Clive’s metaphorical sharing of the phallus is expressed through both music and image. Malcolm Arnold’s jazz-inflected score, for example, employs an erotic saxophone glissando at each sign of sexual attraction, most obviously when Glenda first sees Frank on her return from vacation. However, we first hear the musical theme during the opening mugging sequence, when Harry tails Clive along the dark London street toward the lurking Frank and his gun, charging the scene’s impending violence with repressed sexual desire. This same gun/phallus is subsequently exchanged several times between the two protagonists, as first one and then the other employs it as a form of prop-cum-fetish to assert his masculine power and assuage his castration anxieties. Thus Frank steals it back from Clive’s desk to commit the Oxford Street robbery, only for Clive to use it at film’s end for the staged shooting of Frank, symbolically uniting the two men through matching actions of theatrical artifice while effectively isolating Glenda from the sexual equation. What is most interesting about The Sleeping Tiger is not that Losey structures his film around these familiar Freudian tropes – a strategy that had already degenerated into cliché during Hollywood’s noir infatuation – but that it pushes and expands them into a self-reflexive critique of the Freudian schema as a whole. In effect, Losey’s film is a direct indictment of the entire psychoanalytic system, creating an analogy with the Marxian ghost of exchange value. In fact, the economic metaphor of exchange as a form of commodity transfer or deal-making is the film’s dominant signature. In addition to the recurring exchange of Frank’s gun, there are several other related examples, most obviously the symbolic order’s repeated bartering for Frank’s freedom. At the beginning of the film, the young hooligan’s liberty is exchanged for his captive role as Clive’s guinea pig. This is partly repaid after the robbery as Clive lies to Simmons in exchange for providing Frank with an alibi, but ultimately Frank brokers the final deal, squaring his debt to society by turning himself in to the inspector. Similarly, Glenda is treated as a form of liquid currency as she is exchanged within and across both class and sexual contexts. Thus she changes places with Sally as she is forced to become her own domestic, while also passed as a form of sexual fetish between Clive and Frank. Eventually, Frank gives up Glenda in exchange for cementing his relationship with Clive.

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Perhaps the key scene in the film is where Clive ensures Frank’s freedom and friendship in exchange for the £100 bribe that he pays to Bailey. Although the pay-off is accompanied by Clive’s didactic lecture on the virtues of psychoanalysis, it is clear that Bailey hasn’t come for psycho-sexual enlightenment but from more opportunistic motives – otherwise he would have already gone to the police. The lecture – and metonymically, psychoanalysis – is thus merely a preamble for the real motivating desire of the scene: money. Losey cleverly condenses Clive’s work and sexual desire into the common cathexis of his anal displacement. Thus while Clive is trying to coax Frank out of his active, sadistic and destructive anal rage into a more productive genitality by helping him recognize and embrace his repressed Oedipal hatred for his father, he himself is stuck in a passive anal stage of possessive control. Both manifest themselves through the easy exchange of cash – Frank by stealing it, Clive by using it as currency to allow his researches to continue. Thus we uncover the film’s hidden narrative secret, the fundamental connection of Clive’s anality to Freud’s equation that faeces = gift = money,21 the beginnings of a genealogical chain that we can expand to also include Marx’s triad of exchange: money = commodity = money. As is often the case with Losey, the film’s apparent structural navel turns out to be a fugitive line of flight. Advertently or not, The Sleeping Tiger uses this endless series of displacements to implicate its own narrative shortcomings, specifically through its exclusive reliance on the actions of the male protagonists. As one might expect, Glenda is completely overlooked within this patriarchal economy. ‘What about me?’ she pleads when Frank is about to leave her. What about the woman indeed?! Glenda is the film’s true libidinal time bomb, but the narrative has no means by which to integrate her into its symbolic economy. While the male characters fit neatly into the Freudian archetype of metonymic displacement, ruled by the signifier of the phallus, the woman, Freud’s ‘dark continent’, is the narrative’s real exile, the true manifestation of impulse. Which isn’t to say that Glenda’s desire is completely incompatible with the Freudian schema. For example, her unrealistic expectations concerning Frank’s love and commitment exhibit clear symptoms of what Freud calls ‘persecutory paranoia’. In this case, the patient ‘cannot regard anything in other people as indifferent … The meaning of their delusion of reference is that they expect from all strangers something like love. But these people show them nothing of the kind; they laugh to themselves, flourish their sticks, even spit on the ground as they go by.’22 However, as Mary Anne Doane has argued, there is a considerable difference between male and female paranoia, particularly in how it

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relates to, and integrates with, the Oedipus Complex:

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Although neither Freud nor Lacan point this out, the etiology of paranoia suggests that it corresponds not to a pathological but to a ‘normal’ psychical condition in the case of the female. For separation from the mother and the acknowledgment of difference as represented by the paternal signifier are, in any event, more difficult for the female subject than for the male. In other words, the female never fully resolves her Oedipal complex and is thus linked more strongly to the realm of the pre23 Oedipal than the male.

This ‘normal’ paranoia is also tied into a different form of anxiety for the female spectator. It is derived not from the uncanny and fear of castration that drives the male but from what Julia Kristeva calls ‘the abject’, a pre-Oedipal fantasy derived from the difficulties of separating 24 oneself from the absent, yet all-powerful mother’s body. It is anterior to castration, unmediated and unrepresentable by forms of difference derived from the phallus. It is a drive without an object, and is therefore only representable as a true multiplicity. As the becoming-animal of the ‘awakened tiger’, Glenda is this multiplicity. Irreducible to the vertical hierarchy of the ruling phallus, Glenda’s desire is rootless, horizontal and infinite, representable only by the figure of the rhizome. In this respect, The Sleeping Tiger is itself a foregrounding of the impossibility of re-presenting this problem in terms of the conventional Hollywood realist narrative, with its prevailing dependence on the action-hero and combination of ego-dominant psychoanalysis and teleological history. Losey’s film is innately destabilized, sawn in half between its dominant phallic codes, which incorporate Oedipal, male homosexual neuroses, and its supplemental abject codes, which are relegated to the margins and resolved only through death. There is strong evidence of Glenda’s narrative exile from the very beginning. Firstly she is an American, and there are several hints that she may originally have come from the wrong side of the tracks. Moreover, when she arrives home from vacation she discovers Frank already ensconced in the household, as if he were the true host and heir to Clive’s sovereignty, while Glenda is relegated to the status of guest/ intruder in her own home. Unlike in a traditional baroque drama, however, Glenda is given no linguistic or symbolic power with which to subvert this phallic hegemony. Instead, the objective correlative of her libidinal impasse is the pair of figurines depicting a rearing centaur ravishing a young maiden that adorn each end of the Esmonds’ mantelpiece. Associated directly with animal desires and barbarism, the centaur statuettes are visually contiguous with Frank as he traps first Sally and then Glenda, his priapic energies comfortably channelled

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within the film’s dominant phallic schema. However, the Dionysaic contagion also infects Glenda and, symbolically lacking the phallus, she necessarily falls prey to the other side of the Bacchic coin, the atavism of becoming-animal. Unfortunately the film’s predominantly Freudian codes negate this potential Nietschean affirmation with an epistemology based on desire as a fulfilment of lack. We can see this atavism at work when Frank takes Glenda to The Metro. For the first time Clive’s captive lone wolf recognizes her true nature as part of the multiplicity of the pack, represented by the black jazz combo and frenzied collective of beatnik ‘satyrs’ and ‘maenads’ as they gyrate on the dance floor. At one time Frank had also known the joys of such libidinal excess, but under Clive’s tutelage has succumbed to the Oedipal relationship between those domesticated lone wolves, father and son. It seems apt that Deleuze and Guattari contrast their own rhizomatic reading of becoming-wolf with Freud’s famous diagnosis of Wolf-Man.25 Where Wolf-Man’s becoming-animal dream spots several wolves standing in the tree outside his bedroom window, producing a pack or multiplicity, Freud inevitably reduces them to one wolf – the father-castrator: Who is ignorant of the fact that wolves travel in packs? Only Freud. Every child knows it. Not Freud … Who is Freud trying to fool? The wolves never had a chance to get away and save their pack: it was already decided from the very beginning that animals could serve only to represent coitus between parents, or, conversely, be represented by coitus between parents. Freud obviously knows nothing about the fascination exerted by wolves and the meaning of their silent call, the call to become-wolf.26

Just as Clive has stripped Glenda of her pack-animal instincts, Freud has to purge the wolves of their multiplicity in order to preserve the model of the One (Father) and the multiple (children). Frank is the ideal catalyst for this degenerative transformation, for as a former multiplicity himself he knows how to prey on his own kind. Moreover, he is also of the same class as both his mentor and his victim, so that by implication the hegemony of the Freudian economy (which Frank helps to enforce) is also that of the established middle class, with their characteristics of individuality and the sanctity of home and property. However, Frank has also crossed over into the working class through his adopted role as Teddy Boy, so that as a changeling he is able to intrigue against the women in the film by reducing them both to Sally’s subservient role. Within both the Freudian and Marxian scenarios, then, Glenda has reached the ultimate dead-end. She has no path left to travel, no border to cross; her pre-Oedipal, paranoid desire defies any notion of either trajectory or telos because it isn’t object-driven.

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Significantly, her punishment for her failure to conform to the phallic order is a parallel demotion in class. As she desperately tells Frank, ‘You’re not going to give me notice, like a waitress, one of your servant friends, one of your pick-ups at The Metro.’ But lacking an affirmative will-to-power outside of bourgeois marriage, she has little choice but to accept his rejection and relegation. Her only remaining option is a redeeming oblivion, but even here Losey pulls the rug out from under his protagonist. The final car wreck is far from being a heavenly release. With its bowl-like topography and wisps of smoke rising from the tangled wreckage, the scene more closely resembles a devil’s cauldron, a vision of hell-as-abyss, the ultimate primordial horror. To make matters worse, it is shot in a highly artificial studio interior, irreparably sealing Glenda’s ontological release within the stifling confines of an artistic deceit. Following The Sleeping Tiger, Losey directed A Man on the Beach, ‘a half-hour divertissement’,27 for Michael Carreras at Hammer Pictures. Based on Victor Canning’s story, ‘Chance at the Wheel’, with a screenplay by Hammer veteran Jimmy Sangster, the film offers a variation on the paranoia theme through an inversion of genre expectations and a fluid movement across common binaries such as male/female, intruder/ host, vision/blindness. It opens during the holiday season as a Rolls Royce convertible cruises along a harbour causeway and pulls up outside an elegant casino. The car’s passenger is an aristocratic woman who seems to be on familiar terms with the casino manager (Alex de Gallier) and clearly has plenty of money to spend. However, it seems that our heroine wagers against far more favourable odds: she knocks out the manager, stuffs the money on his desk into a briefcase, and returns to the chauffeured Rolls. It turns out that ‘she’ is called Max (Michael Medwin in drag), and the Rolls is his luxurious getaway car. Max orders the chauffeur (Michael Ripper) to drive to a disused gravel pit in the hills, presumably to divide up the loot. Once there, however, Max has other, more opportunistic plans. After a struggle in which Max is shot in the arm, he overpowers the chauffeur, deposits him in the Rolls and pitches it over a steep cliff. Racked by pain, Max staggers along the beach with his haul and reaches a well-furnished villa. Fortunately for Max there’s no one home, but after an extended search of the house he passes out. The occupant turns out to be Carter, a blind recluse played by Donald Wolfit. As one would expect with Losey, mystery is eschewed in favour of prolonged character study and we learn of Carter’s visual impairment from the outset. Max awakens to find that Carter has treated his wounds, but remains ‘in the dark’ concerning his blindness. Paranoid that Carter will identify him to the police, he begins a reign of terror against the old man, threatening

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him with a gun and vindictively setting fire to one of his poems. However, the equally paranoid Carter has already removed the bullets from the pistol, forestalling any serious danger. When the police eventually arrive Carter admits his blindness to Max, ironically revealing that he could never have identified him in the first place. On a superficial level, the film plays a simple game between different registers of blindness and insight. Thus Max, who has sight, is unable to ‘see’ beyond the pathology of his own egotistical impulse – represented by the power of money and, by extension, the gun/phallus – so that he is ‘blind’ to the bodily signs of Carter’s disability, which are literally ‘staring him in the face’. In contrast, the physically blind Carter, obviously no stranger to the dangers of a threatening exterior world, has the intuitive foresight to rig the physical odds in his own favour. The film is thus, in part, a duel between confidence men, whereby first Max and then Carter beat the luck of the dice throw by cheating the ‘system’ through a form of visual deceit (the charade of the female clothing; faked eyesight). However, as Raymond Durgnat points out, the film is also ‘a grotesque choreography for two harsh, hostile, suspicious lonelinesses’,28 in which the shifting balance of power between the two men’s mutually contagious paranoias takes on some of the characteristics of the gender division that we discussed in The Sleeping Tiger. Thus Max starts out as a transvestite, symbolizing the root of his paranoia in both homosexual desire and its displaced corollary, castration anxiety. He compensates for this repressed fear through the compensatory fetishes of the money and gun, only to find himself doubled by the equally paranoid Carter, who is significantly blind (Oedipus’s fate, itself a symbolic castration). As we argued earlier through Mary Anne Doane’s analysis of female paranoia, one of the characteristics of the woman’s marginalized role in the paranoid Freudian scenario is that her desire lacks an object, so that, in effect, she lacks the scopophilic pleasure of looking at an ‘other’. This is because female paranoia precludes subjective difference based on the integrity of the phallic ego. Instead, as David Rodowick points out, her ‘looking is invaded by terror where the desire to see is matched by the inability to discern an absent object of sight – to image or bring into focus an imagined hostile presence’.29 Under normal ‘gothic’ genre circumstances – Audrey Hepburn’s blind housewife threatened by drug dealers in Wait Until Dark (Terence Young, 1967), for example – this would accurately describe Carter’s impairment. He would metaphorically double Max’s earlier femininity by taking on the role of the abject and thereby provide the gangster with a mirror image of his own paranoid fears.

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However, this isn’t really the case here because there are at least two other images involved. Unlike Glenda Esmond’s inexorable fall into the grip of the abject, Carter’s lack of a verifiable objective visual image is more than compensated for by the verbal presence of the sound image (after all, why should we all fall victim to the hegemony of visual metaphors?) as well as our own sight as all-knowing spectators. In this way, Carter’s ‘second sight’ – an intuition commonly associated with the visually impaired – acts as a confirmation of our own ‘first’ sight: we have already seen Max behave like a violent criminal. The result is a mutual, two-way expression of images between viewer and character that ensnares Max as the unwitting ‘third’ party. In this way, the audience provides the visual crutch lacking in Carter’s own ‘feminised’ situation and thereby restores the balance of the film-going experience to a true multiplicity of affirmative images that forecloses Freud’s scenario based on difference-as-lack. In this way, distinctions between masculine and feminine and their artificial connection between possession and non-possession of sight/the gaze dissolve in favour of a more fluid series of displacements. If The Sleeping Tiger and A Man on the Beach are rooted in a problematic Freudian and Marxian economy, whereby the films’ narrative contradictions self-reflexively critique their own phallocentric assumptions, then The Intimate Stranger represent Losey’s more Nietzschean flipside. Eschewing what Jean-Pierre Oudart calls l’effet de réel (the ‘Real Effect’)30 in favour of the exile’s self-reflexive aestheticism, the film celebrates Nietzsche’s dictum that ‘the existence of the world is justified only as an 31 aesthetic phenomenon’. Produced by Alec Snowden of Anglo-Guild, a subsidiary of Nat Cohen’s Insignia productions, the film was originally titled Pay the Piper, developed from an original screenplay by blacklisted Howard Koch (a.k.a. ‘Peter Howard’). Koch had previously written the radio play for Orson Welles’s broadcast of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, and later co-scripted Warner Brothers’ cult classic, Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1943). Still unable to use his own name, Losey adopted the pseudonym Joseph Walton (his two Christian names) for the British release, while RKO’s American prints – shorn of fifteen minutes and retitled The Finger of Guilt – are credited to Snowden.32 Drawing on their own blacklist experiences, Losey and Koch focused the story on a complex web of false identity and masquerade within the film industry, supplementing the genre’s habitual ‘illusion/reality’ binary with topical informer and exile themes. Like The Boy With Green Hair, the film uses a flashback structure, unfolding the past in an hourlong sequence as Losey and Koch’s alter ego, Reggie Wilson (Richard Basehart), relates his story while undergoing treatment by a nerves

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specialist, Dr Gray (Basil Dignam). Reggie left the US three years earlier on the heels of a well-publicized scandal: he was caught sleeping with the boss’s wife. Saddled with the reputation of a profligate womanizer, Reggie first tried to find work on Broadway but, as he puts it, ‘out of pictures I was like a duck out of water’. Instead he decided to try his luck in England. He quickly caught on as a cutter at Commonwealth Pictures, a small studio run by ‘Big Ben’ Case (Roger Livesey). After a bad run of box-office failures, Ben decided to give Reggie his chance to produce. It was an ordinary, run-of-the mill picture, but he ‘got the story as tight as a drum’ and brought in a winner. Promotion to executive producer followed, and Reggie capped his successful career comeback by marrying the boss’s daughter. ‘The year after I married Lesley was just about perfect’, recalls the new groom, ‘until those letters started coming.’ ‘Those letters’ turn out to be a series of desperate love notes mailed from Newcastle by a former girlfriend, Evelyn Stewart, who has unexpectedly come back into Reggie’s life. The only trouble is, Reggie can’t remember ever having met her. Fearful that he may be unknowingly schizophrenic or suffering from amnesia, Reggie has come to Dr Gray as a last resort. As in the case of Clive Esmond, we have yet another doctor at the narrative helm, but once again Losey eschews the expected scientific/ rationalist explanation for a more aesthetic solution to Reggie’s troubles. The film begins its flashback as a Royal Mail van arrives on the studio lot with the latest instalment of Evelyn’s missives. Another sex scandal is the last thing Reggie needs. He is already stretched to the limit with retakes on one picture, necessitating the cancellation of his oft-postponed Bermuda honeymoon with Lesley (Faith Brook), while he is seriously over-budget on Eclipse, his first attempt at a splashy, international money-spinner. Reggie turns to Ben for some fatherly advice. Ben suggests that Reggie tells Lesley everything about the letters but keeps the police out of it. If the matter ends up in court, juries tend to believe the aggrieved woman. More importantly, the scene also gives Losey a chance to make some critical comments on another shaky marriage, the film industry’s uneasy relationship between art and commerce. Egged on by his penny-pinching assistant, Ernest Chapel (Mervyn Johns), Ben is an old-school advocate of the typically English ‘little picture’, presumably a reference to the tongue-in-cheek ‘underdog’ comedies turned out by Michael Balcon at Ealing or the low-budget potboilers produced at Nettlefold, Losey’s studio for The Sleeping Tiger. Predictably, Ben thinks the figures on Eclipse are getting out of line, way beyond what the studio can hope to get back. If Ben is too much the frugal businessman, Reggie is all artistic ego, an advocate of the overblown ‘showy’ feature that has always been

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Hollywood’s trademark. Moreover, he has staked Eclipse’s success on its expensive American star, his old flame, Kay Wallace (Constance Cummings), whose presence can hardly be reassuring to the already insecure and neglected Lesley. Part of Reggie’s learning curve in telling his story is that he will eventually learn not to treat the cinematic art as an extension of his own personal ambition but more as a self-justifying world in and of itself, an ontology that both embraces and affirms the creative and libidinal life force. We receive a glimpse of this attitude in a revealing snippet of dialogue as Reggie and Ben chat over a cup of tea. ‘No matter how this crazy business grinds you down’, Reggie muses, ‘I wouldn’t trade it for anything else. The way you feel certain moments that people on the outside just wouldn’t understand. Like when you’re sitting in a projection room watching the first rough cut of a film you’ve just sweated blood over and you say to yourself, This one, I like.’ In contrast, Ben’s response is pure exchange value: ‘I get my pleasure a little later when the audience say they like it.’ The upshot of the meeting is that Ben’s financial worries prevail and Reggie reluctantly agrees to make some cuts in Eclipse. This triumph of commerce over (albeit degraded) art is significant. It not only marks the beginning of a series of personal confrontations for Reggie, thereby feeding the mystery element of the narrative by conveniently establishing blackmail motives for several characters, but also hints at the hidden agenda behind the mysterious letters: money and power. Firstly, the production cutbacks alienate the film’s director, Steve Vadney (André Mikhelson) and writer, Dave Pearson (David Hurst), who accuse ‘Big Ben’ of turning into a fiscal alarm clock. This outrages the loyal Chapel, who reminds the studio’s extravagant ‘artists’ that it was Ben’s combination of thrift and vision that built the studio in the first place. Secondly, after reading the blue pages, the increasingly temperamental Kay discovers that her own part has been gutted. Losey spices their showdown with Reggie’s accusations that his ‘ex-’ may be behind the letters: Kay is skipping his ordered wardrobe tests to visit her cousin – in Newcastle! Thirdly, after receiving a phone call at his office from the insistent Evelyn, Reggie goes home to discover that she has also written to his wife, accusing Reggie of marrying her for the sake of his career. Moreover, Evelyn cites places where she and Reggie spent time together, as well as dates that correspond exactly with Reggie’s out-of-town business trips. This information opens the paranoid floodgates for Lesley: ‘Father warned me that your sort of past wouldn’t stay in the past.’ Determined to put the rumours to rest once and for all, Reggie drives Lesley to Newcastle to confront Evelyn Stewart. At this point the film suddenly changes visual register from the artificial, hermetic confines

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of the studio and the Wilsons’ house to the gritty realism of Tyneside’s misty streets, corner pubs and working-class terraced houses. The couple track down Evelyn to her one-room digs, only to be informed by her landlady, Mrs Lynton (Grace Denbeigh-Russell), that she has gone out for cigarettes. Evelyn turns out to be a pretty young television actress from Elmira, New York who is currently in repertory gaining experience. After Mrs Lynton confirms for Lesley’s benefit that she has never set eyes on or spoken to Reggie before, he makes a quick search of the apartment. To his horror, he discovers a signed publicity photo of himself on the dresser and quickly hides it in a drawer before Lesley can see it. When Evelyn (Mary Murphy) returns, she is surprisingly selfassured and highly convincing: ‘He never said he’d marry me, Mrs Wilson. I never fit into his career that way’, subtly insinuating that Lesley did. ‘But I was content with just the fringe. That much he promised me. But now? Now I don’t know what he’s trying to do.’ After Reggie threatens to go to the police unless she tells the truth, Evelyn suddenly notices that Reggie’s photograph is missing. When she discovers it in the drawer, Lesley’s worst suspicions are confirmed and she runs out. The normally level-headed Reggie explodes: as Trevor Duncan’s soundtrack pounds out a loud drum roll, he is about to punch Evelyn in the face but manages to control himself. As with many of Losey’s male protagonists, he is unable to act out his violent urges and for the moment is forced to internalize them as self-destructive impulses. Still searching for rational answers, Reggie takes the matter up with the local police. But Evelyn more than convinces local station sergeant Brown (David Lodge) that her story has credibility. At this point even Reggie is starting to believe it. In one last desperate measure, he decides to play devil’s advocate and joins Evelyn for a drink at her local pub. Unfortunately Lesley is parked on the street outside and watches them go in together. What more evidence of Reggie’s deception does she need? Finding Evelyn’s story to be unshakable, and clearly attracted to her despite his own better judgement, Reggie proceeds to get drunk. Amnesia now seems to be a very real possibility, for when he asks Evelyn a hypothetical question it is less to test the veracity of her story than to fill in what appears to be a huge gap in his memory. Matters reach a climax on the street outside Evelyn’s apartment. To the strains of thudding percussion and dissonant flutes, Reggie finally snaps and his hands clench tightly around Evelyn’s throat. However, instead of strangling his tormentor, he kisses her aggressively. Evelyn’s response is curious: her eyes widen in horror but at the same time she doesn’t resist, as if she were sexually aroused by the danger of Reggie’s desperation. Like Glenda’s unrequited and uncathected desire for Frank

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in The Sleeping Tiger, Reggie’s animalistic act is caught in the gap between sex and violence, Eros and Thanatos, with little hope of a viable release within the established structures of Freudian neurosis. Reggie returns home to face a series of devastating faits accomplis. Lesley has moved in with her father and is incommunicado. The appropriately named Eclipse, which has always been an objective correlative both of Reggie’s hubris and his comeuppance, has been cancelled, thus conveniently freeing Kay from her contract. Reggie himself has been placed on leave of absence from the studio with the hope that he will try and put his life back together. Only Kay is sympathetic, and it is on her recommendation that Reggie goes to see Dr Gray, thus bringing us full circle to the beginning of the film. Unfortunately Reggie seems to have gained little practical insight into the mystery through the telling of his story. Time is regained but Gray’s only advice is to spend a few months away from it all, which Reggie rightly sees as a death sentence to his film career. The solution to the mystery does not issue from Reggie’s increased psychological insight into the story’s characters or his brilliant analytical breakdown of the machinations of the plot, but arrives out of the blue as an old-fashioned theatrical deus ex machina. Just as he is packing up his things before leaving the studio, Reggie takes one last look out his office window and, lo and behold, spots Evelyn walking onto the site. Rushing outside, he follows his nemesis onto a soundstage where he overhears Evelyn talking to Ben. Suddenly, the real facts behind the plot are magically revealed. It turns out that Ben had inadvertently started the whole affair by using Ernest Chapel to spy on Reggie during his out-of-town trips as a means of compiling evidence of Reggie’s alleged affairs. Desperate to protect his daughter, Ben didn’t believe Reggie could ever be a faithful husband: ‘It all fitted in. Those letters, and all I know of your past, and then Lesley herself confirmed it.’ However, unbeknownst to Ben, the pathologically jealous Chapel was unable to dig up any actual dirt and decided instead to exploit Reggie’s past reputation by rigging a staged affair. Promising her a role in Ben’s next film, Chapel hired the ambitious Evelyn to impersonate a blackmailing ex-lover, so that Ben would be forced to fire Reggie and reassert hands-on control of the studio. It was an easy next step to note the dates of Reggie’s trips, build up a detailed itinerary of their liaison, and plant Reggie’s photograph in Evelyn’s apartment. Until this point Losey’s mise-en-scène has been uncharacteristically restrained, but for the final showdown he pulls out all the stops in a sequence of bravura theatricality. After Reggie makes his presence known and argues with Ben over Evelyn’s true motives – Ben thinks

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she’s lying and is secretly in league with Reggie – she runs out of the soundstage to make her escape. Reggie responds by ordering the rapid closure of all the studio exits. Trapped, she heads for soundstage seven where Chapel – the studio’s Uriah Heep, the resentful yes-man/informer – is supervising some dubbing on a war film from his overhead, soundproofed booth. She tells Ernest that the jig is up and that the studio is sealed tight. Panicked, Chapel blurts out not only his role in the plot – ‘I was doing it for Ben. This is Ben’s studio. Wilson had no right to put him on the shelf’ – but also his pathetic infatuation with Evelyn. In case further proof is needed, Chapel has left his booth microphone open and the whole conversation is overheard by Reggie and Ben. The film ends with a terrific fight between Reggie and Chapel on the soundstage, as their looming shadows are spotlit on a back projection screen. At one point Ernest grabs a machine gun and fires it at Reggie but it’s only a studio prop: ‘Prop gun, prop girls. Everything phoney. The story of your life, Ernie.’ After the appropriate arrests are made, Evelyn flirtatiously asks Reggie for a match. Flattered, he lights her cigarette, but after one puff she drops it on the ground and walks off. There is thus a strong hint that Reggie is still vulnerable to the seductive wiles of a pretty girl, for even though he had never been involved with Evelyn, she still represents a clever theatrical reconstruction of his old flames from the past. But Reggie’s hard-earned apprenticeship has not been in vain. He has clearly learned something: ‘I guess I had Evelyn Stewart coming to me.’ ‘I think we both had’, echoes Ben. To the strains of a triumphant jazz trumpet, the two men move outside, where Lesley and Kay are waiting. The film ends with long crane shot as husband and wife embrace. The Intimate Stranger thus begins with a marriage and career in crisis and ends with a strengthened bond between Reggie and his two partners: wife and boss. Although this might suggest a conventional triumph of Hollywood formula, like The Sleeping Tiger, the film undercuts the usual studio schema through a complex series of irresolvable doublings and displacements. Indeed, the film is replete with ‘intimate strangers’ and mutually haunting ghosts. Apart from Reggie and Chapel, each of whom is punished in different ways for his arrogant hubris, the couples range from Reggie and Evelyn (ghost lovers doubling as a blackmailer and her victim); Reggie and Lesley (the estranged husband and wife, split by the spectral return of Reggie’s hidden past); and Reggie and Ben (the surrogate father who places the interests of his ‘real’ daughter over his ‘ghost’ son). Nor should we forget the implied allegorical doubling of Reggie with Losey himself, for the connections between the two filmmakers are

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almost transparently obvious. Both are exiled from Hollywood, one for a sexual scandal, the other for politics, creating a metonymic relationship between women and ideological commitment as seductive objects of displaced paranoid desire. Both men are continually haunted by the past, leading to blackmail (Reggie) and blacklist (Losey). Each falls victim to the machinations of an impotent informer, whether in the form of Ernest Chapel or HUAC’s endless parade of broken stooges. Moreover, it is also significant that the burden of proof is placed squarely on Reggie’s shoulders to show that he didn’t know Evelyn rather than the reverse. One of the trademark strategies of the McCarthy era was that HUAC placed the legal onus on its suspects, not on its own investigative prowess. The subpoenaed had to show good faith and prove that they were no longer Communists by naming names. In contrast, the Committee did little to provide legal evidence to prove that they were subversive. Thus when Reggie discusses Evelyn’s story with Sergeant Brown, their dialogue takes on obvious blacklist overtones. Reggie: ‘Look, she can’t prove that I ever had anything to do with her.’ (Read: HUAC can’t prove I had anything to do with Communist subversion.) Brown: ‘But can you prove that you didn’t? (Read: Can you prove that you were never a member of the Communist party? – i.e. you are guilty until proven innocent.) Besides, it’s a question of whether writing these letters (read: informing) is a crime. Unless you can prove a motive, like extortion. (Read: something other than red-baiting patriotism.) But you said she never tried to get money.’ (Read: Surely HUAC has no ulterior motives.) As we indicated earlier, however, the film’s most important doubling is not so much political as aesthetic. Both Reggie and Losey undergo a form of redemption by exploiting the theatrical artifice of the filmic device itself. By utilizing the soundstage and its cinematic props in revealing Evelyn’s and Ernest’s conspiracy, Reggie gets to regain and advance his lost position in the studio, just as Losey continues his threatened directorial career by virtue of his sleek and self-reflexive direction of the film we are watching. Unlike The Sleeping Tiger, where art is merely a fetish or sublimation for Clive’s hegemonic Oedipal grid, here it stands as a multiplicity of creative difference. By foregrounding the illusory props of the studio – Ernie’s microphone that magnifies his duplicitous voice like the Wizard of Oz, the blinding spotlight that theatrically ‘trumps’ Dr Gray’s ‘scientific’ penlight – Reggie and Losey affirm the triumph of simulacra as an even greater, redeeming ‘real’. It’s perfectly apt then that the final fight between Reggie and Ernie should take the form of shadow boxers projected on a screen, for this is literally the world of Plato’s Cave. Not as a false reality that must be

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revealed and condemned – as Dr Gray would probably suggest – but part of a circuit of phantasmic simulacra that build and celebrate their own heightened truth. As Nietzsche once put it, ‘truths are illusions 33 about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions.’

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Notes

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1 Edward Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, in Granta, No. 13 (Harmondsworth and New York, Viking-Penguin, 1984), p. 172. 2 Losey, cited in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, pp. 134–5. 3 Clore later produced First on the Road (1960), Losey’s twelve-minute Ford Anglia commercial. Like Dick Lester, who later went on to fame and fortune directing The Beatles and The Three Musketeers films, Losey made between 200 and 300 TV commercials. ‘Making commercials was a way of not doing pictures you didn’t want to do. An alternative way of making a living, which is something you really must have if you are going to be selective. You have got to be able to say “no”. It’s the only freedom of choice anywhere in the commercial world.’ Losey in Richard Roud, ‘The Reluctant Exile’, Sight and Sound, Vol. 48, No. 3, Summer 1979, p. 146. 4 Losey, in Gordon Gow, ‘Weapons: Joseph Losey in an Interview with Gordon Gow’, Films and Filming, Vol. 18, No. 1, October 1971, p. 39. 5 Caute, Joseph Losey, pp. 114–15. 6 Losey, in Roud, ‘The Reluctant Exile’, p. 145. 7 According to Macdonald, they worked together ‘as he worked with [production designer] John Hubley in Hollywood to try to produce a cohesive over-all image and visual style. This function is one which is peculiar to Losey and which apparently is not understood … or used … by most other British directors or art directors.’ Cited in Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 324. 8 Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, p. 145. 9 Ibid., p. 137. 10 Ibid., p. 144. 11 Ibid., p. 170. 12 Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London and New York, Verso, 1992), p. 86. 13 Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 135. 14 Ibid. 15 Raymond Durgnat, A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence (London, Faber & Faber, 1970), p. 246. 16 It could also be seen as a dry run for the similar ending in The Gypsy and the Gentleman. 17 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 29. 18 See Sigmund Freud, ‘Family Romances’ (1908), trans. James Strachey, in On Sexuality, The Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 7 (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1977), pp. 221–5. 19 Freud, ‘Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)’ (1910), trans. Alix and James Strachey, in Case Histories II, The Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 9 (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1979), p. 200.

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20 Ibid., pp. 200–3. 21 Freud, ‘On Transformations of Instinct as Exemplified in Anal Eroticism’, trans. E. Glover, in On Sexuality, pp. 295–302. 22 Freud, ‘Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality’, in On Psychopathology, The Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 10 (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1979), p. 200. 23 Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 144. 24 See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York, Columbia University Press, 1982). 25 See Freud, ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (The “Wolf Man”)’ (1914), trans. Alix and James Strachey, in Case Histories II, pp. 233–366, and Muriel Gardiner, ed., The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man: The Double Story of Freud’s Most Famous Case (New York, Basic Books, 1971). 26 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 28. 27 Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 139. 28 Durgnat, A Mirror for England, p. 250. 29 D. N. Rodowick, The Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference and Film Theory (New York and London, Routledge, 1991), p. 27. 30 Jean-Pierre Oudart, ‘L’Effet du réel’, Cahiers du Cinéma, No. 228, March/April 1971. The ‘Real Effect’ depends on the suture of the spectator into the representational system as if he/she participated in the diegetic space. In this way the viewer no longer sees the structures of representation but perceives them as being the profilmic event itself. Losey’s obvious baring of the cinematic device in The Intimate Stranger precludes such a transparent identification. 31 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, Vintage, 1967), p. 22. 32 A wise move, as it turned out. On 18 January 1956, armed with pre-release inside information, The Hollywood Reporter’s Mike Connolly posed the rhetorical question: ‘Isn’t the Joseph Walton who directed Tony Owen’s Pay the Piper in England for RKO release really the Joe Losey who ducked the [HUAC] subpoena and fled to England?’ Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 134. 33 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense’, in Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, trans. Sander L. Gilman, Carole Blair and David J. Parent (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 250.

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A question of background: class and the politics of impulse in Time Without Pity (1957), The Gypsy and the Gentleman (1957), Blind Date (1959) and The Criminal (1960)

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Think of what our Nation stands for, Books from Boots’ and country lanes, Free speech, free passes, class distinction, Democracy and proper drains. (Sir John Betjeman)1

Although he never wore his working-class allegiances on his sleeve, Losey was far too much of a Marxist to complacently reduce either exile or class difference to The Intimate Stranger’s simple dialectic between art and commerce. However, it is also clear from our discussion so far that Losey was unclear or ambivalent about how to represent an active class consciousness. Rather than celebrate the positive aspects of workingclass life, the way Ken Loach, for example, only makes films about and within exclusively proletarian contexts, he instead focused exclusively on the foibles of the bourgeoisie through the representation of hermetic upper- and middle-class milieux. Thus, apart from secondary, usually devious characters like Frank Clements’s partner-in-crime, Harry, or Sally’s fiancé Bailey in The Sleeping Tiger, Losey’s English working class are, initially at least, notable largely for their absence. This neglect seems odd coming from the director of the Living Newspaper and Brecht’s Galileo, for one would have expected the blacklisted Losey to have displaced at least part of his own personal victimization onto some kind of solidarity with the downtrodden underclass. Fortunately, following The Intimate Stranger this limited social and political focus starts to expand. Whether this is the direct result of the increased professional confidence that comes with better scripts and higher budgets, or a greater sense of political security as the immediate worries wrought by HUAC subpoenas slowly receded into the past, is hard to say. Whatever the reason, Losey introduces some form of class analysis into each of his next four films – Time Without Pity and The Gypsy and the Gentleman (both released in 1957), Blind Date (1959) and The Criminal (1960) – his first English features released under his own name. Each represents an initial stab at exploring the complex codes

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and mores of the British class system, a project that will reach full fruition in the Pinter-scripted films of the 1960s. The importance of Losey’s new-found interest in working-class protagonists shouldn’t be underestimated. With the singular exception of the ‘Free Cinema’ group of documentary filmmakers – notably Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson – who were just about to begin the cycle of social-realist ‘kitchen sink’ features that would make them famous, British cinema was dominated in the late 1950s by a seemingly endless string of bland Ealing comedies, jingoistic war films and elaborate costume dramas in the Gainsborough studio tradition. In ‘Get Out and Push’, his infamous diatribe against the arcane, middlebrow nature of the post-war movie industry, Anderson dismissed mainstream British cinema as ‘snobbish, anti-intelligent, emotionally inhibited, wilfully blind to the conditions and problems of the present, dedicated to an out-of-date, exhausted national ideal’.2 Bemoaning the lack of authentic working-class milieux and characters, Anderson argued: This virtual rejection of three-quarters of the population of this country represents more than a ridiculous impoverishment of the cinema. It is characteristic of a flight from contemporary reality by a whole, influential section of the community. And, which is worse, by reason of their control of the cinema, they succeed in imposing their distorted view of the present on their massive and impressionable audience.3

Although largely unacknowledged by the Free Cinema critics at the time, Time Without Pity, Blind Date and The Criminal went some way to breaking this stranglehold through a commitment to authentic workingclass idioms and a fulfilment of Anderson’s dictum that, ‘A style means 4 an attitude. An attitude means a style.’ Moreover, in Stanley Baker, Losey had the perfect acting vehicle to construct a new paradigm of working-class masculinity. As Andrew Spicer correctly points out, ‘Baker’s tough, aggressive characters, confused about their social role, lead directly to the anti-heroes of the “New Wave” films such as Albert Finney’s Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.’5 However, while the New Wave directors opted for a more mimetic, documentary-style realism rooted in regional specificity, Losey’s films constitute an extreme deconstruction of genre expectations, often to the point of wilful pastiche. They are paradigmatic of a seemingly unbridgeable split in critical taste between the largely pejorative British Sight and Sound critics, whose preference for transparent, understated narrative and social realism was always anathema to Losey’s self-reflexively baroque tendencies, and the worshipful French MacMahon Group, who read each film’s highly expressive (and excessive) mise-en-scène as a

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metaphysical search into ontological and dialectical ‘truth’. Rediscovering the films in the early 1960s, the French praised Time Without Pity in particular as a positive revelation. Julian Petley neatly summarizes these contrasting national ‘tastes’ as follows:

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Whereas native English cinema tends to tone down emotional ‘excess’ and to regard melodrama as a pejorative term, Losey tends to play up the passion and play down the touches of ‘realistic’ detail so beloved by critical consensus. Thus Losey’s early films tend to resolve themselves into a series of high-pressure temps fort, in which stylistic elaboration is notable by its obvious presence as opposed to its discreet absence, as witness in particular Blind Date (1959) and Time Without Pity (1957), the latter existing at screaming point for its entire length.7

‘Screaming point’ is an apt description. Adapted from Emlyn Williams’s successful revenge melodrama, Someone Waiting, Time Without Pity is pitched at an operatic level of strident emotion. In many ways it is the quintessential Losey film, for as Robin Wood has commented, ‘here time itself becomes man’s ultimate prison, and the “race against time” of thriller tradition takes on the significance of a metaphysical principle’.8 Everyone in the film is trying, in various ways, to transcend, outrun, appropriate, or stave off time. Firstly, as a quantitative multiplicity of measured, segmented time, epitomized by the inexorable countdown of twenty-four pitiless hours before an innocent young man’s execution for murder. Secondly, as the overlap of two facets of the durational, qualitative multiplicity – the violent impulse of what Deleuze calls ‘becoming-animal’ and the faceless automaton of ‘becomingmachine’, each united in Leo McKern’s splendidly over-the-top performance as the working-class monster, Robert Stanford. In Williams’s play, the action takes place after the innocent’s execution, so that what follows is both a belated ‘whodunit’ and a stinging indictment of capital punishment. As usual, Losey subverts genre convention by revealing the murderer in the very first scene. The film thus opens in the luxurious Belgravia flat of Robert Stanford (McKern) at the very moment that he murders his young mistress, Jenny Cole (Christina Lubicz). Much like the films of Hitchcock, ‘what matters is not who did the action … but neither is it the action itself: it is the set of relations in which the action and the one who did it are caught’.9 In this case the relations are determined by several interconnected forces: the sexual competition between a younger and an older man, which is in turn reinforced by class difference; the genealogy of inherited pathology, and its relation to the contamination of annihilating time. Stanford is a self-made brute of a Yorkshireman who has climbed the class ladder from lowly car mechanic to become the successful owner of

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Stanford motors, manufacturers of high-performance sports cars. Despite his economic success, Stanford suffers from an acute inferiority complex, rooted in a painful self-awareness of both his working-class origins and sexual inadequacy. He compensates for these shortcomings through an obsessive, almost orgasmic delight in driving at high speeds and a concomitant need to control others, specifically Honor (Ann Todd), his genteel trophy wife, and his adopted son, Brian (Paul Daneman), whose real father was accidentally killed in the Stanford works. In conventional psychological terms, this desire to dominate takes the form of a violent animalism – McKern spends most of the film stampeding and bellowing like a wild bull in heat – but also extends to Stanford’s perverse sexual competitiveness with Brian’s sensitive young college friend, Alec Graham (Alec McCowen). It turns out that apart from being Stanford’s mistress, Jenny Cole was also Alec’s girlfriend. Stanford has thus gained a double victory: he not only gratifies his sexual ego by stealing Jenny away from a much younger man but also sets up his middle-class rival to be falsely convicted for her murder. As Losey explained to Tom Milne, I was talking about men who are tyrants in their own families or in their businesses, about human beings who walk over other people to make fortunes, about people who go along with hypocrisies which they dress up in all sorts of trappings … and who are perhaps madmen, the kind of madmen who make wars, although not recognized as being mad, and who have totally disproportionate power over their sons, their wives, the society they live in.10

Twenty-four hours before Alec is to be hanged, his estranged novelist father, David Graham (Michael Redgrave), flies in from Canada in a last-ditch attempt to save his son’s life. A severe alcoholic, David has spent the past several months drying out in a Montreal sanatorium and has only recently learned of Alec’s plight. Under classical mystery/ thriller genre conventions, we would reasonably expect the film to focus on David’s personal odyssey of redemption, his awakening to both his moral, literary and parental responsibilities. Through a mixture of pugnacious tenacity and novelist’s intuition he would don the crumpled trench coat of the amateur sleuth, heroically overcome his addiction, and expose the real killer just as the hangman places the noose around Alec’s neck. Losey deliberately subverts this reading, shifting the murder mystery’s middle-class ideological focus toward a more radical social critique. Because we already know that Stanford committed the murder, both the personal significance of the mystery as a metaphor for David’s journey of discovery and the nail-biting temporal import of his

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sleuthing are pre-empted in favour of a more objectively sociological examination of justice – specifically capital punishment – and its relation to class and violence. Eschewing the clichés of individual psychology, Losey instead argues that British justice is itself a form of class violence by restructuring the narrative into what Durgnat calls ‘a network of soul fights between the writer and every individual who 11 refuses to make justice his concern’. Like Jan Van Rooyen in Blind Date and Thomas Hursa in The Romantic Englishwoman (1975), David represents the positive, transformative effect of the outsider artist-asintruder. He is the ultimately constructive figure who saves his son by challenging the smug conceits and hidden agendas of a complacent and self-serving status quo through a resort to the creative power of the bodily passions. It seems that everyone in Time Without Pity ‘has their reasons’ – legal, spiritual and material – for refusing to help David. The most intransigent are the so-called public ‘servants’, the stiff-upper-lip bureaucrats who hide their true emotions behind a rigid faith in the literal letter of the law and its institutional corollary: the ordered, spatial multiplicity of taxonomy and classification. Thus, during a last-ditch attempt to obtain a stay of execution from the Home Office, David finds the under-secretary (Ernest Clarke) superficially sympathetic but ultimately close-minded: ‘The law must be guided by fact, not faith’, he argues, ‘or justice would never be meted out.’ As one might expect, ‘fact’ in Alec’s case is rooted in the normalizing power of investigative procedure and the testimony of experts: psychiatrists, the prison’s governor and medical officer. Each has their own clinical diagnosis that reduces the messy matters of affect and passion to the political anatomy of disciplines and their variously classifiable network of relations and details.12 Alec’s pathology is thus conveniently transformed (and ultimately de-natured) into what Foucault would call a ‘fabricated delinquency’.13 Even his lawyer, Jeremy Clayton (Peter Cushing), is unable to see his own professional role extending beyond the selfimposed limits of legal procedure: ‘I fought this with everything I could. I’ve had two stays of execution granted and there’s nothing more I can do.’ David’s emotionally charged response is aptly contemptuous: ‘Stop acting like a lawyer’, he cries. ‘Tell me what you believe, as a man.’ The representatives of the Third and Fourth Estates are equally narrow and ideologically self-serving. Maxwell (Richard Wordsworth), a reformist MP who heads up the abolitionist lobby, is less interested in saving Alec per se than in using public horror and outrage against his execution as powerful propaganda in the broader, long-term crusade against capital punishment as a whole. Similarly, when David tries to

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recruit the liberal newspapers to his cause in the form of Barnes (George Devine), an old colleague from his Oxford days, he finds nothing but calculated reproach. Instead of the hoped-for offer of a lastminute press appeal to public opinion, Barnes decides to use David himself as a negative example in order to score some cheap ideological points: where was David’s protest when other fathers were fighting to save their sons? He accuses David of egotistically shirking his responsibilities as both a father and a citizen, implying that his alcoholism is but a symbol of a more widespread social malaise. However, the film scores its most virulent points against class society’s spiritual and moral vindictiveness. For example, Jenny Cole’s burlesque dancer sister, Agnes (Joan Plowright), bitterly dismisses David’s desperate enquiries with an atavistic call to the biblical justice of ‘an eye for an eye’. Unaware of her sister’s abusive relationship with Stanford, she is convinced that Alec is both a sadist and a murderer, citing an incident from the previous Christmas Eve when Jenny came home from a date covered in bruises: ‘Let me tell you, Mr Graham. Your son killed my sister and I’m glad he’s going to die.’ The prison chaplain (Peter Copley) is equally unsympathetic, informing David that Alec has accepted his fate and refuses to see him: ‘Your son has given himself over to other hands, more compassionate perhaps than those of the earth.’ Not only is the measured time of British justice slipping inexorably away like sand through the proverbial hourglass, but in the institutional alliance of law, justice and God, David has transcendental time to contend with as well. If Agnes and the chaplain are the respective manifestations of unforgiving ressentiment and bad conscience (Nietzsche’s twin poles of slave morality), others are mercenary on a strictly materialist plane. Vickie Harker (Lois Maxwell), Stanford’s former secretary, sometime mistress and seemingly unshakeable alibi for the night of the murder, has been given an important promotion in return for her unquestioned loyalty. She is aided and abetted by her freeloading mother (Renee Houston), who sees the continuation of Vickie’s relationship with the grateful and generous Stanford as a long-term subsidy for her drinking habit. Indeed, of the main protagonists, only Honor and Brian seem to genuinely support Alec, but they too are significantly compromised. Attracted to Alec’s gentleness, Honor has fallen in love with the boy, and it is her emotional declaration of love on the eve of his execution that ultimately provides the cathartic release for Alec’s repressed emotions and the renewal of his will to live. He breaks down, finally forgiving his father’s shortcomings and accepting his desire to help. However, Honor’s affection is ultimately misdirected, a desire caught in the

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irresolvable abyss between two manifestations of violent impulse. On one hand, Alec is clearly a greatly needed antidote to her victimization at the hands of Stanford’s brutality. On the other hand, we suspect that the supposedly gentle and affectionate Alec is also susceptible to an equally violent naturalism, but unlike Stanford’s boastful and animated bluster, his impulsive tendencies are internalized, innate, static. Indeed, for Deleuze, when viewing Alec, ‘the spectator trembles – as much as the character himself trembles … under the influence of his own contained 14 violence’. McCowen pulls this off brilliantly, for until his cathartic outburst late in the film when he explodes with emotional fury, his only indication of a seething inner passion is the faint quivering of his mouth as he calmly berates his father during their initial jailhouse meeting. Just as Honor’s desire is caught between two different types of violence, one active, the other static, there are also hints that Brian is equally torn between his ambivalent hatred/loyalty to his stepfather and a homosexual attraction to Alec, with whom he has much in common (they have both ‘lost’ their real fathers, one to an industrial accident, the other to the writer’s occupational disease: drink). This has important narrative repercussions, because Brian’s repression of his true feelings (another form of internalized violence, an impulse divorced from real action) serves ultimately to seal Alec’s fate. For when Brian sees Honor surreptitiously leaving Alec’s bedroom on Christmas Eve – she has simply been comforting the boy after Jenny Cole has cruelly refused to spend the holidays with him – he jumps to the mistaken conclusion that they must be having an affair. Jealously repressing the incident, he subsequently fails to mention it at Alec’s trial. This evidence would almost certainly have helped to acquit Alec because it would have proved that he didn’t see Jenny on the night that Agnes claimed her sister was beaten up by her ‘boyfriend’. Instead, it would prove beyond a doubt that Jenny was seeing someone else in addition to Alec – Robert Stanford. It is Stanford, in the form of Leo McKern, who bestrides the film like a behemoth, acting as a catalyst for its many different moral registers. One of the film’s main themes is that Stanford’s brutish animalism has both individual and collective repercussions. Firstly, it is aimed specifically at David Graham as a personalized form of class warfare. At one point, as the pathetic Redgrave drowns his sorrows in a Soho pub, Stanford delights in flaunting his power by hinting that he is the real murderer, knowing full well that David is physically and legally powerless to do anything about it. Secondly, this animalism is also symptomatic of a more ingrained violence that pervades the whole

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fabric of the film, from capital punishment’s justification of institutionalized murder to each of the main characters’ variously ‘perverse’ moral weaknesses. Moreover, this violence transcends the usual Balkanized categories of identity politics, cutting a swathe across clear divisions of class, gender and sexual orientation. Isolated into themselves by their internalized naturalist tendencies, all the main characters turn to other, more neurotically charged activities as outlets. Indeed, through all David’s interviews and meetings runs the common Losey thread of the contagion of violence and its corollary, exchange value. These spectres are linked either through the outward symptom of alcoholism (David, Alec and Mrs Harker), the seductive power of Stanford’s money (a common lure for Honor, Brian, Vickie Harker and Jenny Cole), or more marginalized ‘vices’, such as Stanford’s obsession with sports cars and speed, and Brian’s repressed homosexuality.15 More importantly, the film’s negative moral judgement of these characters inevitably turns full circle, rebounding and ultimately settling on its biblical, Adam-like symbol of the fallen father, David Graham. In this way the characters’ selfish lack of concern for Alec’s fate mirrors the writer’s own initial complacency. This eternal return indicates the profound nature of cyclical, immanent time as impulse’s conduit. Usually in Losey, the victims of impulse resort to an over-reliance on the structure of segmented time as a security blanket against the annihilating effects of non-linear duration. The irony here is that in Time Without Pity the situation is reversed: it is measured time that fatefully signifies the impending arrival of the grim reaper, while the characters’ main objective is to escape its effects by resorting to an artificially induced oblivion. This explains why the film is rife with conventional thriller staples such as the ubiquitous clocks and watches. They either index – much like Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon – the implacable countdown to Alec’s execution or, through the stock establishing shot of the Houses of Parliament and a chiming Big Ben, provide a metonym for the indifference of the parliamentary establishment. The film’s inherent ambivalence lies in the fact that the temporal means of escape – the oblivion produced through the intoxication of alcohol or speed – is often equally contiguous with violent and destructive behaviour, unless safely harnessed to the creative impetus of art. David is thus doubly fallen and contemptible, because he has not only failed as a father but also frittered away his talent as a writer by drowning his capacity for constructive affirmation in the bottom of a whisky glass. The most baroque manifestation of this slippage between different temporalities is the case of Mrs Harker, who blissfully surrounds

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herself with an abundance of loudly ticking clocks in a pathological attempt to control time. Unlike David, who constantly checks his watch as a signifier of his enslavement to the race against time, Mrs Harker uses the alarm clocks as a constant reminder of a measured temporality that she no longer needs to acknowledge: ‘One of the little pleasures in life … I can now give myself. Just to hear it ring and know that you don’t have to go anywhere. It’s wonderful.’ However, her dependence on both alcohol and Vickie’s (read: Stanford’s) money suggests that this victory over the workaday annoyances of being ‘on time’ is a pyrrhic one, for her temporal freedom is inexorably tied to the twin ghosts of exchange value and addictive intoxication. She has traded in one temporal dependency for another, one far more unforgiving. Like Mrs Harker, David is the victim of a similar temporal double bind. While his entrapment by measured time is directly expressed by the film’s breathless pace and relentlessly fatalistic narrative momentum, Losey also uses mise-en-scène and radical shifts in the film’s tonal range to envelop David in a phenomenologically disabling space–time. Unlike Stanford, whose highly charged, dynamic body is defined through its active interaction with the stark chiaroscuro and low-key lighting normally associated with the highly plastic and tactile qualities of film noir, Director of Photography (DP) Freddie Francis shot David in a series of bleached-out, almost overexposed black and white images with few mediating grey tones and minimal contrast. This enveloped the film’s protagonist in a washed-out primordial void, replacing depth and the tangible ‘flesh’ of the world with pure light and movement. This significantly reduces David’s intentionality in relation to his surroundings, cutting off his exploratory ‘knowing touch’, which would normally allow him to project himself outside his body and orient himself with and through external phenomena. He is denied a fundamental means of bodily interaction, what Merleau-Ponty calls his ability to ‘constitute the world’: I am able to touch effectively only if the phenomenon finds an echo within me, if it accords with a certain nature of consciousness, and if the organ which goes out to meet it is synchronized with it. The unity and identity of the tactile phenomenon do not come about through any synthesis of recognition in the concept, they are founded upon the unity 16 and identity of the body as a synergic totality.

Addled by drink and racked by guilt, David has completely lost the facility of such synchronicity. Although he regains it to some extent in his meetings with Alec, finding a double of himself in the image of his son, it is at the same time radically and damagingly displaced through

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the series of crystalline mirror images that transform the affective qualities of human flesh into a fugitive spectre. When, for example, David first visits Alec in jail shortly after his arrival at Heathrow, Losey frames their cantankerous conversation as a series of shot/reverse shots, cutting back and forth across a dividing window screen. Not only are the two men always separated by the presence of a prison guard (symbolic of both the literal and Oedipal law that divides them), but one of the pair is always visually doubled in the pane of glass, setting up a series of temporal correspondences between father and son and their respective ghost images. Thus when Alec berates David for not being at the trial – he was on one of his protracted drunks – Losey places the camera behind Alec so that we see, from left to right, the back of Alec’s head in the foreground, a prison guard and David on the other side of the window, and then Alec’s full face reflected in the glass. In this way, although Alec is disconnected spatially from his father by the actual physical barriers of the window and the guard, he is also linked directly with David through the doubling caused by his reflection, suggesting, in effect, that Alec is a spectral incarnation of the alcoholic father. This relationship is reinforced later in the conversation when, in a reverse shot, David bemoans the fact that Alec is doing nothing to help himself. ‘But why?’ Alec replies. ‘Why should I wait until I turn into something like you? Long before this happened I started to drink.’ The combination of virtual and actual images thus represents an acknowledgement of the two men’s shared vice, as if their actual physical bodies were haunted by an inherited illness that dates back several generations. However, as in all eternal recurrences, time always returns as difference, so that the mirror motif creates a circuit, one that points to the future as well as the past. As we cut to the other side of the window, we now discover that it is David’s pained and ravaged face that is reflected in the glass, doubling Alec’s stony countenance. The boy’s zombie-like, protective shell serves two purposes: it is both a protection against Alec’s need for a father who has so often betrayed him and a defence against the idea of death. ‘I’m going to die in a few hours and it’ll be over’, he states, matter-of-factly. ‘It’s too awful when you think there’s hope.’ Now, just as David’s alcoholism passes over to the son, so Alec’s calm fatalism displaces onto his father. As a result, David’s reflection in the glass becomes a premonition of his own death at film’s end, inextricably linking the film’s key symptoms of impulse – violence, alcoholism and oblivion – in an inextricable temporal web of past, present and future. In contrast, Stanford is all body and no soul, a seemingly invulnerable

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proletarian leviathan who enacts his own form of sadistic justice through the endemic effects of his inherent violence. Certainly, as the film’s representative of becoming-animal he stands far beyond conventional reason or moral distinctions between good and evil. Instead, as portrayed by McKern, Stanford personifies an explosive somatic spontaneity. ‘Never before have we been so close to human beings, their flesh, their nerves, their pulse beat’, writes Michel Mourlet of the Australian-born actor. ‘The madness of domination and pride, contained in every fibre of his powerful body, explodes in fantastic fury, the 17 manifestation of an infinite lacerating passion.’ Unfortunately, Stanford turns out to be yet another self-destructive organism. He sublimates his superabundant passion and violent misogyny into the intoxicating palliatives of dynamism and speed. This is Stanford’s drug, his equivalent of David’s alcoholism. By obliterating measured time under the controlled conditions of the test track or ‘proving grounds’, he is able to block out any residues of past guilt by translating the psychological ramifications of sex and violence into purely machine-like metaphors. ‘Well, she stood up to it’, he excitedly tells his engineers after testing his new prototype: ‘She took everything I could give her’ (unlike, of course, the car’s flesh and blood equivalent, Jenny Cole). This sense of movement as a perverse form of becomingmachine has close affinities to the proto-fascist aestheticism of the Italian Futurists, who also saw the dynamism of speed as a means of conquering the unpleasant banalities of measured time. Indeed, the Futurist poet Marinetti could easily have spoken for Stanford when he wrote that ‘the intoxication of great speeds in cars is nothing but the joy of feeling oneself fused with the only divinity’. ‘Through intuition’, he added, ‘we will conquer the seemingly unconquerable hostility that separates our human flesh from the metal of motors.’18 Losey expresses this Futurist paean in a remarkable dawn scene, where, convinced that Stanford is the murderer, David follows him to the proving grounds to try and force him to confess to the authorities. As Stanford puts his latest prototype through its paces, David tries to flag him down on the track by waving his trench coat at the oncoming vehicle. The result is a perverse parody of the corrida, but the matador in this case is completely outmatched. David is almost run down by the brutal force of the sports car’s acceleration, as Stanford, driving furiously, literally becomes the personification of the bull/machine. However, as one might expect with a Ben Barzman script, raw brutality is ultimately overcome by the joyful passions of bodily self-sacrifice. After the test drive, David follows Stanford to his trackside office, which is dominated by the outward fetishes of his perverse will-to-power: a

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trophy-filled presentation case and a grotesque, full-length portrait of McKern as a proud captain of industry. Not surprisingly, Stanford ridicules David’s evidence. ‘There’s nothing to connect me with her’, he boasts, ‘do you understand that? I was never seen with Jenny Cole.’ Instead of giving himself up, he cynically offers to buy David off by keeping him in whisky for the rest of his life. As ever, Stanford reduces everything to exchange value: ‘Agnes Cole? Agnes will be like her sister Jenny. Only she’ll be cheaper.’ But David has a superabundance of affirmative passion, which he channels into the ultimate self-sacrifice by embracing death as a means of affirming life. After calling the lawyer, Clayton, with a warning that Stanford is trying to kill him, David deliberately provokes a struggle with the former mechanic and forces him to shoot him at point blank range. ‘You didn’t think I’d let Alec die just like that, did you?’ he gasps, before falling dead. The film ends as Honor and Brian burst in, just in time to see Stanford planting the gun in David’s hand to feign a suicide. Stanford’s smug superiority unravels like a cheap suit. As he kneels at Honor’s feet, sobbing into her dress like a remorseful schoolboy, Brian calls Clayton just minutes ahead of Alec’s execution: ‘I think you’d better ring the Home Office right away. My father has just killed David Graham.’ David’s death is a creative act far more profound than the great novel he never wrote. What was once virtual – the work of art that might have been, a ghost waiting for an incarnation – is fully embodied at film’s end, but ironically as a corpse, so that another might live. Although The Gypsy and the Gentleman’s (1957) intruder and loss of sovereignty themes provide us with an important thematic and historical segue between The Sleeping Tiger and The Servant, Losey’s lavish costume drama has always been one of his least favourite films. ‘I think it’s largely a piece of junk and I’d just as soon nobody saw it again’,19 he admitted to Gordon Gow in 1971. Much of the film’s shortcomings have to do with Losey’s lack of artistic control over the production as a whole. With the help and influence of Dirk Bogarde, Losey had just signed a three-picture deal with James Archibald at the Rank Organization. Their first project, with Bogarde in the lead, was supposed to have been Bird of Paradise, scripted by Howard Koch from a short story, ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’. Unfortunately Koch was unable to produce a satisfactory screenplay and the project was abandoned. Then Archibald was unexpectedly fired and replaced by the unpopular John Davis, who sent Losey a series of substandard scripts, which he promptly rejected. Desperately in need of work and exposure, Losey eventually went against his best instincts and agreed to direct Gypsy, a period melodrama adapted by the popular novelist Janet Green from

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Nina Warner Hooke’s story, ‘Darkness I Leave You’. Losey must have felt that his Hollywood past had come back to haunt him because, echoing his experience with Howard Hughes at RKO, executive interference continued throughout the shoot and into post-production. Finally, after Davis commissioned a heavy, lugubrious score by the Hungarian composer Hans May without his approval, Losey quit the picture before its completion. Then, to add insult to injury, after the film’s failure at the box office, Davis cancelled the remainder of Losey’s three-picture deal. Despite Losey’s dismissal of the film, Gypsy is worthy of detailed scrutiny, not least because of its visual detail. This is largely the result of Losey’s adherence to long-established British studio genre conventions that guaranteed the overall narrative consistency and ‘look’ of the film, which in turn exploited and satisfied audience expectations. Julian Petley, for example, calls Gypsy ‘an extraordinary melodrama in the Gainsborough mould’, by which he means the popular series of visceral melodramas that were released under the Islington studio’s signature in the 1940s, mostly supervised by the creative team of Edward Black and the Box family: Sydney, his wife Muriel and sister Betty.20 Following Marcia Landy’s extremely useful classification of the typical Gainsborough formula, Gypsy can be described as a hybrid of two studio staples: the historical costume melodrama and the so-called ‘woman’s 21 film’. The first, epitomized by films such as Leslie Arliss’s The Man in Gray (1943) and Wicked Lady (1945), focuses on family intrigue in closed-off, often remote aristocratic environments, where sexual conflict is closely tied to differences in social class. In this case, ‘one of the women, usually played by Margaret Lockwood, is frequently an interloper ruthlessly pushing her way up the social ladder at the expense of a more aristocratic female, frequently played by Patricia Roc. The films are addressed to the female spectator and view events from her perspective.’22 The second type – the ‘woman’s film’ – is usually set in a contemporary context and includes features such as Love Story (also Leslie Arliss, 1944), and They Were Sisters (Arthur Crabtree, 1945). This genre is equally formulaic, but adds a healthy dose of sex and violence to the predictable fare of romantic fantasy and familial conflict. According to Sue Aspinall, the basic formula ‘seemed to be based on the conflict between two different types of woman. One woman represents the 23 virtues of marriage and duty, the other, unrestrained libido.’ Gypsy follows this schema quite closely, but muddies the genre’s usual clear-cut class distinctions (aristocratic virtue v. lower-class promiscuity and ambition) through a series of displacements, so that traditional separations of class, sexuality and violence end up in a

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destructive ménage of mutual annihilation. Also, in contrast to Gainsborough’s usual sanitization of its historical settings, Losey stressed the period’s innate lack of gentility:

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I decided that we should make an extravagant melodrama and at the same time try and present something of the real feeling of the Regency period where there were no toilets, and people bathed once a week if they were lucky, in a tub, and the gentlemen, when they got drunk, pissed in the fireplace. Of a period that was cruel and dirty and not just lovely and elegant – with brutal boxing matches and all the rest.24

Like Don Giovanni, with which it shares a number of historical and sexual themes, Gypsy is yet another Losey film caught in the interregnum between orders and classes. This stalling of the dialectical motor causes violent libidinal symptoms to leak out and ultimately overwhelm a superficially genteel social surface. Firstly, the film’s historical context – Regency England (1811–20) – is itself stuck in the awkward limbo of displaced sovereignty during the last mad years of King George III. Secondly, the first decades of the nineteenth century were a period of radical social and economic change, wrought by the Industrial Revolution and a surge in population growth and urbanization, which finally polished off the remaining residues of the old feudal system.25 However, this transition was far from smooth. The landed aristocracy, whose power was based on a genealogy of titled inheritance and birthright, was still flourishing despite the emergence of the industrial bourgeoisie and a radically restructured economy based on vastly increased liquid capital and technological innovation. As the economic historian Eric Hobsbawm points out, the British aristocracy and gentry were … very little affected by industrialization, except for the better. Their rents swelled with the demand for farm produce, the expansion of cities (whose soil they owned) and of mines, forges and railways (which were situated on their estates) … If the eighteenth century was a glorious age for aristocracy, the era of George IV (as regent and king) was paradise.26

In typical Losey fashion, Gypsy’s class dynamic focuses not on the thriving and affluent aristocratic majority but on an anomalous wastrel, who quickly falls prey to the wiles of a seductress. This allows Losey to upset conventional Marxist dynamics through the introduction of an ahistorical third party, that of the nomadic gypsy, another Gainsborough staple, whose volatile, primordial sexual appetite adds a spicy libidinal seasoning to what might have been an otherwise bland dialectical gruel. Gypsy’s class dynamic centres on Sir Paul Deverill (Keith Michell), the charismatic but profligate baronet of Deverill Court who has

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dissipated both his fortune and his character via a poisonous combination of beer, wenches and gambling. Indeed, our first view of the dissolute rake is in the cellar of a local tavern as he wagers on how long he can wrestle a greased piglet. Help is at hand however in the form of Ruddock (Newton Blick), a neighbouring landowner whose matronly daughter Vanessa (Clare Austin) is betrothed to Deverill. Although it’s clear that Deverill doesn’t reciprocate the earnest Vanessa’s love, as the two men ride in their carriage across the open fields to Deverill Court they reach a mutual understanding of the marriage’s economic advantages. ‘If she makes nothing more of you than a decent landlord, or a good master’, proclaims Ruddock, ‘you may be of some use in the world. You can’t pay your servants in the coin of charm forever!’ Deverill is resigned to the end of his self-indulgent carousing, likening himself to a hunted fox: ‘It seems I’ve been run to ground. Well, I’ve had a good run.’ Ruddock’s hopes that Vanessa’s good sense and breeding will turn Deverill into a responsible manager of his estate underline the political importance of the historical lineage of the family seat.27 Although Deverill has a daughter, Hattie (Catherine Feller), who works as a kitchen skivvy, she is the illegitimate offspring of a gypsy mother, thereby necessitating the arranged marriage and a legitimate bloodline of succession to secure the property’s future. However, this heritage is threatened on two fronts. Firstly, Deverill’s chaste sister Sarah (June Laverick) is betrothed to marry John Patterson (Lyndon Brook), an earnest young medical student, much to Sir Paul’s snobbish disgust. ‘A doctor’s wife?’ he snaps. ‘What sort of life is that?’ He would prefer her to have a London season where she could meet eligible (read: aristocratic) young men. But Sarah is stubborn. Her declaration, ‘I’ll marry John, or no one’, marks her as the genre’s representative of responsible marriage and wifely duty. Moreover, her determination to marry for love, even if it means stooping into the lower reaches of the bourgeoisie, has a powerful supporter in Lady Ayrton, Deverill’s visiting Aunt Caroline (Helen Haye). Lady Ayrton is well versed in the dissolute ways of the Deverill line, having seen similar degenerate traits in Sir Paul’s impulsive father. This underlines the negative side of the in-bred, upper-class genealogy: the contagious, atavistic strain that is handed down, like syphilis, from one generation to another. The film suggests that Sarah can only avoid passing on the harmful effects of this inheritance by marrying out of her class, indicating that a potentially destructive sexual desire can only be safely tamed when attached to middle-class mores and exchange value, in effect another marriage of convenience between Marx and Freud. Refusing to help pay off Deverill’s debts, Lady Ayrton strongly advises

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her nephew to marry Vanessa and take advantage of her lucrative dowry. Meanwhile, she will devote her fiscal energies to Sarah: ‘She’ll not go to young Patterson with an empty purse. You may depend on it.’ More amused than angry, Deverill throws down the gauntlet:

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‘She’ll stay a maid until she’s 21. You can depend on that.’ ‘Cross swords with me if you must, Deverill, but remember, women have a way of getting round men like you.’ ‘Care to make a wager?’

Deverill’s challenge marks an important temporal fork in the film’s narrative trajectory, because it becomes the stimulus for a subsequent clause in Lady Ayrton’s will that Sarah must marry before she’s 21 in order to secure her inheritance. The codicil is a test of Sarah’s will-tolove against Sir Paul’s more class-conscious objections: if she falters, Deverill will get all the money. The second threat to Deverill’s sovereignty comes from outside conventional class hierarchies altogether. As Deverill’s and Ruddock’s coach rambles through the picturesque English countryside, it fatefully crosses paths with two Romany gypsies, the appropriately named Belle (Melina Mercouri) and her sly, conniving lover Jess (Patrick McGoohan). ‘I’d like fine to ride in a carriage’, sighs Belle, her ambitious sights clearly set on better things. ‘I’d like fine to ride the horses’, responds Jess. ‘You like horses better than women’, she complains. ‘Find ’em more reliable’, confirms her lover, who understands far better than Deverill the different libidinal registers of becoming-animal that pervade the fabric of the film. The narrative’s twin trajectories intersect at a travelling fair where Deverill and Ruddock are excitedly laying bets on the fortunes of Sir Paul’s prize-fighting protégé, the Game Pup (Nigel Green). Following a brutal fight, where Losey deliberately points up the blood lust of the crowd, Belle steals the Game Pup’s fight purse from Deverill’s pocket. Far from being angry, the good-natured rogue is smitten with this wild ‘beast’ dressed in flaming red. He saves her from the racist lynch mob, which has set upon the ‘gyppo’ with rabid cries of ‘Put her in the stocks!’ Observing that Deverill leaves Belle with a gift of the purse – ‘for your trouble’ – the opportunistic Jess quickly grasps that they’re onto a good thing: ‘There’s a pigeon here to be plucked. A fat ’un.’ That night during a torrential downpour, the two gypsies put their plan into action. On the way home from his engagement party at Ruddock’s, Deverill’s carriage is flagged down by the rain-soaked Belle, who claims to have lost her way in the storm. Exploiting Deverill’s wanton lust and Sarah’s sense of noblesse oblige, she wangles an

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invitation to stay the night at Deverill Court, and quickly manoeuvres her way into Sir Paul’s bed and, the next morning, his bathtub. The thieving magpie/guest is safely in the host nest. During the carriage ride we also learn that, like Hattie, the sensuous Belle (the film’s manifestation of unrestrained libido) is also the half-caste daughter of a noble father and gypsy mother. As Deverill explains to Sarah, it is a Romany custom never to rear the half-child, so Belle is inextricably caught between two irreconcilable races, unassimilable into either ‘civilized’ or gypsy society. Cast out into the wilderness, she is literally a primordial child of the originary world, raised, as she puts it, by ‘the wind, the trees, the sun, brook, the night’. Her wild naturalism is reinforced by the mise-en-scène, for Belle is invariably linked with torrential rainstorms, verdant woods and running streams, or shown on horseback, galloping with feral delight across the Deverill estate. Belle’s connection with Hattie has further implications. Firstly, it suggests that in the form of his unrecognized bastard daughter, Sir Paul’s household was already imbued with the marginalized mark of difference long before Belle’s arrival on the scene, already ‘tainted’ by the product of miscegenation. Like Frank’s unleashing of Glenda’s immanent, albeit dormant desire in The Sleeping Tiger, Deverill’s pigeon was ripe for Belle’s plucking all along. Secondly, through the example of Hattie, race is by its very nature a form of class, suffering the same kinds of discrimination, either through complete exclusion from the class hierarchy or relegation to the role of servant. As a woman, Hattie’s birthright through Deverill is worthless in face of her racial impurity via her mother. Belle’s subversive role in the film is to invert Hattie’s fate by exploiting the libidinal charms inherited from her mother as a means of parlaying her claims to the paternal half of her birthright. Thus, as she successfully seduces Deverill into marriage, she states: ‘I’ve lived my mother’s way too long. If I’m to live my father’s, I’ll be the lady of the house … Make me a lady, Deverill. Make me my father’s daughter.’ Besotted by Belle’s animal sexuality, Deverill breaks off his engagement with Vanessa and weds the gypsy. Despite her association with the underclass, Belle has little or no solidarity with their plight. She is portrayed as an essentially selfish and negative character, a Regency femme fatale, rather than a vigorous and life-affirming natural woman. Her ‘passion’ for Deverill is entirely manufactured, and, once she gains possession of the house, she apes the snobbishness of her betters by evicting her fellow gypsies from ‘her land.’ She is narrow, greedy, harsh, and is sexual only with her gypsy lover, whom she considers a real man and who slaps her and treats her with contempt.28

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Belle is attracted to Jess’s indifferent self-sufficiency, just as Deverill is infatuated by hers. But luxury has made the morally soft Deverill unfit to deal with this sort of atavistic struggle. It’s less a question of Marxian dialectics, of class antagonism, than a Darwinian survival of the fittest that only the sexually aggressive and emotionally self-disciplined Jess is really equipped to endure. Take away Deverill’s money and his position – both rapidly dwindling – and there’s little left but bluff bravado. Many critics have seen Belle as a counterpart to Barrett in The Servant, the baroque intriguer who insinuates himself into the sexual graces of his master all the better to usurp his sovereignty, but as Caute rightly points out, ‘to compare the grotesque Belle to the subtle Barrett, as interlopers, is to give comparative analysis a bad name’.29 Surely it is McGoohan’s understated Jess who is closer to the wiles of Barrett, the cerebral mastermind behind the animal seduction, the man who manipulates Belle in the same way that Barrett uses Vera as a sexual Trojan horse. Jess translates Belle’s ill-gotten gains into a far more tangible and practical currency – his highly prized collection of horses – than Belle’s bankrupt title and inevitable ostracism by high society. As it turns out, Belle’s best-laid plans collapse when she discovers that she’s ‘married a pack of bills and a mortgaged house’. At this point the film undergoes a marked shift in narrative register, veering off from class- and sexually-inspired melodrama into labyrinthine political intrigue, much to the narrative’s thematic detriment. Enter, all too conveniently, Lady Ayrton’s crooked lawyer, Brook (the obsequious Mervyn Johns), with important news from abroad. Mistakenly assuming that he’s yet another creditor come to demand his money, Deverill palms him off onto the unsuspecting Belle. This is a grave miscalculation, because Brook has actually come to inform Sir Paul that Lady Ayrton is dying in Rome and has left her entire fortune to Sarah, provided she marries before she’s 21. Determined to be Lady Deverill and financially solvent, Belle conspires with Brook to misrepresent the will to Sarah, stating that she must marry after her upcoming birthday, thereby ensuring that she will forfeit her entire inheritance to Sir Paul. Fortunately, Sarah discovers the deception after stumbling across the real will and decides to repair to London immediately to marry Patterson. On her way, however, she’s kidnapped by Jess and held captive in a summer house on the estate. The gypsies’ plan is to hold her for a few weeks until the birthday deadline has passed. Belle recruits Deverill to the scheme by promising him the one thing that will ensure his future sovereignty: the male heir that she claims to be carrying. Sir Paul is now locked in an irresolvable moral crisis, caught between his impulsive sexual desire for Belle, familial duty to his innocent sister

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(but also, by extension, to her unthinkable bourgeois marriage), and the continuation of his own, albeit racially devalued, aristocratic lineage. Ultimately, like Don Giovanni, a libidinal manifestation of a similar interregnum, Deverill makes his pact with the Devil. As he admits to Belle: ‘I was only half-bad when I met you. Now I’m Satan’s man.’ Sarah is eventually rescued when Hattie and her servant boyfriend, Will (David Hart), stumble across her hiding place during a midnight tryst. This forces the determined conspirators into ever more extreme measures. They kidnap Sarah from a London inn where she awaits the arrival of Patterson, and institutionalize her in a lunatic asylum under the care of Brook’s scheming partner, Dr Forrester (Laurence Naismith). All they require is Deverill’s written approval, so they conspire to get him drunk and manipulate his unwitting hand into signing the commitment papers. With Sarah now requiring a second rescue, the crisis brings together two unlikely bedfellows: the alliance of the middle-class medic, Patterson, and the theatrical genius of the performing arts. During the ongoing machinations at Deverill Court, Patterson has been living in London at Hatchard’s Inn, where he has become friendly with Mrs Haggard (Flora Robson), a veteran stage actress. She is famous for her beautiful mop of red hair, popularly dubbed ‘The Legend’ because its colour has never dimmed in fifty years. Mrs Haggard has come to champion Sarah’s rights to both her marriage to Patterson and her legal inheritance. On learning of Sarah’s incarceration in Forrester’s bedlam, Haggard puts her acting skills to work by impersonating Lady Ayrton and demanding Sarah’s release. The basis of the rescue is thus a form of theatrical deceit, paralleling the aesthetic resolution of The Intimate Stranger. As in the earlier film, Losey underlines the Nietzschean deconstruction of truth and lie by disclosing the duplicitous nature of Mrs Haggard’s unique genius. When Patterson objects that she couldn’t possibly pass herself off as Lady Ayrton because she is too well known, she proceeds to drop the mask of her career-long deception. ‘The Legend’ turns out to be a wig, hiding a frightful mop of grey hair underneath. The ploy fails, however, when Forrester recognizes Haggard from her equally famous voice. But with fame goes class privilege, not to mention friends in high places. ‘Turn that girl over to me’, demands Haggard, ‘or I’ll post to Bow Street, have this place investigated and you hounded to the poor house if I have to kneel before the Prince Regent to do it.’ One of the film’s more Brechtian commentaries lies in its overt parallel between Mrs Haggard and Belle. Like Brecht’s libidinal outlaw Baal, both are marginal characters who attempt to rise in society by giving free rein to their intuitive qualities, one through sexual mani-

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pulation, the other through the more socially acceptable deceptions of the theatrical arts. The implication is that within the tightly woven fabric of Britain’s rigid, patriarchal hierarchy, there are few other options available to ambitious outsiders – especially women. Mrs Haggard has simply sublimated her potentially destructive impulse for more affirmative, creative purposes than Belle’s mercenary lust for money and social status, once again underlining Losey’s ongoing dictum that art and violence are merely flipsides of the same impulsive coin. In addition, Belle’s racial marginalisation has its equivalent within the Haggard camp in the form of Coco (Louis Aquilina), the actress’s black boy servant, whom she dresses like an Indian maharajah. Coco thus serves as a metonymic displacement of Mrs Haggard’s own ‘Orientalist’ status as an ‘exotic’ artist. At the same time, however, Coco’s ‘difference’ is safely domesticated and theatricalized as part of yet another master– servant relationship, much like that between Deverill and Hattie. Significantly, it is the intuitive Coco who secretly follows the kidnapped Sarah to Forrester’s asylum and later provides the clue for her discovery by Patterson. Instead of roundly condemning subaltern figures in the exclusive form of the manipulative Belle and Jess, Losey is also careful to use racially marginalized characters as sympathetic helpers, for it is Hattie and Coco who play the key roles in helping to spring the captive Sarah. True to the requirements of the Gainsborough genre, the film ends with a nail-biting chase. Just as Sarah and Patterson are reunited in the asylum courtyard, Belle and Jess turn up in one last frantic attempt to waylay the would-be heiress. Jess knocks out Patterson, but not before the medical student has bought Sarah and Mrs Haggard enough time to make their escape. As Belle and Jess set off in hot pursuit, Losey cuts to a long shot of the two rival coaches – framed parallel to the picture plane – as they race alongside the banks of a river. Losey uses dialectical movement to brilliant effect here, for as the camera pans from left to right in order to follow the similar trajectory of the carriages at the top of the picture frame, the river moves in the opposite direction – from right to left – at the bottom of the frame. This establishes – as a clever variation on Eisenstein – a kinaesthetic, dialectical juxtaposition, not between shots or sequences as in Potemkin, but within the spatiotemporal integrity of the discrete take. In this way, the movement of the carriages, representing the debased cultural lust for the spectres of money and inheritance, is in direct contradiction with the inexorable movement of nature, but is also linked within the immanent continuity of a common space–time. In ontological terms, such a contradiction can only be resolved through a form of immanent overcoming, in which the

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dialectic between movements is synthesized as a unity of affirmation and negation, Eros and Thanatos, nomos and physis. This, as we shall see, is achieved through ‘being-towards-death’ for, as Derrida argues, ‘only a being-to-death can think, desire, project, indeed “live” immortality 30 as such’. Deverill, who has been put wise to Sarah’s capture by the scheming Brook, gallops up to block the path of the two gypsies as Jess and Belle’s carriage clatters toward him across a porticoed bridge. Belle bites Jess’s hand to make him rein in the horses, but the carriage hits the bridge wall and the two gypsies are thrown over the side into the river below. Jess is a strong swimmer and makes his way to the opposite shore, leaving the helpless Belle to fend for herself. Deverill leaps from the bridge to save her, but Belle rejects his help and his love, crying out instead for the coldly indifferent Jess. ‘You’re safe now’, whispers Deverill as he pulls her to the bridge support. ‘Not without Jess’, pleads Belle, ‘let me go to Jess.’ But Deverill won’t let go. Like Glenda making a pact with Thanatos at the end of The Sleeping Tiger, Deverill has more ‘gothic’ plans for his bride: ‘You’ll go with me, gypsy.’ Once again emulating Porphyria’s lover, Deverill turns one drowning into two, locking his Belle in a passionate underwater kiss as, hair billowing in the current, they both sink to their watery doom. The water metaphor thus returns us full circle to the lovers’ first mutual seduction during the torrential downpour, but instead of suggesting nature’s correlate for healthy Dionysian lust, it now produces a sobering return to the primordial, as if the destructive nature of Belle and Deverill’s passion had caused their material bodies to succumb to Heraclitus’s inexorable ontological flow. By pitting Belle’s nomadic evil against Deverill’s degenerate aristocratic weakness, Losey sets up a didactic distance from his chief protagonists, both high and low. For Durgnat, this is a case where ‘the forcefulness of Deverill and Belle, in itself a glorious explosion of lifeforce against class barriers, becomes irresponsible and predatory, and concludes in masochism’.31 As a consequence, audience identification is shifted away from the genre’s conventional romantic heroes and their destructive sensual ardour toward sexually repressed secondary characters like Sarah and Patterson, whose prim middle-class sensibilities are equally unappetizing. The film therefore sets up an identificatory vacuum between the represented orders, so that we instead look to a protagonist that is all the more insistent because of its absence: the collective hero of the working class. However, it is also clear that the proletariat is not yet ready to take its rightful historical place. Instead we are left with the void of the interregnum: a moribund aristocracy not yet

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ready to die, a middle class lacking in sensuality, and a working class reduced to a spectre without solidarity. After the melodramatic excesses of Time Without Pity and The Gypsy and the Gentleman it is tempting to see Blind Date as an emotive anticlimax. However, despite its lower melodramatic pitch and relatively sober realism, the film confirms Losey’s trademark skill in teasing socially gestic performances from his actors, as well as his growing maturity in imbuing mise-en-scène with multiple layers of temporal and class distinction. Losey had originally planned to shoot a Barzman script about the atomic bomb called SOS Pacific for Sydney Box. Hardy Krüger, the popular young German actor, was to star with financing from Columbia. Alas, the blacklisted Losey and Barzman names were still politically anathema to the Hollywood studio and the deal collapsed. Instead, with backing from Independent Artists (a small production company run by Julian Wintle and Leslie Park), Box came up with Blind Date as a last-minute substitute for the same creative team.32 The proposed screenplay had been adapted from a Leigh Howard novel by 33 Eric Ambler, the popular British author of mystery-thrillers. Losey disliked Ambler’s script, so Barzman and another blacklistee, Millard Lampell, were brought in for a quick, four-week rewrite. To alleviate time constraints, Losey organized a division of labour whereby Barzman took care of smoothing out the ‘whodunit’ plot while Lampell focused exclusively on the flashback love scenes, which gave a distinctive stylistic contrast to the film’s two main temporal levels. With the exception of Barzman’s early drafts of The Damned, this was to be Losey’s last collaboration with blacklisted Hollywood writers. Barzman and Lampell’s changes are significant, because they lay a strong foundation for the film’s overtly self-conscious class focalization, which in turn generates different analytic registers within the narrative. The investigating detective, for example, becomes the son of a chauffeur (played by the son of a Welsh miner, Stanley Baker), while Ambler’s rich American oil engineer protagonist – a self-assured ‘stud’ who drives a red sports car – is transformed into the insecure ex-coal miner, Jan van Rooyen (Krüger), an impoverished, bus-riding Dutch painter living in London. For the first time in a Losey film, class-conscious characters with bona fide proletarian credentials are directly allied to both the rational aptitudes of the seasoned investigator and the instinctive qualities of the aesthete. The usual character clichés of thriller convention are rejected in favour of a more archaeological exhumation of various levels of difference, focusing on the complex weave of class, gender, nationality, and the outsider status of the exile-cum-foreigner as creative artist.

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The film opens to the sounds of young love, evoked by the lightly sprung glissandi of Richard Rodney Bennett’s chirpy jazz score. Jan, clutching a posy of violets, skips friskily along the Thames embankment on his way to a late-afternoon tryst at the mews flat of his French girlfriend, Jacqueline Cousteau. There’s no one home, but as the front door is unlocked Jan decides to wait for his date inside. The music switches to loud be-bop as Jan throws down his coat, turns up the stereo and starts to explore. This is Jan’s first visit to the flat and, obviously blinkered by the first rush of true love (as a less-than-objective observer of his surroundings, Jan is very much the blind date of the film’s title), he is seduced by its apparent good taste and opulence and titillated by its overtly feminine accoutrements. Cahiers critic Jean Douchet sees this scene as an excellent example of Losey’s ability to reveal Jan’s character through the precision of gest, for, ‘excited by this adventure, his true self reveals itself in his attitudes as well as in his reactions, and is apparent in each of his gestures. And because they are the reflection of that true self, his gestures are as rare as they are precious … Everything in Jan betrays an unsullied innocence, the unbroken heart of a child eager to be enchanted by love.’34 When Jan steps into Jacqueline’s rococo boudoir, the effect is both charming and comic, for whether he is taking an inquisitive whiff from a bottle of perfume or washing his hands with scented soap in the ornate sink, Jan acts less like an experienced womanizer than as an easily impressed rube masquerading as a manabout-town. The mood takes on more sinister tones when, on returning to the living room, Jan finds an envelope with his name on it. It’s stuffed full of money. However, before we can figure out the money’s significance – is it a payment, a gift, or a bribe? – Jan’s reverie is cut short by the abrupt intrusion of the police: the young man is the subject of a criminal investigation. Unlike in his American films, where the police are invariably synonymous with the proletariat, Losey delineates Scotland Yard’s class difference in strictly dialectical terms. Stanley Baker’s brusque, working-class Inspector Morgan – a bullying, nonconformist Welshman who nurses a cold as heavy as the chip on his tweed-clad shoulder – is opposed to the tailored, Savile Row unctuousness of Inspector Westover (John Van Eyssen), whose old-school-tie connections mark him as an Oxbridge insider. After some verbal fencing, during which Morgan and Jan find themselves equally matched in ego and conceit, the inspector pulls rank and informs the Dutchman that he is in serious trouble. Jan defends his legal right to be there and demands to see Jacqueline. Happy to oblige, Morgan leads him into the bedroom and shows Jan her dead body,

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metonymically reduced to the extreme close-up of a limp foot and anklet protruding from a tangle of bedclothes. What follows is crucial for the subsequent dislocation of the diegesis (which is otherwise structured as a conventional murder mystery involving sexual deception and mistaken class identity). When a constable pulls back the bed sheet to reveal the body, Jan turns away in horror before he can get a good look at the corpse. This causes him to wrongly identify the body. He mistakenly assumes that the late Jacqueline Cousteau, in reality a high-class prostitute, is the same person as the sophisticated, aristocratic woman he has been dating. The latter turns out to be not ‘Jacqueline’ but Lady Helen Fenton, the French wife of Sir Howard Fenton, a high-ranking British diplomat currently engaged in delicate negotiations with the German government. Lady Fenton has been jealously masquerading as Jacqueline – her husband’s mistress – as part of an elaborate plot to seduce Jan, lure him to the mews apartment and then frame the unsuspecting dupe for her rival’s murder. It was, of course, the vengeful Lady Fenton who suffocated the girl and then coolly telephoned the police while Jan was innocently waiting for his ‘Jacqueline’ in the next room. With Jan as his prime suspect, Morgan demands that the Dutchman come up with some convincing explanations. Through four subjectively focalized flashbacks, Jan relates the story of his stormy but often tender affair with ‘Jacqueline’/Lady Fenton (Micheline Presle). According to Jan, his ‘Jacqueline’ is a rich, spoiled dilettante with a shallow consumer’s interest in art and, in her own words, a ‘husband who’s got an appetite for cognac and slapping people around when he’s drunk’. After their initial testy meeting at the Bond Street art gallery where Jan works – he is rude and belligerent about both her wealth and her artistic taste – they run into each other by chance at the Tate Gallery. Impressed by Jan’s passion for his work, Lady Fenton talks him into giving her drawing lessons at his studio. Although initially resistant to her icy charms, Jan quickly falls in love with his chic ‘pupil’, who becomes both his nude model and his mistress. Like most affairs, this one has its ups and downs, exacerbated by the couple’s obvious class difference. Lady Fenton is extremely condescending in the face of Jan’s poverty, offering him money as if he were a gigolo. Insulted, Jan throws it back in her face. For his part, Jan becomes increasingly jealous and demanding of both his lover’s time and her body, which he sees in strictly class terms: ‘You’ll call me the way you call your dressmaker’, he complains. ‘When you have an hour to spare.’ Instead, he wants ‘to be there when you wake in the morning, groping your way out of sleep … I want to know what you look like at

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twilight, and pale and tired after you’ve been up late.’ Lady Fenton is sympathetic but clings stubbornly to the privileges of her class: ‘I have a certain position and I have no intention of flinging it away. If you want me there are terms. It will be where I can and when I can.’ Under the mistaken impression that Jan is discussing the real Jacqueline Cousteau, Morgan doesn’t believe a word of his improbable account. To Morgan, the girl’s obviously a phoney, ‘an expensive piece of French pastry.’ Besides, Jacqueline wasn’t even married! Moreover, Morgan is under increasing pressure from his superior, suave assistant commissioner Sir Brian Lewis (Robert Flemyng), to charge Jan and wrap up the case. According to Sir Brian, Sir Howard has been ‘keeping’ Jacqueline by making weekly deposits into her bank account. Time is of the essence because Sir Howard is due back from Bonn at dawn and any unnecessary scandal would do egregious harm to the national interest. ‘If we were to propose the lightest possible charge, perhaps manslaughter, and not murder’, proffers Sir Brian, ‘then he might be persuaded to confess’, adds Morgan. ‘The case would be solved quickly with the minimum amount of publicity and the maximum amount of protection for Sir Howard.’ Although Morgan takes Jan to the police station for booking, he is still not convinced of Sir Howard’s innocence. When Jan turns out his pockets, Morgan discovers the envelope of money. He guesses, correctly, that it contains exactly £500, a tidy sum for a pay-off. He immediately assumes that Sir Howard hired Jan to kill Jacqueline in order to rid himself of an embarrassing encumbrance. Playing a hunch, Morgan drives Jan to Heathrow to meet Sir Howard’s plane, hoping to set up a confrontation between the two men. To his surprise, there is no sign of mutual recognition. Instead, Jan screams with delight at discovering Lady Fenton, alive and well, at her husband’s side. Naturally, Lady Fenton denies all knowledge of Jan, but later concedes that her husband was seeing another woman. She was not aware that it was Jacqueline Cousteau. Back at the police station, Jan swears that Lady Fenton is his ‘Jacqueline’. Morgan insists that he nonetheless clearly identified Jacqueline’s body. ‘But I didn’t look at her face’, admits Jan. ‘All I saw was the anklet.’ Playing his last card, Morgan calls in Lady Fenton, hoping that another confrontation will trap Jan in one last, fatal mistake. But instead Jan’s emotional honesty – the enormous power of bodily affect that drives the artist’s relationships – overwhelms the icy calculation of his would-be nemesis: ‘Why couldn’t you have come away with me? I could have made you happy. What was it? You were too old for me? Were you afraid of that? But you were young to me … I did reach

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you, I know that, in a way you’ve never been reached before … I would never have left you. Because I love you!’ Weakening under Jan’s passionate declaration of love, Lady Fenton lets slip the truth. As Jan turns away and chokes back his tears, she puts her hand on his shoulder and utters the one word that condemns her to the gallows: ‘Jan!’ This is all Morgan needs: ‘So you really did know him’, he smirks. ‘But that’s what your ladyship really counted on, wasn’t it? It would never occur to anyone that Lady Fenton could be connected with such a sordid case. But what you didn’t count on is that I would have the completely stupid idea that your husband had hired van Rooyen to do it. If it hadn’t been for that we’d never have gone to the airport.’ The film ends as it began, with Jan on the Embankment, but once again time returns full circle, as difference. Although he’s still an affirmative spirit, lacking Morgan’s passive acceptance of his social role, Jan is nonetheless a little less ‘blind’ as a result of his harrowing apprenticeship. Ignoring a pretty girl waiting at the bus stop, he walks over to the embankment wall and symbolically drops the posy of violets into the Thames. Then he runs for the bus. An important key to unlocking the complexities of Blind Date is the realization that at no time does the film’s ostensible mentor (Morgan), or his pupil (Jan), have a firm grip on the entire story. Indeed, the whole point of the film is that despite a common class background, their mutually exclusive affective and intellectual interpretations of events must necessarily be partial, and at odds. Moreover, it is the class discrepancy between the real Jacqueline and her imposter – between Morgan’s perceived image of the dead prostitute filtered through the eyes of a cynical policeman, and Jan’s retrospective description of Lady Fenton from the distorted perspective of both artist and lover – that causes the inspector to distrust Jan’s account of his relationship with ‘Jacqueline’ in the first place. This incongruity then produces a skid or slippage in their different interpretative analyses of the affair. Moreover, Jan’s account is also diffracted through the prism of Lady Fenton’s lies and deceptions, so that his discriminating painter’s eye is guided, but then corrupted, by the invention and imagination of an equally gifted (con) artist. Indeed, it is this contradictory weave of class, hermeneutics and the productive power of narration that lies, as we shall see, at the core of the film’s treatise on the immanent temporality of the cinematic image. This interpretative braid of voices is organized as a series of interlocking overlaps, each wrought by the different threads of class, gender and impulse. Lady Fenton, for example, not only relies on her aristocratic bearing and haughty superiority to seduce a naïve young foreigner

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but also assumes that her social rank will get her off scot-free. Seen through the eyes of the class-conscious establishment she cannot possibly be other than what she seems. Even if Sir Howard’s scandalous connection to Jacqueline leaks out, she can always rely on Sir Brian and the old-boy network to conduct the appropriate damage control. Yet, as Losey is fond of pointing out, class is not the whole story. Lady Fenton is ultimately undone by an event that she couldn’t predict or control: that Jan’s love would touch a deeply buried affective and impulsive nerve, thereby cracking the cool façade of her indifference. Like Glenda Esmond, Lady Fenton is a ‘sleeping tiger’, an uneasy combination of fire and ice, of becoming-animal and becomingmachine, which her husband’s affair has already brought dangerously close to the surface. As she warns Jan, ‘Ice can burn too’, little realizing that she is unconsciously commenting on her own split personality, her own future self-victimization. Love and emotion will always breach the class rules, so that her parting shot to Jan at the end of the film – ‘Damn you!!’ – is also a curse on art, growth and creativity, in short everything that undermines the hermetic class structure necessary for survival in Lady Fenton’s world. As usual with Losey, affect and impulse overcome the tight little boxes of class constraints. Jan and Morgan are the product of similar contradictory forces, but their common class background eventually pushes them into an alliance that overcomes their separate investigative shortcomings. Jan’s strident working-class consciousness, for example, influences his relations with both the political and the artistic establishment. Although he is immediately antagonistic toward Morgan and the police – which hardly helps his predicament – at the same time he also has great insight into the machinations of the class system. When he smells a cover-up, he too turns investigator and accuses his interrogator of a rush to judgement. As Durgnat suggests, the film adumbrates ‘the angry young men’s view that the system’s inefficiencies and obscurantism are part of its machinery for keeping the lower orders at bay’.35 But Jan is also an artist, which gives him special insight into the sensibility of the flesh over the intellect. This is both his strength – what makes him the sensitive, visceral being who can ultimately trap his lover into showing the affection that betrays her – but also his weakness, as the naive romantic who could be easily taken in by the experienced machinations of a Lady Fenton in the first place. We see the antinomies of this position in his reaction to art itself, both in its idealized status as somatic truth, and in its debased form as a commodity. Jan is a figurative painter, contemptuous of Modernist abstraction, which he associates with fashionable dilettantes like Lady Fenton: ‘Splash, splash.

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Dribble, dribble. Like the yatter, yatter when the fashionables come for a private view. It’s your stuff, not mine.’ For Jan, abstraction is a mere spectre, a willing victim of exchange value’s degradation of art from its true role as a pure expression of bodily instinct. In contrast, as Jan makes clear, ‘the human body is a continent. You can spend a whole lifetime exploring it.’ Moreover, Jan paints specifically working-class subjects, in particular the haunting images of Dutch miners that Richard Macdonald fashioned specially for the film after actual paintings by Joszef Herman. Jan sees his own vocation in similar class terms: ‘Painting is work’, he tells Lady Fenton. ‘Do you think you can paint ’til your head aches, your arms are breaking?’ On the other hand, Jan’s predilection for the haptic ‘truth’ of flesh also makes him sexually vulnerable, for he has partly sublimated his need for sexual contact into his art, thereby making himself ripe for emotional conquest. At one point he rips up one of Lady Fenton’s drawings, denigrates her technique and ‘eye’, and proceeds to lecture her on the palpable qualities of human skin: ‘Is that what a shoulder is to you?’ he scorns. ‘A shoulder is alive.’ He bares his own shoulder to demonstrate: ‘It’s flesh and blood. Look, under the skin there’s bone and nerves. If you tear it, it bleeds.’ ‘And when you kiss it, it trembles’, she responds, pressing her lips to his shoulder and turning Jan’s rebuke to her own seductive advantage. Just when Jan seems to be most clearsighted in an aesthetic sense, he is most blind to the truth of another reality: the potent combination of sex and class represented by Lady Fenton’s feminine wiles. This myopia is symbolized by Jan’s inability to satisfactorily capture his lover’s form on canvas: ‘It’s empty’, he cries, throwing his failed attempt at representation to the floor. ‘What’s the matter with me? I can’t get it.’ Losey frames the couple separated by Jan’s easel, which acts as an objective correlative of the aesthetic and emotional barrier between them, as well as Jan’s inability to ‘decipher’ her secrets, either artistically or personally. Losey reinforces the irony of this contradiction through his mise-enscène. The flashback love scenes are filmed in a markedly different texture to the stark chiaroscuro of Jacqueline’s flat and the police station, which are shot noir-style in order to mark them as sites of class and sexual duplicity. Losey’s DP, Christopher Challis, always shows Jan and Lady Fenton in bright daylight, reinforced by diffused, high-key lighting. This creates a dazzling luminescence, particularly in Jan’s rented studio, with its stark white walls and bright afternoon sun streaming in through the skylight. This is the film’s idealized Eden of artistic creativity and sexual purity. The effect is to inject the sex scenes with both erotic charge and unabashed innocence. The light sculpts

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Jan’s and Lady Fenton’s naked bodies into a highly tactile, classical relief, as if the two lovers had returned to a prelapsarian affirmation of somatic bliss, much like the mythic effect of Rodin’s The Kiss. Of course, this also underlines the ‘blind’ nature of the dates: too much light, too much primordial innocence, can also blind you to the more impulsive realities that lie lurking in the shadows. The couple might be lying naked in broad daylight with their eyes wide open but Jan is clearly only seeing part of the picture. But the same is also true of Morgan, whose narrow classconsciousness is also a double-edged sword. Although his obvious antagonism towards the old-boy network shows a healthy disdain for the establishment, it is nonetheless stalling his professional advancement. As Sir Brian points out, ‘Your kind either goes to the very top, or doesn’t go at all. But going to the top calls for something a little more than a constable mentality. It calls for an understanding of the deeper meanings of public service’, by which the chief means a touch of rulingclass solidarity, which seems to be beyond the capabilities of the abrasive Welshman. Morgan is thus inextricably torn between ambition and his moral sense. Baker is perfect casting here, for as Losey acknowledged, ‘I knew that I wanted this inspector to be aggressive in a class way. And also aggressive in a sexual way. And I knew that Stanley was both of these.’36 Unlike Jan, who is able to sublimate the antinomies between class, sex and violence into his art, Morgan has neither active nor creative outlet for his frustrations. With his professional advancement stalled and cut off from collective solidarity with his fellow working class, and his family life fallen victim to long hours at the office, Morgan is left with little option but niggling violence. This is directed not at the establishment but at his fellow working class, in this case the aesthetically ‘feminized’ form of the foreigner-cum-artist. Thus when Jan relates the details of his affair, Morgan infantilizes him, dismissing his relationship with ‘Jacqueline’ as ‘the sort of bragging lie kids like to tell’. On the other hand, Morgan’s background also gives him an insight into the case far more profound than the limited ruling-class assumptions of Sir Brian. While the chief erroneously assumes that Jan was paid off by Jacqueline because he was a threat to the continuation of her affair with Sir Howard, Morgan immediately sees the prostitute’s true nature: ‘No’, he argues, ‘Jacqueline Cousteau didn’t give him that money. She wasn’t a giver. She was a taker.’ ‘You make it sound as though you knew’, objects Sir Brian. ‘I do’, says Morgan. ‘My father was a chauffeur. Being brought up the way I was, you get to know the givers and the takers. You can smell them out. It’s a question of background.’

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However, when Morgan suggests that the blood money may have come from Sir Howard, his boss bristles with outrage: ‘Sir Howard arranged and paid for a cold-blooded murder? Sir Howard couldn’t have. Shall I tell you how I know? Know beyond any doubt? It’s a question of background.’ The irony here is that by turning the class tables Sir Brian turns out to be technically right but for the completely wrong reason. No, Sir Howard didn’t commit the murder, but Lady Fenton did, and she has the exact same background. Morgan may have muddled his ‘Jacquelines’ and arrested the wrong suspect but it is this reading of the upper classes through the framework of the prostitute and his own class experience that helps him to understand the true character of the real murderer: a case of discerning a deeper truth through a surface lie. Losey’s point is that neither Jan nor Morgan has exclusive rights to the truth. Neither Morgan’s sexual and class awareness as an experienced police detective, nor Jan’s intuitive feeling for hidden truths of the human body, is useful by itself. Only in combination do these qualities cut through the murk of Lady Fenton’s dissimulation. Jan’s flashbacks can thus be said to be an apprenticeship for both the Dutchman and the Welshman, for they reveal the incompleteness of both their exclusive worldviews. Both men learn to reach beyond their own fields and embrace elements of each other’s ‘vision’. As Jan puts it to Lady Fenton, ‘We’re all more or less blind; we can see precisely only the things we work with every day.’ Growth thus occurs by opening our perceptions so that we can feel like an artist and see/analyse like a knowledgeable sleuth, instead of falling back exclusively on the truisms of prevailing discourses. The key to understanding this discrepancy, what links and at the same time divides the two men, is their different approaches to time. This is brilliantly condensed in the baroque mise-en-scène of Jacqueline’s flat, and in particular through the ambivalent reading of one of Jacqueline’s more expensive possessions: a seventeenth-century study by Anthony van Dyck. Morgan and Jan translate the apartment and the painting in two completely different ways, mirroring the two schizophrenic ‘Jacquelines’. This ultimately clues us in to the fact that there are indeed two Jacquelines. Jan sees the apartment qualitatively, filtered through his obvious aesthetic sense and romantic interest in the occupant. According to Durgnat, ‘truth, for him, is the truth of form, physical enough, but also something of an abstraction from life … Outside his art, there are obvious things he can’t, won’t see: the heavy opulence of his beloved’s apartment, with dolphins and putti-taps, a nouveau riche love-nest if ever there was one, and as the detective spots at first glance.’37 Although Jan might suspect this ‘hidden’ side to the

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apartment, his commitment to his ‘Jacqueline’ means that he is at the same time willing to let himself be taken in, so that the Van Dyck is convincingly reassuring, the confirmation of Lady Fenton’s wealth and refinement. Morgan, in contrast, dissects the apartment quantitatively, reading it as an archive or inventory of socio-sexual clues. He sees the sunken bathtub, mirrored boudoir, huge bed, and frilly black lace underwear as the decor and accoutrements of a classy prostitute. The Van Dyck merely indicates that she has, or had, a very rich client who knows how to devalue and debase objets d’art by exchanging them for sexual favours. However, this reflects more on Morgan’s cynicism and tactlessness than any insight into Jacqueline’s character. What he misses is the simultaneity of the apartment’s history as a palimpsest of past and present, its place as a spatio-temporal archaeology of different class identities that mark it as a true visual multiplicity. According to Losey, ‘the idea was that it was a place that had been converted or redecorated three times so that there were three generations of taste and kind of person represented. If you peeled off one skin, there was another skin, and then another skin.’38 The specific architectural make-up of the miseen-scène – with its combination of deep focus and long takes – is thus innately stratified with temporal clues to the identity of its past and present occupants. It is here that Losey comes closest to the Brechtian ideal of deploying mise-en-scène as a method of knowledge much like that employed by a scientist, an aspect of Blind Date that first seduced the MacMahon Group. Writing in 1961, Jean Douchet gushed: Losey is above all a researcher, his mise-en-scène a method. His declared objective: knowledge. His only apparatus: intelligence, or rather lucidity. His approach is modelled on that of the scientist. The same basic attitude to the phenomena under observation, the same procedures: discover lived experience in its totality, record it like an object, make this object the field of investigation, in short, place lived experience in laboratory conditions. Losey restores the camera to its original function as scientific 39 instrument. This is the mark of his originality.

Despite the hyperbole, there is much truth in this statement, but what Douchet misses is the immanent temporal expression of Losey’s camera. What the film requires is not so much a surface read that fits a preconceived conceptual bias, but a spatio-temporal decipherment. It is Jan and Morgan’s discrepant interpretations of this same temporal evidence that leads to a tearing apart of both readings, and it is Losey’s mise-en-scène that expresses this deconstruction visually. Eventually the

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murder is only solved through the reinterpretation of an affective visual layer which hadn’t immediately been evident, namely the Van Dyck, the clue to Jacqueline’s other lover: Sir Howard Fenton. In this respect, Jan is more temporally qualified to decode the apartment’s secrets, for it is through the interstices of the flashback time of Jan’s recollected relationship with Lady Fenton that he understands the true ramifications of the Van Dyck. He sees the painting not in terms of Morgan’s sexual currency but as a timeless artefact, a representation of the immanent time of emotive instinct manifested as a symbol of true love. It is this insight that allows Jan, and not Morgan, to ultimately solve the crime. Picking up the painting in Morgan’s office, he turns to Lady Fenton: ‘You don’t give this away like perfume. You give it to somebody you love even more than your self-respect or your career. Your husband was going to leave you for her … You couldn’t bear that. So there was only one violent way out. Kill her.’ Jan’s flashbacks are thus both a partial truth and partial lie. A lie for the obvious reason that he is taken in by Lady Fenton’s impersonation – she dictates the flashbacks’ misleading didactic content because she triggers the romantic deception that they are filtered through. However, they are also true insofar as they capture some of the genuine love that Jan has for Lady Fenton, which subsequently allows him to understand and appreciate something that Morgan cannot see – the similar love Sir Howard had for Jacqueline. In this way, the affair’s seeming contradictions are worked out through the overdetermined image of an Old Master, a work of art that becomes the catalyst for solving the mystery both scientifically and instinctively. Losey’s working-class exile thus eventually finds his way home by using his intuitive aesthetic instincts as his ontological roadmap. Although Blind Date gave Losey his first critical and commercial success in Britain, it also underlined the full extent of his continuing political problems in the US. Packaged with a new title – Chance Meeting – and nation-wide distribution by Paramount, the film was slated to open in New York the following year. ‘This was the big opportunity for me and Ben Barzman and a number of other people who had been blacklisted to regain a little of our home territory, in a sense’, recalled Losey. ‘However … Variety and some other publications struck out at us as soon as they heard that Paramount had bought the film. So it never got a New York opening.’40 The screaming headline of this nowinfamous Variety article gives a good indication of the prevailing hysteria: ‘Alleged REDS, in partnership with ex-NAZI sell BLIND DATE to 41 PARAMOUNT.’ The ‘ex-Nazi’ was the film’s German co-star, Hardy Krüger, who had joined the Hitler Youth as a teenager. What the article

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failed to mention was that he had subsequently deserted the German army and, according to Losey, spent a year in a prisoner of war camp for 42 his pains. What Losey had failed to anticipate was the increase in antiCommunist paranoia that would hit the industry like a shockwave following renewed political pressure from the American Legion. This was triggered by right-wing concern at perceived cracks in the blacklist’s ‘iron curtain’, specifically Otto Preminger’s well-publicized crediting of Dalton Trumbo as the screenwriter of Exodus (1960) and Stanley Kramer’s similar acknowledgement of Nedrick Young for Inherit the 43 Wind (1960). On hearing of Blind Date’s impending distribution by Paramount in October of the same year, the incensed Legion hounded the studio into dropping it, despite a favourable review that same month from Eugene Archer in the New York Times.44 This setback was disastrous for Losey because he hoped to strike a long-term deal with Columbia on the strength of the film’s artistic and commercial success. He had even agreed to go on the record with what amounted to an antiCommunist oath, a repentant statement carefully drafted by his lawyer. Caute’s verdict on this and the earlier Sidney Cohn ‘compromise’ is severe: ‘Losey had in effect disavowed his own past – but he had almost certainly done the same in July 1951, when signing up with Stanley 45 Kramer. He never mentioned either episode in public.’ Whatever our judgement of Losey’s opportunism, it is at least artistically fortunate that it backfired. Had he returned to the Hollywood economic umbrella, with its long-established production codes, studio-style predilection for pre-prescribed budgets, formulaic scripts and traditional genres, it is unlikely that Losey would have developed the narrative and visual skills that, under the profound influence of artists like Resnais, Duras and Antonioni, he subsequently achieved within the European art-house tradition. Moreover, it’s extremely doubtful that he would have continued his fruitful collaborations with forceful actors such as Dirk Bogarde, Stanley Baker and Leo McKern, nor availed himself of the rich pool of regional British writers that had come to the fore through the theatre (Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Robert Shaw) and television (Evan Jones and David Mercer). In this respect, perhaps the most important catalyst for these writeroriented collaborations was the Liverpudlian poet and short story writer Alun Owen, a master of dialect and argot whose unique vernacular ‘voice’ is inextricably tied to his authentic Irish-Catholic working-class background. Owen’s work on The Criminal (1960, a.k.a. The Concrete Jungle in the US) is an excellent example of the rich vein mined by this grassroots, writerly alternative to mainstream production values.46 Shot on a minuscule budget of £60,000, The Criminal was based on an

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original screenplay by the Hammer films stalwart Jimmy Sangster. Losey quickly dismissed Sangster’s script as a hackneyed, plagiaristic mosaic of every American prison film ever made. Despite his best efforts to inject some working-class verisimilitude, the story still lacked originality and authenticity. Consequently, Owen was brought in on Stanley Baker’s recommendation for his ability to communicate character and class through the specific detail of language and idiom. Losey’s original intention was to explore his customary dialectic between becoming-animal and becoming-machine within the hermetic apparatus of the prison system. ‘I would have preferred to make a film that took place entirely in the prison and didn’t go on the outside at all’, he complained shortly after the film’s release. ‘We were saddled by the distributors with a plot structure which was ridiculous but inescapable because they insisted on it. I tried, therefore, to ignore the story, to bury it, and simply tell what I had to say through characters and through scenes, mostly the prison scenes.’47 Despite these narrative restrictions, the producers’ insistence that the film be opened up to include a daring racetrack heist, Bannion’s relationship with the corporate crime structure, and details of his romantic life actually turned out to be a plus. These exterior scenes allowed Losey to collapse the difference between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, between the discipline-machine and the organized crime-machine, by painting both as conduits for repressed violence, as well as allegorical stand-ins for capitalist modes of production. As in Time Without Pity, Losey opted for a more Marxian, sociological analysis of crime. In this case, both criminal and carceral organizations have their unwritten codes of conduct and loyalty as well as powerful pecking orders that extend vertically within the confines of each institution – whether it be cell block or ‘sell bloc’ – yet also spread horizontally across the fluid boundaries between prison and the outside. Both systems have the same objectives, namely the propagation of profitable enterprise (i.e. cash flow) through the transformation of instinctual individuals into one-dimensional technological subjects. In this way recidivism, far from being a social problem to be solved, instead justifies and proliferates archaeological institutions of power. It produces what Foucault calls a ‘carceral archipelago’, in which both the criminal and the jailer are both equally complicit and mutually reinforcing.48 Losey and Owen expand these institutional channels of impulse to include organized religion, didactically structuring the film in the form of a four-act morality play, in which the traditional Christian vices and virtues wage a symbolic struggle for the Catholic soul of career criminal Johnny Bannion (Baker). This begins, in medias res, inside the prison

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(Act 1: atonement for past and future sins); moves outside (Act 2: rebirth, a brief interlude of virtue and love, followed by further temptation, fall and betrayal); returns inside (Act 3: punishment for Act 2’s sins, exacerbated by further treachery); and concludes outside (Act 4: an orchestrated escape leading to a brutal death without salvation). Far from presenting religion as a transcendence of Bannion’s criminal impulse, Owen and Losey instead indict faith as a less than effective sublimation of ingrained violence, as much a part of the problem as of the cure. This is vividly expressed through Richard Macdonald’s design and Losey’s uncanny ability to hone reality down to a clean, ideological core through the appropriate detail or social gest. Thus the ever-present Madonna on Bannion’s cell wall and the religious medallion that he wears around his neck are not simply religious icons but images and fetishes of an ingrained impulse, symbolizing the reciprocal relationship of religious ecstasy and violence. This contiguity extends to the prison architecture as a whole. Modelled after an existing Victorian prison, the cell blocks feature high, vaulted ceilings and arched buttresses so that they resemble gothic cathedrals. In this way, Losey’s predilection for deep focus and the wideangled lens, along with tightly cropped framing, takes maximum advantage of the oppressive texture of the prison’s predominant materials. Hence brick, iron and glass become palpably associated with the equally oppressive, non-material prison of Catholicism itself. As Durgnat reminds us, ‘many of Losey’s films are set in the key-signature of stone and concrete … [he] thinks like both a dramatist and a sculptor, in terms of feeling physicalised rather than analysed.’49 This hapticity is further reinforced by camera movement: Losey uses the same ascending crane shot alongside the main stairs of the cell block each time Chief Warder Barrows makes a duplicitous power play, thereby undercutting the ‘lofty’ nature of the literal movement through its association with a debased, unethical action. The film opens on the eve of Bannion’s early release for good behaviour. Bannion is the personification of violent individualism, the uncrowned kingpin of Cell Block ‘B’, as well as an incurable recidivist. Working on a tip from his voluble cellmate Snipe (John Molloy), he has spent his three years inside perfecting a foolproof plan for a £40,000 tote heist. Closely based on the real-life Soho protection racketeer Albert Dimes, Bannion is an inflated personification of the true ‘performer’, an early prototype for Chas Devlin, James Fox’s psychopathic gangster in Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Performance (1968). Losey was particularly captivated by Dimes’s impulsive nature and saw a perfect match for Baker’s aggressive, gestic style of acting.

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‘Every once in a while this kind of man lets loose a physical kind of violence that is animal and insane and terrifying, and anti-social in a way that no society could tolerate’, he recalled. ‘I would always be frightened of him because underneath there is an animal that would do 50 anything. And this is what I tried to present in Bannion.’ Losey depicts prison society as a simplified microcosm of the British class system: we know immediately who are the bosses and who are the minions. Thus Bannion is far more at home flexing his muscles and impressing his subaltern Irish pals – specifically the sensitive but nonetheless psychopathic Pauly Larkin (Brian Phelan) – within the black and white, homosocial confines of the prison than he is dealing with the increasingly fluid, grey world of shifting allegiances and sexual betrayals on the outside. Yet even here, Bannion’s rampaging individualism is increasingly anachronistic. The prison system is fast becoming a mirror image of the basic principles of Taylorism, with its fluid dialectic of individual initiative combined with well-financed teamwork and group loyalty to the prevailing economy of one’s work/cell block. Our first view of the inside, for example, is a series of tight close-ups of a circle of three prisoners, irritably gambling for high stakes. Yet, when the hand is ‘won’ by the surly ‘Antlers’ (Murray Melvin) and we pull out to a wider three-shot, the expected ‘millions’ turn out to be cigarettes. With admirable brevity, Losey thereby presents the predominant theme of the film as a whole – the mastery of human relations by the dematerialized ghost of exchange value. Indeed, from the prisoners’ point of view this guiding economy is doubly spectral, for the cigarettes act, in turn, as an abstract idea of value, a mere stand-in for real wealth, a simulacrum economy dictated and controlled from above by the prison authorities. In this respect the scene also acts as a parallel for Bannion’s later antagonistic and dependent relationship to the organized crime syndicate, which also controls the mechanism of exchange through its ability to launder ‘hot’ (i.e., like the cigarettes, unspendable) money – for a percentage. Robin Wood has perceptively linked these parallel economies to capitalism/crime’s affective corollary – violence – insofar as the gambling scene is a complex metaphor for the modern world of materialism, where crime is big business and big business (by implication) crime, and where each man is imprisoned within the limitations, inadequacies and degeneracy of his own desires; in it is implicit the violence that explodes periodically in the course of the film – the violence of men under intolerable pressures (both internal and external) of constraint and 51 frustration.

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This violence is immanent to the collective’s internal laws, chief of which is its ruthless punishment of sinners who violate the first commandment: thou shalt not squeal! Thus when Kelly (Kenneth Cope), a notorious stool pigeon from the rival Cell Block ‘A’, is returned to the jail, he is brutally beaten by Clobber (Kenneth J. Warren), Bannion’s resident Cockney enforcer. Losey interjects a Brechtian VEffekt here in the form of a West Indian ballad singer who comments on the action before it happens and also serves notice that although Clobber is the actual executioner of Kelly’s sentence, it is Bannion who commands the role of both judge and jury. Losey transforms the individual mismatch into a group spectacle, using heightened sound to play up the whole cell block’s participation in the rite. Thus Clobber’s savage blows are cut and choreographed to an unholy din of rattling mess tins and the unforgiving chant of ‘Knick-knack paddy whack, give a dog a bone’, thereby creating an aural continuity to the rapid series of disjointed close-ups that link the ecstatic inmates with their helpless victim. In the case of the susceptible Pauly, this ecstasy takes on both religious and sexual connotations, for the sounds of the beating push him into a state of religious catatonia, culminating in an orgasmic scream of sexual release. The scene also shows that the prison code is in many ways more rigid, ruthless and ‘moral’ than the code on the outside. As Bannion will quickly discover, there is little opportunity to be an individualist in either milieu. Equally important however is the complicit nature of the prison authorities in this impulsive explosion, specifically the role of beetlebrowed, clench-jawed Warder Barrows (Patrick Magee). According to Losey, the functionaries have little choice but to co-operate because ‘the warders are as much prisoners as the prisoners themselves, as they are locked in together. This whole operation, whether it’s pervertedly sadistic or simply civil service, is the only way they can make it work really … if they don’t play the game with each other, there isn’t any chance of making it work, because they’re outnumbered by about twenty to one.’52 Not only does Barrows turn a blind eye to the Kelly beating, but he clearly revels in the violence, contributing his own dissonant syncopation to the din by banging his huge keyring on the metal rail as he descends the cell-block stairs. As in the case of Pauly, Barrows’s impulsive tendencies are also rooted in the sublimating role of his Catholicism. When we later see Barrows at mass, for example, he is delirious, on the edge of hysteria, as if in sexual ecstasy or an advanced state of compassionate grace. He’s as much a transcendental prisoner of his own inner violence as the inmates are material captives of their own external atavism. It is this unstated naturalist code, not the

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nominal authority of the prison bureaucracy or, by extension, the Home Office, that is the site of effective power in the prison. Thus for Kelly, ‘it is the other men, the ones he had betrayed to secure his own release, who are the cage, rather than the actual prison and the paraphernalia of 53 governor, warders, cells, etc.’. The metaphorical key to this cage is language itself, specifically Owen’s colourful prison lingo that can both lock and unlock the door to mutual understanding between inmates and the collective code. Unlike Foucault’s extremely limited, one-way view of the modern prison as a form of panopticon, where the prisoner ‘is seen, but he does not see; he 54 is the object of information, never a subject in communication’, Losey presents a more complex parallel universe supplemented by the power of the spoken word. Thus when the cell block’s ubiquitous gossip, Scout (Jack Rodney), spreads news of Kelly’s return, Bannion gets word by listening at the spy hole in his cell door. We see Scout’s mouth where his eye should be, suggesting that while observation might be associated with the official power structure of the warders and guards, the combination of speech, information and the gest of dialect is the preferred language of the inmates. But these distinctions are not neatly divided into simple pluses and minuses: the punitive observation of the inmates through the prison panopticon is subverted by Barrows, who ‘looks the other way’ during Kelly’s beating, while the chain of verbal information among inmates is easily corrupted by the contagion of informing. It is also supplemented by a visual, bodily gest that speaks volumes vis-à-vis social class and racial difference, particularly the contrasting roles of Cockneys and Irishmen, Anglos and West Indians, and their concomitant position in the prison pecking order. On his release the morning after Kelly’s return, Bannion is immediately met by a smooth-talking American gangster, Mike Carter (Sam Wanamaker), whose chic ivory cigarette holder and natty trilby hat offer a marked contrast to Bannion’s working-class filter tips and cloth cap. While Bannion personifies the impulsive characteristics of becoming-animal, the sadistic Carter represents the crime machine, specifically the head of a Highgate-based cartel. ‘Highgate’ is in the process of swallowing up independent operators like Bannion as part of a wholesale homogenization of organized crime into an underworld version of Herbert Marcuse’s highly rationalized and quantified technocracy.55 Bannion isn’t smart enough to see that his own free-wheeling individualism has no place in the new corporate underworld. Men like Carter work by the numbers, calculating all the answers in advance and leaving nothing to chance. They are thus able to outflank men like Bannion at every turn. Like Chas in Performance, Bannion is fast

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becoming ‘an ignorant boy, an out of date boy’, for ‘the individual criminal has as little place in the Syndicate’s universe as the indepen56 dent craftworker has in the multinational corporation’. Carter, who is far more willing than Baker’s character to accept a smaller, more functionary role in a larger organism, wants in on Bannion’s racetrack heist so that ‘Highgate’ can launder the stolen tote money for a 20 percent cut. Ever the lone operator, Bannion is stubbornly defiant: ‘You tell him [i.e. ‘Highgate’] I’ll see him in six months. By that time the heat will be off the money. He can have it. At 5 per cent.’ With Carter’s help, Bannion recruits three sidemen – Ted (Nigel Green), his cousin Chas (Larry Taylor) and Quantock the getaway driver (Tom Gerard) – to carry out the robbery. The five men meet one chilly morning beneath a park pagoda to finalize their plans. Significantly, Losey plays up the wintery desolation of the scene, particularly the stark, leafless trees, which evoke the similar, post-atomic desolation of the prison exercise yard, which Losey invariably intercuts just prior to a scene of violence or betrayal in the cell block. The heist’s conception couldn’t be associated with a more ominous image than this stark originary world rife with the more negative characteristics of impulse, further reinforcing the fateful, inextricable weave between Bannion’s life inside and outside the prison and its common thread: money. Accompanied by Carter and the gang, Bannion dons the disguise of a bookie from Tattersall’s and promptly absconds with the members’ tote at Tennant’s Park on Silver Stakes day. Unwilling to compete with Stanley Kubrick’s bravura suspense thriller, The Killing (1956), a similarly staged, process-oriented racetrack caper, Losey deliberately refrains from showing the actual mechanics of the robbery, focusing instead on his protagonists’ general movements and the race-day atmosphere. The sequence ends with Bannion, reduced to an insect-like speck in extreme long shot, as he buries the loot in a snow-covered field, safeguarding its future from the corporate machinations of ‘Highgate’. Or does he? Unfortunately for Bannion, his smooth-running business plans are complicated, as usual, by the third part of Losey’s impulsive triumvirate: sex. In Losey’s original cut, Bannion was met at the prison gates by his estranged girlfriend, the strung-out Maggie (Jill Bennett), ‘an upper class girl who had gotten tied up with Bannion for kicks and who probably took dope’.57 When Maggie turns up uninvited at a ‘coming out’ party for the parolee that same night, a furious Bannion throws her out. It’s significant that we first see her enter the room through the subjective gaze of Carter, who views her through a kaleidoscope. She is thereby disembodied into multiple fragments, creating an objective correlative of her multiple and shifting

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personalities as well as Carter’s ability to deconstruct, then reconstitute her at will. Although she leaves, screaming hysterically, Maggie is nonetheless immediately signified as a loose cannon and potential informer, the ‘outside’ equivalent to the two-timing Kelly. Bannion’s other love interest is Suzanne (Margit Saad), Maggie’s exroommate and dialectical opposite. Suzanne is a vivacious European blonde, extremely comfortable in her easy-going sexuality and confident in her ability to seduce and tame the great Johnny Bannion. It is the playful sex scenes with Suzanne that signify the height of Bannion’s emotional freedom. Until now sex has been exclusively representational, depicted through the usual Playboy pin-ups on the prison-cell walls, the tacky reclining nude paintings in Bannion’s bedroom, or the life-size nude photo on his bathroom door. Now, with Suzanne, Bannion has graduated from the simulacrum of sex to the real thing, marking another step in his leaving the sexual substitutes of jail for the healthy libidinal appetites of the outside world. In fact, until he meets Suzanne, Bannion’s domestic surroundings seem little more than a comfortable equivalent of his prison cell. Indeed, although Bannion may be physically at home, he is intellectually and emotionally still in prison, epitomized by one telling gest: when he undresses, he neatly folds and stacks his clothes, prison-style. When he realizes what he has done, he angrily sweeps the pile to the floor. The devotedly loyal Suzanne is thus a very real palliative to the prison routine. Far more than a sexual object, she exudes an intuitive, affirmative presence akin to that of Losey’s other creative artists, Jan van Rooyen and The Damned’s Freya. Ironically, it is Bannion’s unselfish, romantic generosity that proves to be his undoing. Anticipating the haul from the upcoming heist, he orders a £500 ring for Suzanne at the local jeweller’s. Observing him leave the shop, Maggie enters, discovers the ring’s value, and quickly deduces that Bannion is planning a big job to pay for it. After the heist she jealously informs the police of the extravagant purchase and abets Bannion’s eventual arrest by the phlegmatic Inspector Town (Laurence Naismith). Suzanne’s ring will become a symbolic noose later in the film when Carter kidnaps her, thereby inducing Johnny to escape from prison and forcing him to show where the money is buried. In this way, Losey sets up a contiguous chain of exchange value, transforming healthy affect into dehumanizing impulse via the mechanism of duplicitous informing. The overall benefactor is, of course, ‘Highgate’, whose operation exists by and through his control of this very same market of exchange. Back in prison, the governor transfers Bannion along with Pauly

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Larkin to the rival Cell Block ‘A’, which is under the control of sleepyeyed Frank Saffron (Grégoire Aslan) and his informing brother-in-law, Alfredo Fanucci (Paul Stassino). Saffron is a bland organizational man with direct ties to Carter and ‘Highgate’, so that Bannion’s manipulation by the cartel is continued via its extensive organization of agents inside the cell block itself. This influence extends as far as the prison establishment, in the form of the enigmatic Barrows. It turns out that Bannion’s transfer is merely a short-term ploy engineered by Barrows so that Saffron can find out the status and whereabouts of the buried loot. After Bannion is returned to Block ‘B’, Saffron and Barrows quickly put the cartel plan into action. Firstly, Bannion is informed by Scout – who turns out to be yet another of Saffron’s stoolies – that Ted and Chas have been forced to sell out their heist shares to Carter, while the resistant Quantock has met an untimely end at the hands of a speeding truck. Secondly, while conferring at mass – the Catholic inmates are not above using religious ritual as an effective mask for capitalist transaction – Saffron admits to Bannion that Carter has kidnapped Suzanne. Desperate to escape so that he can save his girl, Bannion agrees to Carter’s price: the whole £40,000, including Snipe’s promised share. Finally, Barrows instigates the necessary diversionary tactic by planting and then miraculously discovering a ‘shiv’ (a knife) on Pauly Larkin. This leads to a brawl during which the unfortunate Irishman falls from the third-floor gallery. Suicide? Or was he pushed? All hell breaks loose, creating a delirious, Dionysian frenzy complete with bonfires and dancing and Johnny Dankworth’s dissonant score. Meanwhile as Barrows quietly smokes a cigarette while safely locked in one of the cells, Alfredo lures Bannion to the cell-block entrance, where he is shoved into the waiting arms of the prison warders. At that moment, the lurking Kelly leads in the guards to the provocative shouts of ‘Bannion’s let the screws in!!’ The news of Bannion’s ‘betrayal’ spreads like wildfire, so that even the usually loyal Snipe joins in the accusatory chant. With Barrows’s help, Kelly has neatly turned the tables on Bannion, welcoming him into the ranks of a lower breed of becominganimal: the informer-rat. With his future safety at the prison now precarious at best, Barrows persuades the prison authorities to move the ‘co-operative’ Bannion to another, lower-security prison. This is, in effect, an open invitation to Carter to spring Bannion en route, while Barrows secures his cut of the £40,000. More importantly, Barrows’s involvement completes the horizontal chain of command that transcends the boundaries between inside and outside that we discussed earlier, creating an efficient money

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machine, greased by informers and stoolies, which effectively outperforms the rival cottage industry represented by Bannion and Suzanne. This is the film’s final blueprint of Foucault’s ‘carceral machine’, where ‘delinquency, solidified by a penal system centred upon the prison, thus represents a diversion of illegality for the illicit circuits of profit and 58 power of the dominant class’. Once more outside the prison walls, Bannion is sprung from the Black Maria by Ted, who promptly drives him to Carter’s canal barge, where Suzanne is held captive. ‘So you and Saffron were working together?’ asks Bannion, in a massive statement of the obvious. ‘Oh, it’s not just Saffron, John’, responds the American. ‘We belong to a proper set-up. We’re important, yes, but things would go on without us. With us, it’s a team. It’s business. But your sort doesn’t fit into an organization. So we can’t have you running about, messing things up, now can we John?’ Carter offers Bannion a passport and an airline ticket ‘to nowhere’ in return for the exact location of the buried loot. However, discovering that his girl is to be disposed of as an awkward impediment, Bannion rejects the deal and fashions his escape with Suzanne. Losey’s mise-en-scène is a telling expression of Bannion’s emotive state of mind here, for the narrow, cramped quarters of the barge act as an effective correlative of the narrowing of both Bannion’s hopes and his future prospects. However, this is still no excuse for the ‘idiot factor’ illogicalities which follow: throwing all reason and intelligence to the winds, Losey has Bannion foolishly lead the gang directly to the money. The subsequent shootout, in which Bannion is fatally wounded and staggers across the vast, snow-covered field to die, is reminiscent of the climax to François Truffaut’s Tirez sur le Pianiste (1960). Only here the gender roles are reversed: in this case it is the woman who is left standing helplessly as her lover suffers an unforgiving death. As Bannion, fervently kissing his holy medal, whispers the Act of Contrition, Carter cradles his bloodied head, rocking the dying man like a new-born baby. But instead of a poignant scene of succour and solace, Losey presents us with cynical nihilism. ‘I dread the loss of heaven, and the pains of hell’, mutters Bannion, horrifyingly alone with his fears of damnation. His last words, ‘I do firmly resolve never more to offend thee … ’ are offered more in desperate hope for salvation than from a state of grace. In fact, Losey had originally planned at this point to cut in a reprise of Barrows banging his keys on the prison bars, thereby extending Bannion’s worldly ‘imprisonment’ beyond the grave, into the spiritual afterlife itself.59 ‘We are not, perhaps, “moved” by his death’, writes Robin Wood, ‘the tone is too uncompromisingly far from any subjective pity. One is

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numbed by its harshness and forbidden the comfort of tears; it is among 60 the most terrible deaths ever shown on the screen.’ It is made all the more shocking because of its accompaniment by Carter’s desperate attempts to discern the location of the loot. The scene concludes with an aerial shot down on Bannion’s body, as Carter and Chas dart about like a pair of scurrying mice, digging desperately for the buried money in the frozen field. Their circling of Bannion’s corpse acts as a formal parallel to the circle of prisoners gambling for money at the beginning of the film: in both cases, each man is unknowingly haunted by the ghost of paper currency that is all the more palpable for being tantalizingly out of reach.61 As in the Truffaut film, the whiteness of the landscape contains its own terror. Despite its surface beauty, this is an unforgiving Eden that swallows up debased human life (and the filthy lucre that passes for its lifeblood) with a mixture of indifference and contempt. The film ends with a group of prisoners shuffling around in a circle in the exercise yard, an eternal return to the vicious circle of a society that persists in making money its God.

Notes 1 John Betjeman, ‘In Westminster Abbey’, Collected Poems (London, John Murray, 1988), p. 74. 2 Lindsay Anderson, ‘Get Out and Push!’, in Tom Maschler, ed., Declaration (New York, E. P. Dutton, 1958), p. 139. 3 Ibid., p. 141. 4 Reisz later praised Losey’s work up to and including Accident, noting that, ‘Losey’s peculiar sourness towards the English worked very well. But then he became a dandy.’ Cited in Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 466. 5 Andrew Spicer, ‘Male Stars, Masculinity and British Cinema, 1945–1960’, in Robert Murphy, ed., The British Cinema Book (London, BFI, 1997), p. 152. 6 This group of critics was centred on Paris’s MacMahon cinema near the Etoile. Under its director Emile Villion, the theatre showed original subtitled American films, often in private screenings, and it was Pierre Rissient’s championing of Time Without Pity in June 1960 that led to Losey becoming a cult director with cinephiles such as Bertrand Tavernier, Jacques Serguine, Marc Bernard and Michel Fabre. The zenith of Losey worship at that time was a special edition of Cahiers du Cinéma (Vol. 19, No. 111, September 1960), which included an interview with the director by Fabre and Rissient, and essays by Rissient, Bernard, Serguine and Michel Mourlet. 7 Julian Petley, ‘The Lost Continent’, in Charles Barr, ed., All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (London, BFI, 1986), p. 112. 8 Robin Wood, ‘The Criminal’, Motion, No. 4, February 1963, p. 8. 9 Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 200. 10 Losey, in Milne, Losey on Losey, pp. 52–3. 11 Raymond Durgnat, A Mirror for England, p. 251. 12 According to Foucault, ‘discipline is a political anatomy of detail’. Michel

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Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, Vintage, 1979), p. 139. ‘Although it is true that prison punishes delinquency, delinquency is for the most part produced in and by an incarceration which, ultimately, prison perpetuates in its turn.’ Ibid., p. 301. Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 136. See Bertrand Tavernier, ‘Temps sans pitié: Les Vaineus’, Positif, No. 35, July– August 1960, p. 49. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London, Routledge, 1962), pp. 316–17. Michel Mourlet, ‘The Beauty of Knowledge: Joseph Losey’, trans. by David Wilson, in Jim Hillier, ed., Cahiers du Cinéma 1960-1968: New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating Hollywood (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 148. Cited in Gerald Silk, ‘Futurism and the Automobile’, in Richard Hertz and Norman Klein, eds, Twentieth Century Art Theory: Urbanism, Politics, and Mass Culture (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice Hall, 1990), pp. 33 and 39. Losey, in Gow, ‘Weapons’, p. 39. Petley, ‘The Lost Continent’, p. 112. Gainsborough Pictures had been founded in Islington by Michael Balcon and Graham Cutts in 1924. Along with GaumontBritish, the studio was acquired by J. Arthur Rank in 1941 so that, like The Gypsy and the Gentleman, many Rank releases started to acquire the Gainsborough ‘look’. Marcia Landy, British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930–1960 (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 41–3. Ibid., p. 42. Sue Aspinall, ‘Sexuality in Costume Melodrama’, in Sue Aspinall and Robert Murphy, eds, Gainsborough Melodrama (London, BFI, 1983), p. 30. Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 151. The population of England and Wales had ballooned from 6.5 million in 1750 to 14 million by 1831. See T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, 1760–1830 (London and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1968). Eric J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1969), p. 80. Genealogy is also a major theme of The Go-Between (see Chapter 5). Hirsch, Joseph Losey, p. 74. Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 129. Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Palo Alto, CA, Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 55. On ‘being-towards-death’ see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco and New York, Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 279–311. Durgnat, A Mirror for England, p. 254. See Ciment, Conversations with Losey, pp. 167–8. Notably The Mask of Dimitrios (filmed by Jean Negulesco in 1944) and the 1942 Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles project, Journey into Fear. Jean Douchet, ‘A Laboratory Art: Blind Date’, trans. Norman King in Hillier, Cahiers du Cinéma 1960-1968, p. 159. Durgnat, A Mirror for England, p. 150. Losey on Stanley Baker, in Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 177. Durgnat, A Mirror for England, p. 256. Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 168. Douchet, ‘A Laboratory Art’, p. 158. Losey in Roud, ‘The Reluctant Exile’, p. 146. Cited in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 171. Ibid.

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43 Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 134. 44 Eugene Archer, ‘Chance Meeting’, New York Times, 27 October 1960, p. 45:2. Paramount eventually struck a deal with the Legion, releasing the film in New York as the second feature in a double bill with a Cary Grant comedy. 45 Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 136. Caute is invariably a purist on matters of Losey’s political commitment. In contrast, Losey’s fellow blacklistees seem to have had no problem with his compromise, although Trumbo later regretted the Columbia oath as a step in the wrong direction just when the blacklist was beginning to crack. 46 Although Owen is best known for writing A Hard Day’s Night (1964) for Richard Lester and The Beatles, he had also written an admired TV play, No Tram to Lime Street, which Losey planned to film after The Criminal with Stanley Baker, Anthony Newley and Brian Phelan, and then much later with Tom Courtenay. Both projects were abortive. 47 Losey, in Ian Cameron, V. F. Perkins and Mark Shivas, ‘Joseph Losey on The Criminal’, joint issue of Granta, No. 1206 and Oxford Opinion, No. 45, 18 February 1961, p. 27. 48 ‘Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons.’ Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 228. 49 Raymond Durgnat, ‘Losey: Puritan Maids’, Films & Filming, Vol. 12, No. 8, May 1966, p. 33. 50 Losey, interview with Peter von Bagh, April 1965, cited in James Leahy, The Cinema of Joseph Losey (London, A. Zwemmer, and New York, A. S. Barnes, 1967), p. 90. 51 Wood, ‘The Criminal’, p. 7. 52 Losey, in Cameron, Perkins and Shivas, ‘Joseph Losey on The Criminal’, p. 28. 53 Jonathan Gili, ‘On Losey’, Isis, No. 1456, 1 February 1964, p. 10. 54 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 200. 55 See Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston, Beacon Press, 1964), pp. 144–69. 56 Ernest Mandel, Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press), p. 103. 57 Losey, in Cameron, Perkins and Shivas, ‘Joseph Losey on The Criminal’, p. 28. 58 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 280. 59 Losey, in Cameron, Perkins, and Shivas, ‘Joseph Losey on The Criminal’, p. 28. 60 Wood, ‘The Criminal’, p. 8. 61 To formally underline this economic vacuity, Losey had planned a helicopter shot which ‘went straight up into infinity until they were just ants on the face of the snow-covered earth, but because of winds we were never able to get it right’. Losey, in Cameron, Perkins and Shivas, ‘Joseph Losey on The Criminal’, p. 29.

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1 Becoming-animal: Frank (Dirk Bogarde) and Glenda (Alexis Smith) react with alarm to the discovery of their affair by Glenda’s husband, Dr Clive Esmond, in Losey’s first British film, The Sleeping Tiger (1954).

2 Reflection of a death foretold: the face of David Graham (Michael Redgrave) is doubled in the prison glass as his condemned son, Alec (Alec McCowen), displays a calm fatalism in Time Without Pity (1957).

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3 Amour fou: Keith Michell and Melina Mercouri make their pact with the Devil in The Gypsy and the Gentleman (1957).

4 MacDonald Carey is on the wrong end of an umbrella as Oliver Reed and Shirley Ann Field look on with sadistic amusement in The Damned (1961).

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5 Eve (Jeanne Moreau) seduces a smitten Tyvian (Stanley Baker) by telling a fabricated tale of her childhood in Eve (1962).

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6 ‘He’s a vampire too, on his Sundays off’: Barrett (Dirk Bogarde) sizes up his next victim, Tony (James Fox) at the beginning of The Servant (1963).

7 ‘We’ll all be rat food before long’: Pte Sparrow (Jeremy Spenser) gives some creature comfort to Pte Hamp (Tom Courtenay) on the eve of his execution in King and Country (1964).

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8 Monica Vitti and Terence Stamp strike a defensive pose in Modesty Blaise (1966).

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9 Forbidden games: Robert Mitchum ‘menaces’ Mia Farrow during one of her staged rape fantasies in Secret Ceremony (1968).

10 The redoubtable Mrs Maudsley (Margaret Leighton) in Losey’s Palme d’Or winning The Go-Between (1971).

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11 Galileo (Topol) demonstrates his new (stolen) invention – the telescope – to the young Andrea (Iain Travers) in Losey’s film version of Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo (1974).

12 Class conflict meets sexual politics as Patti Love confronts Vanessa Redgrave and Sarah Miles in Losey’s last film, Steaming (1985).

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Dystopic malevolence and the politics of collusion: Evan Jones’s The Damned (1961), Eve (1962), King and Country (1964) and Modesty Blaise (1966)

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A Brechtian maxim: do not build on the good old days, but on the bad new ones. (Walter Benjamin)1 He who can command, he who is by nature ‘master’, he who is violent in act and bearing – what has he to do with contracts! (Friedrich Nietzsche)2

The Criminal represents an important turning point in Losey’s career for several reasons. Unlike Time Without Pity and Blind Date, which are still largely vehicles for Losey’s bravura mise-en-scène, the prison film was clearly the philosophical and spiritual brainchild of its writer rather than its director. Indeed, it is hard to reconcile colourful characters like Snipe and Pauly Larkin, who are the direct product of Owen’s ingrained Liverpool Irish-Catholic upbringing, with the often dour Puritanism of our man from Wisconsin. Owen’s brilliantly idiomatic characters and dialogue provided the necessary artistic impetus for Losey’s inevitable break from old-guard Hollywood writers such as Ben Barzman and Howard Koch, thereby initiating a more experimental, writer-oriented focus in the director’s subsequent work. This not only opened the way for collaborations on a more equal footing – most notably with Harold Pinter (The Servant, Accident, The Go-Between), Tennessee Williams (Boom! ), Franco Solinas (Mr. Klein), Jorge Semprun (Les Routes du Sud) and David Mercer (A Doll’s House) – but also found Losey increasingly willing to push conventional narrative beyond the exigencies of the realist action-image to a more radically modernist appreciation of ambivalence and discontinuity. Perhaps the most underrated of these ‘writerly’ collaborations are the four films that Losey made with the West Indian screenwriter Evan Jones in the early 1960s. The pair first worked together on The Damned (1961), when Jones (who until then had worked largely in television) was brought in at the last minute for a hurried rewrite of Barzman’s original script. Losey had discovered the writer through In a Backward

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Country, Jones’s 1957 teleplay on land reform in Jamaica, where his own family were property owners. ‘We had a certain political kinship and we 3 got along very well in other respects, too’, recalled Losey. So well that Losey later admitted that their next project, Eve, ‘was a much more active collaboration … than any other I’ve had; and I probably made a greater 4 personal contribution to that script than any of the others’. Most critics agree that Eve represents a new maturity of style in Losey’s career, for despite its stylistic self-indulgence and disastrous cuts at the hands of the producers, it is closer to the work of ‘literate’ arthouse auteurs like Antonioni and Resnais. In contrast, Jones’s third film with Losey – the anti-war King and Country (1964) – was a well-received, albeit conventional adaptation of John Wilson’s stagy, theatrical source. Only the camp, Avengers-like spy spoof Modesty Blaise (1966) is an acquired taste, failing to transcend its swinging sixties ‘pop/op’ roots and Losey’s ham-fisted attempts at visual humour, despite its obvious stylistic inspiration for the Austin Powers series. Yet even here, Jones managed to imbue the comic strip’s slight, escapist storyline with biting political satire. What specifically unites these films is not simply Jones’s reiteration of Losey’s habitual concerns with impulse and dislocated time, but his exploration of the cynical collusion between naturalism’s two outward symptoms. These are: (1) masochism (which, for Deleuze, enacts the individual’s rebirth from impulse in the form of a controlled fantasy, a case of naturalism raised to the level of the business contract); and (2) the institutional dystopia that exploits and exacerbates it. Thus while Eve is the quintessential study of masochism’s innate relation to both Christianity and capitalism, the other three films focus on its destructive partnership with Britain’s class-bound military bureaucracy, whereby primordial violence is presented as both tactic and symptom of ruling-class duplicity. The threat of contamination by nuclear radiation, for example, is disclosed as both a public hazard and as the scientists’ utopian solution for the future in the ‘Brave New World’ of The Damned. Similarly, Passchendaele’s deluge of mud and rain in King and Country acts as an objective correlative of the military’s necessary dehumanization of bodily affect (neatly condensed into the semi-comic gest of Private Hamp’s constant attacks of diarrhoea). More ominously, in Modesty Blaise both the government and its corollary, international terrorism, exploit difference itself as a form of controlling duplicity, epitomized by the film’s limitless variations on metamorphosis and the ever-shifting economy of both economic and identity exchange. For Jones, this dystopic malevolence is spread by corrupt public servants and maverick bureaucrats who hide secrets from their superiors in order to promote

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their own unofficial agendas. In each case, masochism perpetuates 5 itself through a wellspring of perverse acts and fetishes. Eve (or Eva in its European release) is clearly the paradigmatic film in this group, not only because it provides a case study for the masochistic personality, but because it filters Sacher-Masoch’s ‘vice’ through the framework of several Losey obsessions. Eve is at once a Marxist fable and biblical allegory, tying Adam and Eve’s ‘fall’ to the dehumanizing economy of capitalist exchange value. It also serves as a cautionary tale against selling out literary and filmic ‘art’ for commerce, as well as a cathartic explosion of personal sexual neurosis. All this is expressed through Losey’s riotous love affair with Venice and the baroque, visualized specifically through the constantly changing rhythms of water and the multiple, often circuitous reflections of mirrors and glass. ‘I think Eve was a properly baroque film’, he admitted, ‘because it was dealing with a baroque city, a baroque period, and essentially a baroque group of characters.’6 Eve’s literary source – a hard-boiled, California-based thriller by James Hadley Chase – couldn’t have been more alien to Losey’s recently cultivated modernist sensibilities. The initial film adaptation was written by one of Losey’s old blacklist cohorts, Hugo Butler (The Prowler and The Big Night), but Losey rejected his efforts as ‘too Hollywood’. The director was determined to make a clean break with the established action-thriller genres of his noir period and move towards a more discursively confessional, auteur-based cinema. ‘It was an intensely personal film’, recalled Losey, ‘and it was a film in which I was not only working out my sexual, personal relationships, but also working out my exile … To be dislocated in terms of background and place to the extent that I was is to dislocate your personal relationships.’7 Jones was brought in to transform the material into a more chi-chi Italian filmworld context, all the better to underline the working-class protagonist’s social, artistic and sexual alienation. Chase’s hero, Clive Thurston, is now the successful author, Tyvian Jones (Stanley Baker), a self-centred Welsh charlatan living in Rome. Tyvian’s fame rests entirely on Strangers in Hell, a novel (and subsequent film) plagiarized from his dead brother, which appropriates the latter’s real-life experience in the Rhondda pits as Tyvian’s own. This duplicity and subsequent guilt is the basis for Tyvian’s neurotic insecurities about class, nationality, money and women, which significantly extend the contradictions of Baker’s earlier Losey characters, Inspector Morgan and Johnny Bannion. According to Losey, Stanley Baker’s character was based on his Welsh background in Eve as it was in the case of Blind Date, and this cannot be translated into any other

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language. I don’t know how you would convey the bible-background, the coal mining background … the class implications of the accent, even the minorities thing that comes into the whole Welsh idiom.8

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On the other hand there is also a danger of fetishizing the exile’s difference to the point where he is incapable of any form of assimilation or will-to-power, whether it be emotional, economic or cultural. As Edward Said knew all too well, ‘There is the sheer fact of isolation and displacement, which produces the kind of narcissistic masochism that resists all efforts at amelioration, acculturation and community. At this extreme the exile can make a fetish of exile, a practice that distances him 9 or her from all connections and commitments.’ Given Losey’s fanatical defence of Eve’s autobiographical content in the face of producer interference, Said’s comments are perhaps more descriptive of the director himself than his fictional surrogate. The character of Eve is similarly transformed from the clichéd prostitute of the novel into an alluringly ambiguous vehicle for Jeanne Moreau, symbolically standing in for Losey’s problematic relationship with women in general. ‘Eve meant a lot to me’, Moreau recalled, because it was about the freedom of women, and how they get trapped by money, how they are the victims of convention – especially marriage. This was one of Joe’s big preoccupations as well, of course. He worried about his need to dominate women, and realized that he – and any man – can only do this within bourgeois marriage. He loved femininity in women, but didn’t understand what it really was, in its largest sense, except as sexual power over men. This … is central to the character of Eve, who has little but contempt for men, and uses sex as a weapon.10

As one might expect, Jones immediately raised the warning flags, seeing a low-budget potboiler suddenly transformed into a grand auteurist statement. The once slim plot had now become the vehicle for Losey’s self-inflated attempt to compete artistically with his European rivals on their own turf. Indeed, Antonioni’s creative fingerprints are all over the film, from its producers, the Egyptian-born Robert and Raymond Hakim (who were at that time also financing the Italian director’s L’Eclisse), to the DP, Antonioni’s regular cameraman, Gianni di Venanzo. With its starkly framed architectural geometries, washed-out, monochromatic images of wintry Venice, and stark interior chiaroscuro, Eve looked more like an Antonioni than an Antonioni!11 As originally edited, the film is structured as one long flashback, 12 focalized through the subjective narration of Tyvian Jones. This is framed by two sequences, which act as a brief present-day prologue and coda. Eve thus begins on a grey, wintry day as the courtesan Eve Olivier

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(Moreau) rides in a water taxi across the Venice Lido and pulls up at the dock of Harry’s Bar. Inside, a washed-up Tyvian – ‘part-time writer, part-time guide’ – drunkenly tells picturesque tales of the Rhondda to a captive audience of foreign tourists. The raconteur is interrupted by the arrival of his hated rival, Sergio Branco (Giorgio Albertazzi), the producer of the successful film adapted from Tyvian’s plagiarized novel. He’s in Venice to observe the second anniversary of the suicide of Tyvian’s Italian wife, Francesca Ferrara (Virna Lisi), who was also Sergio’s assistant and unrequited love. Appalled by the Welshman’s indifference to Francesca’s memory, Sergio accuses him bitterly: ‘I don’t suppose Tyvian that you even remember why we are here today.’ But Tyvian remembers all too well, for Sergio’s presence triggers a suffocating attack of self-recrimination. Close to vomiting, he rushes gasping into the street. Cued by Tyvian’s voice-over, we flash back two years to better times: ‘It was a sun-splintered summer’s day. Venice – Film Festival time. The book had made me famous, the film had made me rich, and I rode the waters of Babylon on a chariot of speed.’ Cut to a tanned, beaming Tyvian in a straw hat, waterskiing across the Lido, his watery swath fatefully intersecting with that of Eve, who films his progress through a Super 8 from a passing boat. That night, while Eve escorts a rich client on the Grand Canal, Tyvian reaps the rewards of his success at the Film Festival. Not only is ‘his’ film a big hit, but we also learn of Tyvian and Francesca’s impending marriage. Losey is at his brilliant best here, using long takes and a peripatetic camera to catch snippets of expository conversation much as in Robert Altman’s Nashville. More importantly, the sequence gives us clear evidence of the bitter enmity between Tyvian and Sergio. The Italian is devastated at the news of Francesca’s engagement, particularly as Tyvian is obviously not in love with her. Francesca is merely an attractive trophy in the unfaithful Tyvian’s ongoing macho and class competition with the wealthy producer. We also learn that Sergio had to be persuaded ‘at the point of a gun’ to do the picture. It seems he already doubts that Tyvian actually wrote the book, for, as he later admits to Francesca, ‘it’s too full of sympathy and good humour’. Sergio throws down the gauntlet by immediately buying the rights to Tyvian’s next novel, challenging him to produce something original of his own. As usual, Tyvian is one step ahead: he has already rented a farmhouse on the island of Torcello for that very purpose. It is there, later that same night, that Tyvian and Eve symbolically cement their masochistic contract. Stranded with a broken rudder in the middle of a torrential downpour, Eve and her rich client, Pieri (Checco

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Rissone), break into the Torcello house to shelter from the storm. Returning home, Tyvian angrily confronts the embarrassed Pieri, but softens when he sees the seductive Eve, fresh from a hot bath. Instantly smitten, he throws out Pieri; then, claiming the feudal right of conquest, the Welshman demands to see what Eve can do. She responds by knocking him senseless with a heavy glass ashtray. This violent rejection would normally deter the most self-possessed of men but Tyvian is undaunted. Pursuing Eve back to Rome, he initiates a series of increasingly humiliating encounters as he tries every ploy – macho virility, pathetic pleading, hard cash, intimate personal confession – to secure her devotion. Although Eve doles out the occasional night of sex, she warns him not to fall in love with her. Matters are further complicated by the haunting ‘presence’ of Eve’s engineer ‘husband’, who turns out to be yet another client, a professional gambler named Michele. It seems that exchange value governs all of Eve’s sexual transactions. Tyvian is quickly lured into yet another contractual triangle, mirroring his similar, albeit more legitimate relationship with Francesca (sex) and Sergio (business). At this point the film shifts register, abandoning the realist conventions of clear exposition and logical narrative causality (the usual corollaries to character development) in favour of a discontinuous series of psychological vignettes that better express the prevailing exchange economy between the main characters. Instead of showing character through overt actions and reactions, the libidinal nuances and shifting economy of the Eve–Tyvian relationship are indicated through the mood and texture of the film’s score, as well as the baroque discontinuities of its spatial architecture. The soundtrack is a haunting combination of Michel Legrand’s Miles Davis-like jazz modalities and Billie Holiday, what Losey called ‘the two passions, the horn and the voice’.13 Eve’s mise-en-scène is dominated by the deceptively shifting parameters of time and space produced by the film’s plethora of mirrors. Durgnat describes the film’s baroque visual style as ‘a constantly shifting composition of torsion, counterthrust, abrupt re-entrants, the penetration of levels by winding structures (such as staircases) or sharp diagonals (certain track shots), and brutally foregrounded details pulling strongly 14 against larger structures’. The result is an audio-visual vocabulary that unites the couple within a reflective world of self-deception, while simultaneously alienating them through a combination of architectural tension and elliptical editing. The relationship comes to a critical head following a humiliating encounter when Eve refuses to see Tyvian at her Rome apartment. (He peers longingly through a crack in the door as Eve receives a present

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from a satisfied customer – a riding crop no less!) Tyvian demands that she go away with him for a weekend on Torcello. At first she refuses, but then she calls Tyvian in the middle of a wedding reception and states her demands in predictably materialist terms: ‘The best hotel in Venice. And gambling.’ Ever the faithful lap-dog, Tyvian deserts his friends (he is about to cement a film deal with Sergio) and leaves immediately for Venice, in effect giving up one ghost of exchange value – art for commerce – for another: money for sex. The ‘best hotel’ turns out to be The Danieli. With its giant, gothic-cum-baroque stairwell and multilevelled network of staircases and balustrades, it resembles a cross between the labyrinthine logic of an Escher engraving and the inner courtyard of M’s Bradbury Building, allowing Losey to overlap the themes of class, money and sexuality via the fetishized architecture of the leisure ‘arcade’. As an awed Tyvian puts it, ‘a long way from the mines and the chapel is this’. It is at The Danieli, surrounded by the ensnaring and duplicitous mirrors of the bridal suite, that a drunken Tyvian finally breaks down and admits to stealing his brother’s novel. Eve receives Tyvian’s confession with a predictable lack of compassion, callously billing him for her weekend’s sexual and ‘priestly’ services. But Eve is ultimately less interested in the money per se than in the self-deluding sexual power it makes possible. She throws the currency back in his face: ‘Here, I take money from a man. You’re not a man, you’re a loser … You need it worse than I do.’ Then she adds the ultimate insult: ‘What do you think I’ve been doing all the time? I’ve won money gambling. You even led me to a couple of clients. You earned it. Go on, take it.’ Horrified, Tyvian suddenly realizes that the reverse cash transaction has switched his role from privileged client to unwitting procurer. Tyvian’s response is to legitimate this new role – which is merely a sexual parallel to his already whorish economic and creative relationship to Sergio – by marrying Francesca. Shooting it on the Grand Canal, Losey turns the wedding into an incandescent riot of fluid movement, replete with wobbly gondolas, traditional music and the peeling bells of the Santa Maria della Salute. Despite this suggestion of Dionysian intoxication, Losey and Jones also imply that bourgeois marriage is itself a form of contractual prostitution. This very Godardian view15 is reinforced by both the visual contiguity of Eve herself, who smugly observes the proceedings from her balcony at The Danieli, and the vindictive phone call she makes to Tyvian on his wedding night: ‘Très chic. Très cher. Did she pay for it? What’s the matter? You’ve got nothing to say? Have you told her about your brother? Ty, I sent your money back … recommandé, to your flat in Rome. I don’t want your dirty money. Pauvre tarte.’

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Although Francesca reluctantly chooses to overlook Tyvian’s affairs, Sergio is not so forgiving. He sees Tyvian’s liaison with Eve as a public humiliation of Francesca. ‘I don’t care about your morals’, he states. ‘I care for her because I want her for myself. I warn you Tyvian, when you hurt Francesca you hurt me. As a man you are a fake. I believe you are also a fake as a writer, and I’m going to prove it.’ Later, he warns Francesca that he’s making a thorough investigation of Tyvian’s Welsh ‘miner’ background in the writer’s hometown: ‘This man is a drunkard, a braggart, a strongly built man frightened of the hard work in the mines. These are the facts.’ By linking Tyvian’s sexual infidelities to his lack of working-class authenticity as both a man and an artist, Sergio combines issues of love and marriage, art and class authenticity, under the hallowed seal of the bourgeois business contract. Losey sets up a clear dialectic between the fallible, creative individual and the ‘legitimizing’ function of the capitalist machine, only in this case the pretence is mutual. Just as Sergio claims to authenticate art but actually debases it into money-spinning commerce, Tyvian returns the favour by basing this art on a fraudulent impersonation. Far from justifying Sergio’s moral position, Losey uses his flawed character to indict contrived representations of subaltern classes (i.e. Tyvian as a legitimate workingclass hero), which are obviously framed through the dominant authority’s ‘jargon of authenticity’. As Adorno once observed, ‘Art would perhaps be authentic only when it had totally rid itself of the idea of authenticity – of the concept of being-so-and-not-otherwise.’16 Besides, any moral ground that Sergio might claim in his defence is irrevocably undermined by his vindictive jealousy. We see the full nature of this possessiveness when the producer makes an uninvited visit to the couple’s Torcello honeymoon. Surrounded by the wintry desolation of fens and marshes – an austere inverse to the sexually fecund world of the Grand Canal – Sergio reveals that he’s showing a new cut of Tyvian’s picture in Rome and would like his assistant to be there. Moreover, he has brought Tyvian a ‘wedding present’: the damning results of his investigation in Wales. Although Francesca refuses to read his report, confirming that she would love Tyvian no matter what he claims to be, she cuts short her honeymoon and returns to Rome with her boss. Tyvian reacts to Francesca’s ‘desertion’ with a visit to the Venice Casino, where he humiliates and then propositions Eve in front of her ‘husband’, Michele (Riccardo Garrone). Back in Torcello, Eve fashions a little payback by withholding the only real currency she has left – she denies Tyvian her body. The next morning, Francesca returns unexpectedly from Rome to discover her husband asleep on the living-room

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floor, as Billie Holiday’s ‘Loveless Love’ plays on the turntable. She climbs the stairs to the bedroom and, to her horror, discovers Eve dressed in her negligée. As the shamed Welshman stands agonizingly in the doorway, Francesca runs hysterically from the house. Tyvian can only stand helplessly on the dock as his wife jumps into her boat and heads full speed toward the harbour dredge. Losey cuts to a close shot of Tyvian, keeping the splintering impact and explosion off-screen. Baker’s head drops, his whole face quivering with grief. The recurring sexual exchange is complete, and it ends, as one might expect, in death. The night of the funeral – which Losey shoots as a rainy, waterlogged mirror image of the wedding – a demented Tyvian lurks menacingly on Eve’s balcony, watching her through the window as she drunkenly undresses to the strains of Billie Holiday’s ‘Willow Weep For Me’. Later, as she sleeps, Tyvian confesses to Eve that he needs her. She wakes up screaming, reaches for the riding crop and, fulfilling Tyvian’s every masochist fantasy, whips him savagely on the body and face. He staggers into the night and falls off Eve’s front steps into a pile of rubbish in the courtyard below. The sequence ends with a choker close-up of Tyvian, the riding crop dissecting his face. Behind him, we see the stark light of a street lamp, echoing the closing shot of Antonioni’s L’Eclisse. To the elegiac sound of Francesca’s tolling funeral bell, we then flash forward to the film’s epilogue, as Tyvian’s voice-over brings us back full circle: ‘Two years and the tolling of that bell’, he recalls wistfully. ‘But it wasn’t for you that I stayed in Venice, Francesca. Eve stayed and I – parttime writer, part-time guide, full-time exile in my Babylon.’ Tyvian then quotes a fragment from Emily Brontë’s, ‘Remembrance’ – ‘If I forget thee … ’ – which folds Tyvian’s narrative time-regained into a nostalgic yearning for the innocent snapshots of lost youth.17 But as Sergio and Tyvian emerge from church, we realize that unlike Losey’s usual Proustian creative harnessing of past experience for future growth, Tyvian’s longing for lost time is escapist, an attempt to lose himself in an idealized childhood Eden. In fact, he seems to have elided the unpleasantness of his wife’s memory altogether, for as Sergio reminds him, ‘It’s only two years and there’s no wreath from you on Francesca’s grave.’ Tyvian’s entrapment within a vicious circle of recurring time is cemented by his final meeting with Eve, which underlines their mutual pathological contract. Leaving Sergio at the church, he walks across Piazza San Marco to where Eve sits with her latest ‘lover’, a Greek businessman named Kasakas (Alex Revides). They are about to leave on a cruise of the Greek islands. Tyvian is a broken man, dutifully offering to meet the boat when Eve returns. ‘I hope to have sold that story by then’, adds Tyvian. ‘We could go to the casino, make a night of it … I’ll

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wait for you at The Danieli bar, yes?’ As the Greek notes his fawning movements with subtle amusement, Eve brushes Tyvian away: ‘If I come back.’ Then, as Tyvian walks sulkily toward the Lido, she calls after him: ‘Bloody Welshman!’ In his original cut, Losey had Eve add the line, ‘And don’t forget to feed the cat’, underlining the fact that they have now entered into Losey’s idea of a domestic ‘marriage’, a circular trap in which man and woman internalize their libidinal desires into the static vortex of violent impulse. Eve’s representation of hedonistic pleasure – or more accurately, the fantasy of pleasure, because masochistic pleasure is nothing if not a fantasy – is used as a weapon to feed vindictive egos, not for mutual bodily satisfaction. Like Blind Date’s Lady Fenton and Jacqueline Cousteau, the film’s symbolic Adam and Eve are takers, not givers, their sole affective currency not emotional love but monetary exchange. The source of this destructive behaviour – and the neurotic sexuality that feeds it – lies in the socio-cultural repercussions of the Christian Fall. The expulsion from Eden is the film’s primordial symbolic core – the genesis of its circuitous temporality – and its self-destructive trajectory. Indeed, Tyvian’s entire flashback – what he theologically calls his ‘fulltime exile in Babylon’ – is sandwiched between symbolic representations of Christianity’s irreconcilable views of Man: pre- and post-Fall. The prologue is particularly important in this respect, for Losey uses it to introduce all the main biblical and ontological themes of the film as a whole, and also to set up a crystalline circuit between past, present and future, transforming the film’s religious symbolism into a temporal allegory. The scene opens with a 360° pan to the right, passing across a series of statues atop Piazza San Marco before descending, God-like, to a corner relief sculpture depicting Adam and Eve alongside the Tree of Life. Tyvian’s voice-over provides the biblical denotation: ‘And the man and woman were naked together and were unashamed.’ Eve thus begins with the two sexes ‘before The Fall’, blissfully ignorant of genital difference and the nature of good and evil. This is but a brief glimpse of Eden, however, for Eve is not about a transcendental eternity gained but about an earthly paradise irrevocably lost. As in Milton’s epic poem, we sink quickly and inexorably ‘into a Limbo large and broad, since called the Paradise of Fools’,18 for the film will end with the same 360° pan onto the same image of Adam and Eve, but it will be an image tainted by the sordid revelations of the temporal flashback, an image of mankind after the Fall, the couple allegorically united in sin and condemned to eternal exile. Losey gives us a premonition of this fall from grace with his trademark tolling bell, which continues over our first glimpse of Eve in the

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water taxi. Eve’s unseemly trade – sex in exchange for money – is not only contiguous with the biblical original sin but also visually associated with Venice’s protean world of water and movement, whose deceptively shifting mirrored surfaces and diffused, liquid light have, like Eve herself, already snared the unsuspecting Tyvian. The prologue is also rife with more character-oriented temporal forebodings, for across the Lido from Harry’s Bar stands the Santa Maria della Salute: the church where Francesca and Tyvian were married. The tolling bell thus acts as a condensed form of time, expressing the vicissitudes of duration, which Losey expresses openly as the intrinsic motor of the narrative as a whole, but also conceals within the interstices of the film’s non-linear construction. From the point of view of the fabula – the imaginary construct of chronologically related events inferred by the viewer – the sound is both an empty echo of past wedding bells and Francesca’s future death knell. However, in terms of the syuzhet – the artistic organization of events as plot/discourse – both events are deferred to the film’s diegetic ‘future’, as part of Tyvian’s ‘Babylonian’ flashback. In this way, like the sin of Genesis’s first couple, Tyvian and Eve’s primordial ‘crime’ is universalized, infecting both fabula and syuzhet through the same immanent (i.e. non-linear) temporality. For all her worldly innocence, Francesca represents the entire genealogy of mankind who are already born into sin, already victimized by Tyvian and Eve’s fall.19 Losey also expresses this contagious temporal circuit visually by directly associating the flight of Adam and Eve with Francesca herself. Just prior to her suicide, when she discovers Eve in the Torcello bedroom, Francesca moves outside onto the upstairs landing and leans against the wall, clutching her face in despair. To her right is a detail of Adam from Masaccio’s fresco, The Expulsion from Eden (c. 1427), conveying the exact same emotions and body language, as ‘Adam and Eve stumble blindly but compulsively, with an almost audible sense of anguish and despair, towards an uncertain dawn’.20 Francesca’s death will transform that dawn into the blackest of eternal nights. Unlike in Proust, where time regained produces an eventual overcoming of memory and loss through art and difference, Tyvian’s account ends with an eternal return to the same fallen state. This cycle of guilty, impulsive self-abnegation is what Nietzsche calls ‘bad conscience’, because ‘this instinct for freedom pushed back and repressed, incarcerated within and finally able to discharge and vent itself only on 21 itself … is what the bad conscience is in its beginnings’. Irrevocably caught in this endless circuit of exchange, Tyvian – and everyone he comes in contact with – ends up perpetually renewing the same masochistic contract with his own guilty conscience.

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Byron once wrote: ‘All tragedies are finish’d by a death, all comedies are ended by a marriage.’ If the Romantic poet is correct and we define Eve as a comedy, albeit a black one, then The Damned (1961) is a vastly overdetermined tragedy, pushing the dystopic malevolence of the statemachine to its ultimate extreme. In this light, it’s significant that Losey’s original title for the film was ‘The Brink’. This alludes both to the ‘the brink of the cliff’ – in this case the rugged rock face of Dorset’s Portland Bill, a limestone outcrop linked to the mainland by a shingle spit – and ‘the brink of the end of the world’, reflecting the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s (CND) protest against weapons of mass destruction, a ‘hot’ topic at that time.22 Based on H. L. Lawrence’s The Children of Light, the film is an odd hybrid of two genres: a variation on the science-fiction staple of the mad scientist run amok (with utopian fantasies of building a future master race in the laboratory), combined with the 1950s Teddy Boy film. As with Eve, Losey had begun the adaptation with an old Hollywood colleague – in this case Ben Barzman – but was unhappy with the results. After Jones’s hasty rewrite, ‘all that 23 was left of Barzman was the story slant’ and all that remained from the book was the teenage gang. However, despite Jones’s significant input, Barzman’s ‘story slant’ dominates the structure of the film, for The Damned shows little of Eve’s experimentation with narrative disjuncture and character-defining mood shifts. Narratively, the film is a conservative throwback to the actionrealism of Losey’s studio formula days, using parallel montage to alternate corrupt social and organizational hierarchies in order to contrast separate but ultimately interconnected worlds of self-destructive impulse. To complete the film’s nostalgia for old noir strategies, these two milieux are linked via their common victim: the uncommitted liberal (played by MacDonald Carey) who, once awakened, overcomes his social indifference to become an activist hero. The Damned was Losey’s first foray into Cinemascope, and he uses the wide-screen format to powerful effect in the film’s opening, as we pan across the omnipresent English Channel to the sheer cliff face of Portland Bill. With its crashing waves and atavistic cries of circling seagulls, this is archetypical Thomas Hardy country, but the added combination of Arthur Grant’s stark black and white cinematography and James Bernard’s eerie, flute-inflected score heightens the landscape’s visceral desolation. This primitive, terrifying wilderness is the perfect rendition of Losey’s recurring motif of the primordial world. It becomes all the more ominous when we subsequently discover that its sublime natural violence harbours more deadly, man-made horrors, the product of the paranoid minds of the military and scientific establishment.

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Beneath the rock lies ‘Edgecliffe Research Station’, an underground military installation carrying out an unauthorized top-secret plan. Anticipating an inevitable nuclear war, the ‘boffins’ have developed a laboratory and school to raise and nurture a group of nine radioactive children as the immunized ruling class of the apocalyptic future. Suddenly, the ethereal music gives way to a rock ’n’ roll saxophone as we leave this timeless naturalism for the faded Victorian elegance of the neighbouring seaside town of Weymouth. As if to underline the difference in temporalities, we pan slowly down the town’s ornate Queen Victoria clock tower (with its connotation of deliberately measured time and reassuringly timeless imperialism), to find Simon Wells (Carey) staring admiringly from the promenade. Simon is an American tourist and former insurance executive who has retired from the economic rat race to sail the seas in his yacht, La Dolce Vita. He is immediately propositioned by Joan (Shirley Ann Field), an attractive twenty-year-old ‘townie’. Mistaking her for a local tart, he promptly follows her, presumably for an assignation. However, Joan’s come-on is a set-up, designed to lure the unsuspecting foreigner into a deliberately laid trap set by her psychopathic brother, King (Oliver Reed), and his motley crew of hooligans. The latter are an early 1960s mutation of the earlier Teddy Boy phenomenon, only now transformed into leather-clad motorcycle ‘greasers’ with an early foretaste of ‘Mod’ via King’s natty tweed jacket and civil servant’s brolly. We discover them lounging on the unicorn statue which stands at the base of Weymouth’s monument to George III, thus creating an ironic contiguity between King and ‘King’ that underlines the town’s social and class degeneration from royal resort to hoodlum haunt. As in most of his overt historical references, Losey expresses this continuity cyclically rather than linearly, conceiving the subaltern ‘Teds’ as a perverse temporal reprise of Weymouth’s aristocratic past.24 As usual in Losey, this bricolage of upper-class style and working-class aggression is a false representation, for power is concentrated in the hands of a small self-centred group rather than dispersed into a true collective consciousness (the townspeople are completely absent from the film). In addition, King’s influence is painfully limited and inarticulate, able to communicate only through mindless violence. To underline the point, Losey accompanies the scene with ‘Black Leather Rock’, a rock ’n’ roll song whose crude lyrics celebrate the inane violence that acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy of degeneration, not renewal: ‘Black leather, black leather, Rock, Rock, Rock … Smash, Smash, Smash … Kill, Kill, Kill’. As Losey explains,

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I wanted to exploit Rock, which was very primitive then, and try at the same time to show that it was very much associated with direct violence. And this open violence, this product of society, was paralleled with the indirect, secret, hidden, hypocritical violence of the men who assumed the right, through some kind of old school educational system, to corrupt, pervert and brainwash the minds of the young.25

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Losey uses the same music to parallel King’s overt teenage delinquency with the state-sanctioned, covert violence of the scientists. Both are complementary mutations of the prevailing social order. Thus King orders his men into battle formation with a military command – ‘Forward into battle, dear chaps’ – then leads them across the street in a perverse parody of The Bridge on the River Kwai’s stiff-upper-lip stoicism, whistling the tune of ‘Black Leather Rock’ à la ‘Colonel Bogey’. However, the parade ends not in a celebration of imperial guts and glory but the brutal mugging of Simon, who is left battered and bleeding as the gang march triumphantly away. Although the scene bears an uncanny resemblance to the choreographed gang violence in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess’s prophetic source novel is exactly contemporary with the release of The Damned), Losey deliberately refrains from glorifying the violence. Instead, as in The Criminal, he abstracts the beating into a series of rapid cuts as the gang members gleefully ‘put the boot in’. Paul Mayersberg argues that this lack of subjective catharsis makes the scene all the more visceral: ‘Because we do not “see” the beating up, there is no feeling of relief afterwards, only a sensation of pervasive violence and the fear that it could recur at any time at the least provocation. It is the incompleteness of this scene that makes it disturbing’, and, one might add, serves to internalize the violence into the suppressed impulse that pervades the film as a whole.26 If King represents the unacceptable face of inarticulate, individual terror, then Bernard (Alexander Knox), a dour Scottish civil servant/ scientist, is his institutional equivalent. Bernard is an intellectual advocate of theoretical science, which allows him to justify apocalyptic social remedies in idealized, non-somatic (read: inhuman) terms. We first meet him on the veranda of a sea-front hotel, his umbrella (metonymically doubling King’s) hanging from the window ledge. He’s there to meet his ex-girlfriend, Freya Neilson (Viveca Lindfors), a Swedishborn sculptress who is down from London to rent his cliff-top studio for the summer. Freya – her name refers to a northern fertility goddess – is the film’s artistic free spirit, its anti-establishment conscience. Absent from the original book, she was invented by Jones and Losey as a creative moral antidote to the film’s otherwise unrelieved pessimism.27

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An emotional open book, the bluntly honest Freya hates Bernard’s mysterious secret project, seeing it as the last bulwark of a petty, solipsistic mind. ‘A public servant is the only servant who has secrets from his master’, she posits, thereby maligning Bernard as a usurper of the people’s sovereignty, a bureaucratic variation on The Servant’s Barrett. Bernard responds in typically apocalyptic terms: ‘If I were to tell you even a little bit about what you call my secrets, I might be condemning you to death. Please trust my judgement.’ The ex-lovers’ lunch is interrupted by two of Bernard’s ubiquitous security men, Capt. Gregory (James Villiers) and Major Holland (Walter Gotell), who have somehow intercepted the battered Simon and escorted him to the safe haven of the hotel. Like King, Bernard’s juvenile passion for playing soldiers reflects his deep-seated need to blend into a dehumanizing group identity at a time of widespread fear, but both groups tend to exacerbate this fear rather than alleviate it. Freya spots this military fetishism immediately, noting Gregory and Holland’s presence with a knowing smile: ‘Captains and Majors, huh? Do they both belong to you?’ ‘Aye’, says Bernard. ‘And I keep a pet Colonel in the kennel at home.’ In contrast to her adverse reaction to Bernard’s ‘war games’ and crisis mentality, Freya is instantly seduced by Simon’s sober intellectual non-conformism, admiring his sceptical refusal of Bernard’s tiresome received wisdom. ‘I like him because he doesn’t like the world’, she says. ‘It’s a good beginning.’ Simon’s maverick outsider status – he is in many ways the film’s nomadic ‘exile’ – thus provides the direct catalytic link between the hermetically violent worlds of King and Bernard which, in true Griffith fashion, would normally come together as a dialectical conflict to be overcome. However, Losey’s dialectic will remain stalled in impasse and Simon’s proto-‘Hollywood’ role as the transforming action hero will be forestalled in the face of an inhuman science’s investment in creating and exploiting a contaminating, annihilating death. Continuing the parallel montage, Losey cuts back to Joan, signifying her as Freya’s intuitive equivalent among the Teddy Boys, the only true rebel in the group. When she dares King and the boys to race her in a motorcycle dash along the Weymouth causeway, for example, she seems to delight in speed’s empowering freedom, much like Robert Stanford’s cathartic release of pent-up violence on the proving grounds. As the gang pursues her, she deliberately cuts the wrong way around a roundabout, while King and the guys dutifully ‘keep left’. Despite his propensity for violence, King’s animalism is mitigated by an innate conformism to the establishment machine and its internalized social codes, marking him as the true interpellated subject of Bernard’s

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ruling-class ideal. This is further manifested through King’s despotic control over Joan’s sex life in which he is seemingly oblivious to his own incestuous desires. This is less a case of jealous perversity than an almost puritan anathema for all sex, which King considers ‘dirty’. According to Joan, he’s ‘never had a girl’. Losing her pursuers in town, Joan defies her brother’s censure by riding over to the harbour where she makes another play for Simon, who is busy working on his boat. Despite, or perhaps because of the previous day’s mugging (as in Eve, most of the film’s relationships are masochistic), there is a clear attraction between them. However, their mutual seduction is quickly interrupted by the sudden arrival of an incensed King and the gang. Following Jones’s penchant for metamorphosing common everyday objects into deadly weapons (which reaches baroque proportions in Modesty Blaise), King removes the handle of his brolly to reveal a long stiletto which he jabs menacingly into his sister’s face: ‘Do you think I’ll let a man put his dirty hands on you?’ Despite her brother’s threats, as Simon guides his boat out of the harbour to the derisive jeers of the gang, Joanie runs along the quay and impulsively jumps aboard. Meanwhile, at Edgecliffe, we gain some expository insight into the history and insidious nature of Bernard’s equally perverse project. Now eleven years old, the nine captive children were all born in the same week to mothers who were accidentally exposed to an unknown kind of radiation. Cold and clammy to the touch, and deadly to anyone who comes in direct contact with them, the children have been carefully quarantined in a sealed underground bunker-cum-school dormitory, where Bernard is nurturing and educating this mutant seed as the experimental prototype for a new kind of being who will survive the coming holocaust. However, the scientists are having considerable difficulty in maintaining the children’s immunity: two of them have already died from radiation poisoning and another is coming down with the same symptoms. Because actual physical contact with the children is impossible without wearing a radiation suit, Bernard keeps a professorial eye on his wards through a system of Big Brother-like surveillance cameras, addressing them as a large ‘talking head’ via closed-circuit television. Macdonald’s art direction makes full use of the wide screen here, exploiting the space’s horizontality to envelop the children in an open-plan, futuristic environment that suggests limitless width but restricted depth and perspective. In fact, with its chic, 1950s moderne furniture, modulated lighting and wall-to-wall computer banks, the bunker more closely resembles a hi-tech corporate conference room than the peeling paint

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and crumbling masonry of the typical British public school. This hybrid of one-dimensional technocracy and upper-middle-class elitism is a clear reflection of Bernard’s arid, establishment ideal of the future ruling class. Indeed, with their stilted RADA delivery and stiff, prepschool elocution the children are more like brainwashed automatons than typically rambunctious pupils, a frightening contrast to the violent but nonetheless very human and idiomatic Teds. Science’s creations are imitations of children, as much the prisoners of Bernard’s limited view of existence as Bernard himself. Back on La Dolce Vita, Joan is caught between a rock (sex with Simon) and a hard place (incest and violence with King). Reluctant to give in to Simon’s sexual advances, she asks to be put ashore and opts to hole up at Freya’s ‘Birdhouse’ studio until King cools off. Finding the place deserted, the couple break in, setting up a quiet interlude during which Simon finally seduces Joan amid the clutter of Freya’s radioactive ‘bird’ sculptures, an eerie metaphorical combination of free-spirited love and hideous death. Although Joan is ambivalent about getting romantically involved – ‘I didn’t want to be just somebody’s girl’ – Simon calms her fears with an abrupt proposal of marriage. He also confides his recent commitment to life through an affirmative acceptance of oblivion: ‘I’ve been married and divorced and I’m much older than you are, but I’ve never found this kind of quietness before. It’s as if I were no longer afraid of dying.’ The lovers’ romantic and philosophical idyll is short-lived, however, as they are quickly tracked down by a jealous King. They escape into the night, unaware that their movements have been constantly observed by the gang’s equivalent of Bernard’s panopticon: a relay of spotters linked by the whistled refrain from ‘Black Leather Rock’. The film’s hitherto separate but parallel threads now converge as King and the gang pursue the couple across the rugged outcrop until they blunder into the wired fence of the Edgecliffe Project, triggering an armed response from security guards and attack dogs. Caught between the pursuing Teds and Bernard’s troops, between the twin jaws of youthful, sexually repressed violence and its institutional equivalent, Joan and Simon have no means of escape except to scramble down the cliff face and dive into the sea below. Soaked to the skin and shivering with cold, they are rescued by the children and taken to their ‘secret’ cave hideout under the bunker. ‘They don’t have eyes here’, says one of the boys, unaware that the all-seeing Bernard already knows about their sanctuary. They are subsequently joined by the bedraggled King, who has also escaped from Bernard’s men by the same perilous route. The children are convinced that these

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adult ‘strangers’ are their long-lost parents – up to now they have made do with simulacrum families in the form of cut-out magazine photos of mismatched couples – and react with delight and amazement at the human warmth of their bodies. The film’s ensuing climax is both formulaic – Simon leads the rebellious children in a daring breakout – and sadly irrelevant. By being exposed to the radioactivity, the grownups have effectively signed their own death warrant, and they quickly show signs of nausea. The Damned is perhaps Losey’s most direct expression of actionrealism’s bankruptcy, for Simon is effectively neutralized as a heroic protagonist as soon as he comes into contact with his charges. Although the children stage a collective riot, smashing the hated surveillance cameras, and Simon and Joan ultimately lead them out of captivity into the sunlight above, it is clearly a useless, empty gesture. As a tweed-clad Bernard observes from the cliff top and predatory helicopters hover like metallic gulls overhead, the children are rounded up by frightening men in radiation suits and manhandled back to the cave. The film ends with the logical upshot of Bernard’s evil programme – the systematic death of his antagonists. King, trying to outrun a pursuing chopper in Freya’s sports car, swerves off the causeway to a watery death. Simon and Joan are released to La Dolce Vita and the open sea, but what was once the symbol of nomadic freedom and a realistic escape from the workaday world now carries the couple to a hideous demise from radiation poisoning. Then, as we look down on their aimless drifting from the bird’s-eye view of a hovering helicopter, we soar left to Freya’s terrace, where she is hard at work on one of her sculptures. Having rejected Bernard’s equivalent of the Final Solution, Freya knows too many of his deadly secrets to be allowed to live. In a pair of rapid cuts, Bernard fires his gun and Freya falls dead.28 The film ends as it began, with a pan across Portland Bill to the ocean below, as we hear the plaintive cries for help of the recaptured children. The voices continue over an establishing shot of the Weymouth sea front, a seemingly benign holiday town that masks an eternal return of a terrible, horrifying death. Losey’s anti-nuclear position has clearly shifted from the Cold War contingency of The Boy With Green Hair to a more unilateral plea for peace that seems to indict scientific rationalism as a whole. Leahy rightly stresses the film’s Brechtian agenda, reading it as another of Losey’s diagnostic fables of society’s pathologies, in this case indifference, for ‘Bernard’s project, born of death, could only be an act of public service in the time of a public indifference and abdication of responsibility so complete that it amounts to a rejection of life.’29 The real ‘damned’ of the film are not just the radioactive children or Simon’s

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motley crew of doomed action-heroes but the indifferent silent majority themselves. The film’s antidote to this negativity is Freya, and Losey uses the relationship between the sculptress and the scientist to point up key moral differences between two radically different readings of the dystopic. These are: (1) the ‘utopia’ born of negation and crisis; and (2) the dystopia as an aestheticizing ‘return to zero’. In his groundbreaking study of Spinoza, the radical activist Tony Negri frames this dichotomy as a fundamental difference between negative, dialectical thought, rooted in Hegel and the crisis (the ‘utopia’ of contradiction), and affirmative, constitutive praxis (Spinoza’s immanence): In the context of seventeenth-century philosophy Spinoza accomplishes a miracle by subordinating the crisis to the project. Only he, an anomalous and irreducible figure, assumes the crisis of the renaissance utopia as the reality to be mastered. The theoretical mastery must have the very same potential of absoluteness as does the utopia that is in crisis.30

In contrast to Spinoza’s purely affirmative and constructive project, modern rationalism and empiricism subordinate the project to the crisis. Transcendent and idealistic, these are reactive philosophies of the bourgeoisie, the class of crisis and its mediation. This is the world of Bernard and his men, a world where ‘creation’ is founded on the ultimate utopian crisis: nuclear holocaust. As Bernard tells Freya, indicating the stone walls of her studio, ‘I live with one fact. A power has been released that will melt those stones. We must be ready when the time comes.’ When he later bemoans that he is unable to repeat the exact conditions that produced the mutant children, Freya is aghast: ‘You mean you would if you could?’ ‘Certainly … Life has the power to change.’ Then, donning God’s aegis, he adds: ‘My children are the buried seeds of life … [they] will go out to inherit the earth.’ This is Bernard’s kind of dystopia – built not from what is good and creative in man, but from the very same cold, clinical science and reason that has produced the means of annihilating the human race in the first place. Freya’s impassioned response is unarguable: ‘What earth, Bernard? What earth will you leave them? After all that man has made and still has to make, is this the extent of your dream? To set nine ice-cold children free in the ashes of the universe?’ ‘Do you know what your refusal means?’ ‘Yes. It means that you are wasting whatever time I have left.’

Faced with the threat of annihilation, Freya returns to her work and goes on creating until her very last breath, ‘for here, when the danger to his will is greatest, art approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at

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healing. She alone knows how to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live: these are the sublime as the artistic taming of the horrible, and the comic 31 as the artistic discharge of the nausea of absurdity.’ Nietzsche’s stirring words effectively describe Freya’s world, celebrating a constructive new beginning framed through the sublimity of artistic creation. Freya’s terrifying bird sculptures (the work of English artist Elizabeth Frink) are thus not a mirror or objective correlative of the nihilistic effects of Bernard’s utopian dream, but, like Losey’s film itself, an aesthetic means for its overcoming. Losey stresses the distinction, for ‘Freya, the artist, represented the necessity and the right, if you can exercise it, to make your judgements on the merits of each case, which represents some kind of freedom … [I]n her sculpture she is expressing her opinion of the sterility of the world which is not her own sterility.’32 Losey uses Frink’s sculptures as an aesthetic V-Effekt throughout the film, linking Bernard with the violence of King and the gang. Although birds are often used as symbols of peace or freedom, Freya’s petrified ‘Graveyard Bird’ (which she gives to Bernard in lieu of her studio rent) expresses the scientist’s association with death and destruction. It is by his side when he addresses his captive children through his closed-circuit televisions, and later metamorphoses into the surveillance helicopters that hover like predators over the fleeing King and Simon. It is also the gang’s symbol, represented by King, perched like a vulture on a gravestone in the local churchyard, while the gang’s motorcycle handlebars resemble frozen wings, inflecting their freedom of movement with the deathly taint of oblivion. Read through Negri’s analysis, Freya’s ‘constitutive project must therefore pose science as a nonfinalized essence, as an accumulation of liberatory acts. It must pose science not as nature but as second nature, not as knowledge but as appropriation, not as individual appropriation but as collective appropriation, not as Power (potestas) but as power (potentia).’33 Her aesthetic solution is therefore a creative dystopia of limitless potential, necessitating a radical clearing of the ground so that a new project can be constructed on the basis of a body-based, constitutive praxis. In this sense, Losey’s own sense of creative exile and historical rupture is repaired artistically (rather than dialectically) through a combination of his character’s art as well as his own, for it is only through an aesthetic will-to-power that life’s immanent truth can be disclosed in all its healing powers. Jones and Losey push the inhuman consequences of the disciplinary society to its ultimate extreme in King and Country, an affecting case study on the harmful effects of the smug sanctimony of moral prerogative.

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Based on an actual incident during the Great War in which a workingclass volunteer was court-martialled and shot for desertion, the film traces the ideological origins of Bernard’s scientific rationalism in the crisis mentality that lies at the very heart of the class system. In this case ruling-class morality is represented by the extreme microcosm of British military justice and its own time-honoured categorical imperative: the necessity of personal honour and sacrificial duty to that most patriotic of abstractions, ‘king and country’. Produced by Daniel Angel for BHE Productions, King and Country was shot entirely on a sound stage in just eighteen days on a minuscule budget of £86,000. Richard Macdonald’s design is among his best, enclosing the action in a stark, claustrophobic set of dugouts and billets, linked by seemingly endless stretches of squelching mud and pouring rain. Macdonald even dragged in the carcass of a dead mule and live rats, inserting realist props into an essentially artificial world to produce a distancing V-Effekt. References to the larger context of the war itself are limited to the off-screen sounds of rumbling howitzers and exploding whizz-bangs, or carefully selected photographic inserts from the Imperial War Museum archive. Jones developed the spare and affecting screenplay from John Wilson’s successful stage and TV play, Hamp, which was itself based on an earlier source: an episode from James Lansdale Hodson’s fictionalized war memoir, Return to the Wood. According to Losey, Hodson was Hamp’s actual defence lawyer in the court martial, a man forever haunted by his failure to get the poor soldier acquitted.34 Originally intended for television (pre-colour) but never broadcast, King and Country was to be Losey’s last film in black and white. Set in Flanders in 1917 amid the mud and devastation of Passchendaele, the unadorned facts of the case are straightforward enough. A three-year veteran of the Western Front, the twenty-three-year-old boot maker, Private Arthur Hamp (Tom Courtenay), one day walked away from the guns and the slaughter for the simple reason that he couldn’t stand it any more. Apprehended in Calais, Hamp was returned to the front and, as the film opens, awaits trial for desertion. Under the military rule of ‘Soldier’s Friend’, he is entitled to the help of a defending officer. This unenviable duty falls to Capt. William Hargreaves, played with understated aplomb by Dirk Bogarde, who had himself been an officer in World War II and whose own father had served at Passchendaele and the Somme. Conceding that Hamp’s desertion is unarguable, Hargreaves decides to piece together a rapid, makeshift defence of mitigating circumstances, hoping to convince the court that Hamp was acting under

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extraordinary and intolerable strain and thereby move them to compassion and pity. He stresses, for example, that Hamp was not a conscript but a willing volunteer, joining up for ‘King and Country’, albeit on a dare from his wife and mother-in-law. A veteran of Loos, Warlencourt and Trones Wood, he has been under constant fire since the war began and is now the sole surviving member of his original platoon. Hamp himself narrowly escaped death on at least two occasions, once from drowning in a flooded foxhole and later from an explosion that claimed his friend Willie Bryson. The latter incident was particularly traumatizing, not only as a contributing factor to the accused man’s subsequent shell-shock but also because parts of Willie’s shattered body were splattered all over Hamp’s uniform. Finally, Hamp has recently learned in a letter from Len, a friend and neighbour back home in Islington, that his wife has taken up with another man – doubtless Len himself. Armed with these few paltry facts, Hargreaves makes an eloquent, impassioned plea on Hamp’s behalf, but to no avail. Although the court martial finds Hamp guilty as charged, it could legally temper its verdict with a recommendation for mercy, thereby saving Hamp from the firing squad. Unfortunately, instead of confirming the sentence personally, the company’s convening officer and president of the court martial (Peter Copley) decides to pass the buck by sending the matter up to Headquarters for final approval. ‘Emphasize good conduct, length of service, that kind of thing’, says the colonel, ‘but don’t put in anything about mental health. They’re not interested in that sort of thing at Headquarters.’ The High Command responds with an order for Hamp’s immediate execution, ‘Pour encourager les autres ’. With the battalion moving up the following day, it’s vital to maintain morale. At dawn a drunken, morphia-addled Hamp faces the firing squad, but with many of his comrades deliberately aiming wide – HQ’s ‘tonic for the troops’ has obviously gone down like flat beer – the volley fails to kill him. Hargreaves pulls out his pistol, walks over to Hamp’s prone body and humanely applies the coup de grâce. King and Country can be read on many levels, not least as a timely anti-war tract (its release coincided with President Johnson’s escalation of the war in Vietnam) every bit as visceral and gut wrenching as Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1958). It can also be argued that the film only uses war as a convenient context to make a larger, allegorical statement about rulingclass injustice and hypocrisy, particularly its propagation through the myth of patriotic ‘duty’. It’s significant, for example, that no rounds are fired in the film except the shots of the execution. ‘I set out to make a

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picture which, while set in World War I in a very specific and classically limited way, was to my own thinking not a war picture’, confirms Losey. ‘I think basically, if I have any one theme, it is this question of hypocrisy: the people who condemn others without looking at themselves, and the people with good educations and good minds who accept, 35 knowing they don’t believe in it.’ Losey and Jones thus continue and expand the themes of moral indifference and lack of commitment that we have already discussed in relation to The Damned (and which will later resurface in Mr Klein). Once again, when figures in authority are allowed to perpetuate the crisis mentality without an affirmative and active public accountability for their behaviour it becomes internalized into self-fulfilling destructiveness, in which the lower orders are invariably cast as the sacrificial lamb. As with Bernard’s idealized nuclear war scenario, what is not challenged is the ‘utopian’ nature of the crisis itself, for as Losey argues, ‘All of these people are culpable, including the young recruit, because the crisis brings them to the point of confronting each other, and not one of them takes an absolute position in relation to what he is or what he has come to understand.’36 Finally, the film is a powerful human drama centred on the personal relationship between Hargreaves and Hamp, in which the officer’s rationalization of duty is questioned and ultimately overcome by another’s irrational act of fear. Losey also sees it as ‘a class conversation in which the officer is educated by the boy’s simplicity. So that when that pistol, that coup de grâce, has to be fired at the end, in a sense Hargreaves is ending his own life as well as the boy’s … He will never be 37 able to get that out of his system.’ The film is structured around three levels of interaction: (1) the unequal division in class and rank between Hamp and Hargreaves; (2) Hamp’s relationship to his fellow soldiers, who ultimately will become his executioners; and (3) Hargreaves’s gradual isolation from his own officer peers. Each dynamic is set against a mise-en-scène of mud and devastation that under normal (non-military) circumstances would act as an equalizing agent between the different groups: everyone is enveloped by intractable forces of death that ultimately know no class distinction. However, Losey draws upon his Brechtian predilection for precise detail and texture in order to pinpoint a constructed class division that allows us to clearly differentiate between the different structures of power. With a predominantly static camera playing the role of a neutral observer, and deep focus and long takes uniting groups of characters in real time, subtle shifts in class hierarchy and moral position are expressed largely through blocking and framing. In the case of (1), Losey structures the dichotomy between Hamp and

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Hargreaves in terms of his familiar dialectic between becoming-animal and becoming-machine. There is a clear overlap of Hamp’s workingclass status and lowly military rank with his simple-minded naïveté and inability to control his bodily instincts, while Hargreaves’s superior class and military standing are tied not only to his background and breeding but more importantly to his ability to sublimate his animal horror of war into the official language of law and duty. While Hamp epitomizes the horrifying, incommensurable image of war that the captain has blotted out of his own life, Hargreaves represents the verbal text of self-justifying duty that Hamp is unable to articulate. As Leahy points out, Hamp is not a conscious malingerer; it’s simply that his body rebelled even though his mind was too befuddled to act.38 Although Hamp can mechanically recite his ID number to Hargreaves as if by rote, indicating his depersonalization into a mere cog in the military machine, he is still unable to control his body’s primal response to fear. When he recalls Willie Bryson’s death, for example, his body reacts instinctively to the sheer horror of the thought with another attack of diarrhoea. The unrepresentable effects of this involuntary memory of Willie are in marked contrast to Hamp’s more voluntary recall/fantasy of his life back home in Islington, which is presented as a series of sentimental, snapshot-like inserts. As Losey explained, ‘It seemed to me essential to give almost subliminal flashes of the kind of thing which Hamp had come from, which were not intended to be exact. They were not memories, and they were not realistic reproductions, but they were a combination of memory and fantasy and reality.’39 Consequently there is some doubt as to whether the images – the cobbler’s shop on the street corner, Hamp’s young son, Len the malingering spiv, sipping a cup of tea in bed – belong to Hamp’s subjective focalization or to an omniscient, thirdperson narration that underlines the soldier’s powerlessness within a fractured temporal schema, much like Harold Pinter’s Proustian experiments with time in the films that follow. In fact, Losey later admitted that ‘those early flashes of stills at the beginning of King and Country is partly the stirrings of Accident, of The Go-Between, of Proust’.40 Unlike the subjective flashback account of Tyvian Jones in Eve, Hamp’s cognitive estrangement from the third-person narration means that he is unable to overcome the temporal fracture between voluntary and involuntary memory, lacking the required self-knowledge and narrative will-to-power to turn his account into a truly liberating artistic apprenticeship. This sense of being ‘lost in time’ is conveyed as much by Hamp’s body language and the actor’s expressive social gest as by his limited narrative skills. Isabel Quigley perceptively noted at the time

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‘Tom Courtenay’s eloquent, starveling face that could have skipped this 41 half-century, for it always looks a bit anachronistic in the present’. Lost in this temporal no man’s land, Hamp is forced to defer to the unsympathetic authority of Hargreaves, who, cut off from his own bodily passions, can only understand Hamp’s act in terms of calculated and rational cause and effect. Why did Hamp wait ten days after coming down from the line before defecting? What was his plan? When was the exact moment when he knew he couldn’t take it any more? Hamp responds with befuddling candour: ‘I didn’t have a plan. I haven’t got the sense, have I?’ ‘Then what did decide you?’ asks Hargreaves. ‘I dunno. I just started walkin’. Walkin’ away from the guns.’ By unconsciously following the dictates of his bodily desires, Hamp can be seen as the moral flipside to the degraded, Christian characters in Eve. Whereas Tyvian is in such denial about his guilt and fall that he is destined to repeat the same masochistic actions over and over again, Hamp is blissfully naïve about his guilt, simply following Adam’s pre-Fall allegiance to bodily affect and passion. Indeed, because he is unable to think relationally, Hamp cannot even conceive of his desertion as a betrayal of his fellow soldiers. He is convinced that he and his crime are too inconsequential for them to shoot him. It is only when confronted with the punitive law of God/duty that he falls into a trusting, masochistic contract with his superior officer and the court martial as a whole. Because he is unable to speak the language of the dominant authority, the subaltern Hamp must be spoken for, represented by Hargreaves. Hamp’s desertion was an act of unconscious bodily will, something that the court could never recognize because it thinks only in terms of actions preconceived by the rational mind. Even worse, Hamp’s irrational fear may be contagious and must be nipped in the bud as quickly as possible. Hargreaves must therefore translate Hamp’s intuitive acts into the imperative signs of law so that they can be punished as a disciplinary example to others. In this context, Hamp’s own language is a distinct liability. An uneducated cockney who left school at the age of twelve, Hamp speaks in a colloquial dialect that not only lacks the court’s requirement of a precise statement of fact but reeks of subversive class difference. For example, when recalling his impetuous rush to enlist in the early days of the war, Hamp admits, ‘Well, when I volunteered we didn’t know any better, did we?’ implying a subaltern ignorance of the true nature of imperialist warfare. ‘What do you mean by that?’ asks Hargreaves. ‘Ah, just a manner of speaking, sir.’ Hamp’s innuendo muddies the strict semantic distinctions demanded by the court’s dependence on clear denotation. Instead, Hamp’s speech is filled with class connotations, forcing Hargreaves to consider issues beyond the

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letter of the law. The captain is understandably defensive: ‘You’ll have to learn to be careful of your manner of speaking’, i.e. stick to imperative signs that can be simplified in terms of right and wrong, cause and effect, mitigating circumstance. No wonder Thomas Hardy, in The Mayor of Casterbridge, condemned ‘dialect words – those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel’. Not surprisingly, when Hamp is called upon to testify on his own behalf, his embarrassingly disarming honesty is his own worst enemy. Courtenay is particularly effective here, playing Hamp as a trusting but frightened child, wild-eyed with terror, a mask of bewilderment lacking all comprehension and consciousness. Having given himself up to the protective veil of Hargreaves’s rhetoric, the best he can say is ‘Well, like you told me to say, sir, I was acting under extraordinary strain.’ By quoting Hargreaves’s own term, Hamp reveals that he’s being coached and reacts detachedly from his own, ‘foreign’ way of speaking. Hamp simply cannot dissemble in the imperative language of the court, indicating the huge gulf between the official language of duty and the non-verbal language of instinct, affect and the body: ‘I’d sooner you told them, sir. You know more about it than me.’ One could argue that this sets up a Brechtian alienation for the viewer, so that the film becomes an affirmative call for the subaltern class to speak for itself. Although this is obviously impossible in the filmic context of the received notions of military duty, it could be a future societal possibility built from the clearing of the moral ground that the film’s contradictory context makes possible. Andrew Sarris agrees, noting that Hamp is reduced to a sack of bile and vomit, gurgling finally in his basest biological essence and thus becoming sublimely human. This … is the key to Losey’s artistic beauty, specifically his expressive ability to doom his characters within his deterministic compositions, and yet to allow them to thrash about with force and feeling so that what finally emerges as important is not Life but living, not Death but dying, not beings but feelings.42

Although Losey seems to vacillate between optimism and pessimism on this question, one possible vehicle for this critical articulation is the film’s representation of Hamp’s fellow sappers. While Hamp and the officers are individualized into specific characters and types, the Tommies are homogenized into a comic Greek chorus, which acts as a critical commentary on the ritual nature of military justice. Losey’s point is that men envelop themselves in these rituals – the court martial; the almost sacrilegious holy communion where Hamp vomits up the communion wine; the firing squad; the soldiers’ drunken binge on the

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eve of the execution; even Hargreaves’s coup de grâce – as a moral security blanket at the expense of individual judgement and choice. We first meet the men at the beginning of the film as they dig out a muddy shell hole. They speak in fragments, completing each other’s sentences in a theatrical verbal choreography. The rhythm of their words parallels the ritual rhythm of the task, which they equate to shovelling shit, an apt commentary on the dehumanizing conditions of war itself. As James Palmer and Michael Riley point out, the chorus is a parody of the ‘idealised soldier/hero’ who leaves home, suffers through initiation into horror (death), overcomes and returns (rebirth), then shares his experience with the uninitiated. This is the idealized mark of duty against which Hamp is judged. However, in the soldiers’ words and self-mocking tone, the scatalogical and the heroic are combined, offering a dualistic view of man as animal (wedded to the needs and demands of his body) and man as a self-conscious entity capable of having ideals and acting heroically. His capacity to kill is, interestingly, a feature of both his creatureliness and his idealism – a 43 theme, in various forms, in much of Losey’s work.

One should add a third element, for the men are far more selfreflexively aware of their condition than either Hamp or Hargreaves, recognizing the connection of their status as animals within the overall code of the military machine. They express this during Hamp’s court martial by conducting their own parallel mock trial. A rat is accused of biting Private Sparrow (Jeremy Spenser) and is eventually stoned to death, but Losey takes great pains to show that the accused is not the actual perpetrator, but an ‘everyman’ rat captured to set an example to the others. The men are well aware that Hamp is merely a sacrifical lamb and that any one of them could be standing in his shoes. This bond is strengthened during the ‘orgy’ sequence on the eve of the execution, when the men pile into Hamp’s billet with a supply of rum and proceed to get drunk. The resultant binge, which culminates in a blindfolded Hamp staggering helplessly around in a game of blind man’s buff – a cruel parody of his upcoming fate – is ribald and erotic, with Sparrow at one point wrapping his arms around the besotted Hamp and rocking him like a baby. ‘There’s no disgrace, no disgrace at all’, he says in his melodic Welsh accent: Here today, gone tomorrow. It doesn’t matter who kills you, does it? Well, you know, you’ve lived a long life, Hamp, [three years: long by World War I standards] and you’re due. You rot in the mud and that’s that. Doesn’t matter what anyone bloody well thinks about it, does it? Hey, we’re all moving up soon, hmm? We’ll be in the same boat as you are. We’ll all be rat food before long.

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The key gest here is the contiguity of class solidarity with intimate bodily contact, a direct contrast to the officers, whose bond is verbal and abstract, linked largely by ceremony and duty. As Losey saw it,

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I wanted to get the sense of human creatures clinging to flesh, to each other’s flesh, and to the preservation of their own flesh, and attempting to comfort, and at the same time being hideously cruel, by mocking the thing that is going to happen … I hoped that it would serve to make it unmistakably clear, when the actual execution occurred, that none of these men, in the somewhat sober dawn, coming an hour or so after this affair, would want to kill the man.44

That task ultimately falls to Hargreaves, who by trial’s end has an equal lack of stomach for the job. As in the similar circumstances of Time Without Pity, Hargreaves’s fellow officers also have their personal, self-interested agendas. Because we were not witness to Hamp’s desertion and are therefore not in a position to judge for ourselves based on emotion or empathy, we are, like the court, reduced to an analysis based on the so-called facts themselves, an exegesis of signs that is of course highly subjective: ‘[a] matter of opinion’, as the colonel himself puts it. The trial thus turns out to be a comparison of witnesses, a test of the veracity of different subjective narrations, where the usual issues of reliability, authority and interpretation raised by all narrative texts are made overt and themselves tested within the filmic discourse as a whole. In true Barthesian fashion, story and discourse turn out to be completely dependent upon other stories and discourses, with the victory spoils going to the highest-ranked ‘interpreter’: the colonel. What began as a pure act of bodily instinct is thus reduced to an intellectual exercise of textual exegesis, governed by the codes and hierarchies of military law, a ‘reception theory’ utterly divorced from gut-level matters of life and death. Thus while the prosecuting officer, Captain Midgley (James Villiers) plays the legal game solely according to the prescribed rules, portraying Hamp as an undistinguished soldier and malingering coward, his courtroom skill contrasts with his personal feelings. After the trial he sportingly congratulates Hargreaves on a job well done: ‘I hope you got him off.’ However, he adds the rider, ‘But you know a proper court is concerned with law. It’s a bit amateur to plead for justice.’ Midgley is fully aware of the difference between the imperative signs of the former and the libidinal signs of the latter, where judgement, interpretation and some creative moralism are required. Although Lieutenant Webb (Barry Foster), Hamp’s platoon commander, is equally well-meaning – he gives the private an extra supply of rum to calm his nerves and

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applies the injection of morphia at film’s end – his interest is purely personal: ‘I don’t want my men as a firing squad. And I certainly don’t want to be the bloody sap who has to shout “fire!”’ Utterly empirical, he knows that the colonel has it in for him and is even willing to perjure himself to avoid the assignment. Unfortunately, although he exaggerates the case by stating that Hamp was a first-class soldier and popular with the men, he can provide no real evidence of Hamp’s mental breakdown. His best testimonial is that Hamp ‘brewed a damn good cup of tea’. In contrast, Captain O’Sullivan (the ever-blustery Leo McKern), the boorish company medical officer who treated Hamp for nerves and insomnia, quickly dismissed his symptoms as ‘cold feet’ or ‘funk’ and promptly prescribed his usual treatment of a ‘No. 9’ (i.e. laxatives for his bowels): ‘A good clean out never hurt anybody.’ But, as the constantly diarrhoeic Hamp sarcastically puts it, ‘one thing I didn’t have any need of was a No. 9’. Unfortunately, because of O’Sullivan’s fatal lack of a proper diagnosis of shell shock and its related symptoms, he now has a vested interest in asserting Hamp’s guilt as a confirmation of his professional competence as a doctor. As he smugly informs Midgley, ‘He’s proved me right, hasn’t he and that’s all there is to say about it. He did turn and run, didn’t he?’ But what is really in doubt is the very nature of imperative facts as such. At one point during his examination of O’Sullivan, Hargreaves raises the valid point of whether there is ‘an exact moment in the life of a soldier before which he is not suffering from shell shock and after which he is? An exact boundary about which no two doctors will ever disagree? An exact boundary on the one side of which a man is required by army law to “pull himself together”, or on the other, if he cannot, is liable to be shot as a criminal?’ Jones’s dialogue marks a significant shift from the play here, for in the latter the dividing line is between a man’s duty to ‘pull himself together’, ‘liable to be shot as a criminal if he cannot’, and ‘the right to be recognized as suffering from illness’.45 Jones shifts the discussion of boundaries from one issue to another altogether different: Wilson’s distinction between pre- and post-shell shock now becomes an issue of pulling yourself together or facing the consequences. Jones’s screenplay removes the legitimate right to be suffering from illness as a possible legal choice, disclosing the true nature of Hamp’s situation as a Catch-22. It’s little wonder then that when a stunned Hargreaves confronts the colonel in his quarters, he has become chary not only of facts but also of military discipline as a whole. Earlier, when Hamp thanked Hargreaves for his eloquent defence, the captain responded with a withering attack on Hamp’s negligence as a soldier: ‘It was my duty. If you’d remem-

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bered your duty none of this idiotic rigmarole would have been necessary … Don’t thank me for doing my duty. I had to! Just as you should have done yours.’ This is nothing but windy rhetoric, a verbal means of concealing Hargreaves’s own moral shell shock. Shaken to the quick by his defeat, Hargreaves is also betrayed by his body, almost gagging on his glass of scotch as he slumps wearily into the colonel’s chair. ‘Rather short on ceremony, aren’t we?’ rebukes the colonel. ‘Yes, I had too much of that today.’ Hargreaves then proceeds to challenge the court’s interpretation of the ‘facts’: ‘We’ll shoot that poor little bastard simply because he went for a walk. That’s what it was, you know. It was a technical desertion, but it was just a bloody little walk, really. And you know it. Don’t you?’ The colonel’s ‘reading’ of the facts is, of course, far more pragmatic: he refers Hargreaves to the execution order-cummorale boost. ‘Has it ever encouraged anyone? Or discouraged anyone?’ asks Hargreaves. ‘Of course it has.’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘No. Not quite.’ The colonel seems to be acting more out of a Kantian Duty as Necessity: it doesn’t matter whether the verdict was right or wrong because he’s going to accept it anyway, simply because he doesn’t want to take on the onus of fighting it. Then, in one of the film’s rare mirror shots, Hargreaves looks at himself in a cracked reflection and recites from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland: ‘There’s a porpoise close behind me, and it’s treading on my tail’,46 adding the key word, ‘Facts’, thereby equating the official version of events to a surreal parody of justice. But the colonel is more aware of the contradiction of facts than Hargreaves realizes. He also turns to a text, citing the opening lines from John Masefield’s poem, ‘Biography’: ‘When I am buried, all my thoughts and acts/Will be reduced to lists of dates and facts/And long before this wandering flesh is rotten/The dates which made me will be all for47 gotten.’ Hamp’s betrayal by his body thus becomes the fact of his failure of duty, which will in turn be eventually forgotten, leaving Hamp’s life and death as an insignificant hiccup in the glorious annals of the military machine. To paraphrase Lieutenant Webb’s epitaph on Hamp, ‘All that’s here is a few years of bloody nothing.’ In light of such cynicism, we are encouraged to read Hargreaves’s coup de grâce less as an act of empathy and compassion than as a clinical end to an annoying inconvenience, much as he might finish off a horse that has broken its leg during a fox hunt. Although he ends up divided between duty and human obligation, ultimately profoundly changed by Hamp’s simplicity, his societal role and class obligation hardly evolve at all. As Alexander Walker so aptly points out, ‘The ethics of those who ride to hounds are the same as those who ride to war: the master’s code overcomes temporary embarrassments occasioned by the servant’s

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incompetence … Hamp’s body goes to the lime-pit; the soul of the gent 48 goes marching on.’ Following King and Country’s bitter didactic tone, Losey and Jones opted for a more level, amoral playing field in Modesty Blaise, their final, and as it turned out, bitterly contested collaboration. The corrupt collusion between the ruling class, its subaltern agents and the criminal element is now made mutually complicit, equalized within a global economy of limitless greed, violence and amoral cynicism. As in Eve, these separate links of power and desire are connected by an endless chain of exchange and transmutability, so that any fixed, lasting ‘value’ or identity is rendered obsolete and disposable from the outset. Produced by Italian-born Joseph Janni (A Kind of Loving, Billy Liar, Darling), with pre-financing guaranteed by Darryl F. Zanuck and 20th CenturyFox, the film was originally slated for Sidney Gilliat as part of a £600,000 British Lion package, with Monica Vitti set to star in her first English-language film. After Gilliatt and Vitti failed to click, Losey, who had been making commercials for Janni’s Augusta Productions, jumped at the chance to direct (and, as in the case of Jeanne Moreau, appropriate) Antonioni’s acting protégée.49 With Losey on board, the budget ballooned to an estimated £1 million, enough to make seven or eight versions of The Lawless or M. The character ‘Modesty Blaise’ derives from Peter O’Donnell and Jim Holdaway’s popular cartoon strip, which was at that time syndicated in at least sixteen different countries. Another in a long line of Losey exiles, the exotic adventuress was orphaned at a young age and spent the early years of World War II as a stateless refugee, drifting aimlessly amid the rubble and chaos of the Balkans and the Levant, surviving a brutal rape and a brief spell in a Greek prison. At seventeen, Modesty was shunted between several displaced persons camps in the Middle East before making her way across Turkey and settling in Tangier. There she found work in a gambling joint under the aegis of one Henri Louche. On the latter’s death, she inherited the business, adopted the name Modesty Blaise, and expanded the organization until it became internationally renown as The Network, specializing in international art and jewellery thefts, smuggling, currency and gold manipulation, as well as all-around espionage service. Her eschewal of drugs often led to unofficial collaborations with the US Bureau of Narcotics and uneasy alliances with the British government. Known for her trademark jet-black hair wrapped in a tight bun, refined taste (including a priceless, albeit mostly stolen art collection) and predilection for rough red wine, Modesty is highly trained in hand-to-hand combat and notoriously deadly with her two favourite weapons: a bow and arrow and a

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kongo stick. Her specialty, however, is ‘The Nailer’: ‘This meant taking off her sweater and bra, and going into the room stripped to the waist … The technique was guaranteed to nail a roomful of men, holding them 50 frozen for at least two or three vital seconds.’ Her Cockney sidekick for the past seven years is Willie Garvin, a man of pure animal instinct whose equally wayward itinerary has led him from approved school, through two short prison sentences to a spell in the Foreign Legion, before hooking up with Modesty and The Network in Saigon. Morally and ethically, Modesty and Willie bear a close resemblance to Leslie Charteris’s The Saint: ‘As “poachers turned gamekeepers”, they defend the innocent, the poor, and the threatened against 51 “bad” gangsters of every kind.’ A final but important point: one of the more perverse aspects of the comic strip is that Willie’s and Modesty’s partnership is purely Platonic. The strip’s copyright holders insisted on this virginal relationship in the film. Although Losey pays lip service to this one particular point, he does little justice to the rest of Modesty’s persona, removing or downplaying 52 most of her hallmark traits, including ‘The Nailer’. Instead, the film’s plot is largely a clothesline for Losey’s op and pop dressing and satirical bag of sight gags. As the film opens, Modesty is retired, living off her abundant earnings. However, Modesty (Vitti) and Willie (Terence Stamp) are lured back into business by Whitehall’s Sir Gerald Tarrant (Harry Andrews) and a high-ranking cabinet minister (the ever-game Alexander Knox). The couple are recruited to accompany a shipment of £50 million worth of diamonds to pay friendly Sheik Abu-Tahir of Massara (Clive Revill) for valuable oil concessions. The sheikh, it turns out, is an old friend of Modesty’s, having ‘adopted’ her when she was a child. A problem immediately arises when Modesty discovers an Amsterdambased plot to steal the diamonds by the effete master criminal Gabriel (Dirk Bogarde in a silvery blond wig), a camp parody of Bond villains such as Dr No and Blofeld, who presides over an island monastery/ fortress in the Mediterranean. Gabriel’s colourful retinue includes his maîtresse-cum-‘wife’, Mrs Fothergill (Rossella Falk), who spends her time torturing and killing for Gabriel’s sexual pleasure, and a parsimonious Scotsman, McWhirter (also Clive Revill), who keeps close tabs on Gabriel’s finances with his ubiquitous ledgers. A complex series of double and triple crosses ensues. Using Modesty’s sometime lover Paul Hagan (Michael Craig) as bait, Tarrant sets up Modesty and Willie as decoys in order to dupe Gabriel into believing that the diamonds are being flown by RAF courier, thereby deflecting his attention away from their real mode of transport, the passenger ship Tyboria. But Tarrant is outwitted by both criminal masterminds. Gabriel

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dutifully plays along with Tarrant’s deception, shooting down the courier jet while secretly plotting his own scheme. He plans to break into the underside of the Tyboria using a bathysphere hidden in the hold of an innocuous cargo boat sailing under the Liberian flag. Meanwhile, Modesty and Willie have also become wise to Tarrant’s treacherous setup. They decide to ditch Whitehall and go after the diamonds themselves, infiltrating Gabriel’s organization by deliberately allowing themselves to be captured. This turns out to be extremely opportune for Gabriel because one of his divers has flunked the underwater tests and he can now use the expert Willie as his replacement. After the successful jewel heist, Gabriel returns with his captives to the island fortress where he offers Modesty a deal. He will share the diamonds if she is willing to pool their resources and thereby create an unassailable criminal cartel. He is willing to sacrifice Mrs Fothergill if she will give up Willie. Needless to say, Modesty refuses the offer and fashions the pair’s escape. After a showdown with Mrs Fothergill, in which the whip-yielding enforcer is literally hoisted by her own petard, the couple are pinned down on the rocky beach by Gabriel’s men. They resign themselves to inevitable death until the sheikh’s Arab legions come dramatically to the rescue, followed closely by Tarrant and Hagan. Mission accomplished, the film ends with Gabriel staked out on the desert sands, gasping for champagne as the kilt-clad McWhirter crawls commando-style to his rescue, while Willie and Modesty take full advantage of the sheikh’s largesse. ‘You can ask for anything’, he tells Modesty. She grabs a handful of ‘rocks’: ‘The diamonds.’ He roars with laughter. Although Modesty Blaise would seem to be unlikely material for a director of Losey’s background and interests – one wonders what Dick Lester would have made of it, given the film’s Help!-like fondness for zany, Orientalist intrigue, visual puns and narrative non sequiturs – he nonetheless approached the project with a serious didactic intent. Rather than making fun of the spy genre, Losey decided to use it as a vehicle to comment on its insidious lack of morality: ‘I wanted to make a film full of fun, full of laughter of various kinds and at various levels, which would at the same time make the amorality of the James Bond films … apparent.’53 Losey was particularly keen to critique the ‘violence for violence’s sake’ indulgence that typified Ian Fleming’s Cold War milieu, until John Le Carré’s deglamorized The Spy Who Came in From the Cold redressed the balance. Using the basic plot from O’Donnell’s 1965 novel, also called Modesty Blaise, Jones duly produced a logical, concise narrative in the 007 spythriller tradition, but in the wake of Eve’s more modernist visual digressions, writer and director suddenly found themselves radically

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divergent in their approach to linear narrative. Outlining his views to Tom Milne, Losey argued against the idea that film is simply a narrative form:

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I’m not against it being used as a narrative form, but I don’t want it to be limited to that … the exploration of a plot, which is necessarily the same basically as many others, must be valuable only as a kind of framework on which you hang observation of all sorts of … behaviour and relationships, society in relation to individuals and so on … theme rather than story.54

According to Jones, however, Losey rewrote much of the script midway through the shoot without consulting him. Far from being stylistic enhancements, Jones felt that the changes were grossly self-indulgent: ‘If the point of a scene was the theft of a ruby, he’d say that doesn’t 55 matter, what matters is the wig or tattoo.’ Unfortunately the connotative import of these touches invariably got lost under an avalanche of visual puns and the film consequently tended to fall between two irreconcilable extremes: an excess of high-camp spectacle versus a conventional thriller plot. In the end it failed to do either successfully. ‘The script was completely different in the finished film’, confirms Jones, ‘and I disliked almost everything Joe did with it … In terms of my work, Modesty Blaise was a mess, and a lot of things which were funny or 56 meaningful to me were neither in the end.’ Despite Jones’s understandable frustration, the film nonetheless successfully supplements and expands several of the themes that we have discussed in relation to the writer’s earlier projects. The most obvious is Modesty Blaise’s bitter critique of the establishment’s coldblooded complicity in mercenary, indiscriminate violence. Particularly anathema is the profitable marketability of this cruelty within a gadgetand technology-saturated economy that privileges abstract exchange over human use value. When one of MI6’s Amsterdam agents (played by Losey’s real-life agent Robin Fox, father of James and Edward) is blown to pieces in the line of duty, his death is greeted with characteristically callous indifference by the bureaucratic big wigs. Their cries of ‘Oh dear, that’s bad luck’ and ‘No use crying over spilt milk’ are the sort of smug platitudes one expects from the members’ pavilion at Lord’s when a batsman is dismissed one run short of his maiden century. By the same token, Tarrant and the minister think nothing of sacrificing the crew of the courier jet as part of their decoy plan to protect the sheik’s precious diamonds. While Hagan celebrates the mission’s success with a glass of expensive champagne with Modesty, all Tarrant can offer by way of eulogy is the line, Dulce et decorum est pro

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patria mori (‘Lovely and honourable it is to die for one’s country’), which harks back to the opportunistic cynicism of Hamp’s ‘official’ death in King and Country. This use of violence as liquid currency in a broader economy of conspicuous consumption is extended still further in Tarrant’s unusual choice of weapons: King and Bernard’s trademark civil servant’s brolly is now, in Tarrant’s hands, transformed into a guncum-radio receiver, a literal metamorphosis of the Whitehall ‘uniform’ into an open licence to kill, much like Odd-Job’s steel-rimmed bowler in Goldfinger. Gabriel, in contrast, is a mass of conflicted ambivalence, tempering his violent megalomania with the delicate sensitivity of the true artist. At one point Losey shows him sitting on the terrace of his island fortress, framed against the objective correlatives of a Frink-like sculpture and a radar scanner, as if he represented an uneasy alliance of The Damned’s Freya (art) and Bernard (science). An odd hybrid of Oscar Wilde’s wit and Dr Mabuse’s evil genius – he is both hypersensitive and a hardened criminal – Gabriel might be willing to push his enemies to the limits of mutual destruction but it has to be accomplished with the creative flair and sensibility of the true aesthete. After learning from McWhirter that the courier pilot that he is about to kill is a family man, Gabriel is horrified: ‘The father of two children? Probably a split-level house in Woking, and a rubber plant in the lounge. Why can’t they be bachelors!?’ On the other hand, he is equally relieved when the plane is shot down according to plan. Later, faced with the choice of two lobsters for lunch, Gabriel seems equally mortified by the prospect of their cruel death – ‘I can’t bear to hear them screaming’ – and the impossible decision of which one to eat: ‘Oh, decisions, decisions: Both.’ With his white wig, pink parasol, slit-shaped sunglasses and fey chitchat, Gabriel personifies detached homosexual ‘cool’: criminal efficiency with an artist’s élan. He explains his motives to Modesty: ‘I’m not a dessicated, calculating machine like you McWhirter, nor yet a roaring psychopath like you, dear lady [referring to Mrs Fothergill]. I’m the villain of the piece and I have to condemn you to death.’ Eschewing such vulgar motives as personal revenge or sheer greed, Gabriel is simply following the dictates of what the genre demands and expects. As T. J. Ross has pointed out, ‘Gabriel’s brag is that what he does, he does “without malice.” For Gabriel this is the sign of the “true criminal”, which is to say it is the mark of authenticity, of grace, in a Consumer’s World. His rapacity, like Modesty’s, or James Bond’s, is essentially impersonal. You do it for the sake of the game, and the game is all there is.’57 But even Gabriel is not above obdurate indifference to violence if the price is right: he is willing to exchange Mrs Fothergill’s life for

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Willie’s as part of his proposed deal with Modesty. When she refuses, he simply switches currency, ordering McWhirter to bring along his ledgers as he ‘feeds’ Modesty to the tender mercies of his wife. This fusion of violence with the exchange mode of production extends also to the film’s treatment of ‘meaning’ itself, specifically as it relates to issues of class and sexuality. If Modesty Blaise has one thematic and narrative constant it lies in its wilful celebration of instability for its own sake, for the film indulges in every kind of unexpected visual metamorphosis and transmutation – Modesty can change hair colour and costume simply by crossing the room – shifting the semantic and narrative ground from beneath the viewer’s feet with almost perverse abandon. ‘Events, changes of fortune, alliances and disagreements among the villains, occur so rapidly as to defy comprehension’,58 so that signs act less as direct correlatives of narrative meaning than as catalysts for building a perverse semantic illogic. The seemingly innocuous act of ringing a doorbell, for example, turns out to detonate a bomb; Modesty’s belt and lipstick transform into a bow and arrow; a mechanical bird fronts as a radio transmitter; a cocktail glass doubles as a goldfish bowl; while a modernist sculpture in Hagan’s apartment is used as a potential torture device. In this case Losey’s usually clear distinction between creative and negative power is deliberately blurred, so that it is often impossible to pinpoint the film’s moral and political centre, to differentiate critically between what constitutes élan vital and what is merely perverse sadism, masochism or back-stabbing Machiavellian realpolitik. As Durgnat notes, because ‘the characters hardly pause to feel psychologically lost among the gloss, the metaphors for lost-ness lose their meaning, and are felt as, simply, bric-a-brac’.59 However, one could also argue that this lack of semantic distinction in turn creates its own critical distance, for the narrative’s expression of a ‘lack of lost-ness’, manifested through a fluid skidding of metaphors, seems to be the film’s whole point. Moreover, as in The Damned, it can serve to express two different forms of dystopia. Firstly, echoing Bernard and the scientists, it can take the form of government indifference to the violent side effects of its own self-made crisis. In this case the endless exchangeability of signs exacerbates the built-in obsolescence of the short-term, strategic programmes designed to ‘solve’ the crisis in the first place. Secondly, evoking Freya, it is expressed through the creative dystopia of artistic potentiality and becoming. Like Jones’s other films for Losey, Modesty Blaise seems stuck in a cul de sac between the two options. This is expressed on specifically class lines at the film’s conclusion. Although Tarrant and the minister represent the Arabs as backward and

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prone to internal feuds, they are actually a paradoxical mixture of the feudal and the modern: archaic cannon and cavalry on the one hand, but also Land Rovers, dinghies and hovercraft on the other. The source of such technological contradiction is of course the economic disparity brought to the Middle East by oil, an incongruity common to the makeup of both East and West. After Modesty’s and Willie’s timely rescue from Gabriel’s island, we cut to the sheik’s desert caravan. As we track out from a close shot on a group of Arab children sitting under a leaking pipeline outlet, we quickly discover that they’re gazing quizzically at drops of oil forming a small black puddle in the sand. The arid world of the desert is thus also shown to be the source of untold wealth: under the economic aegis of OPEC, the world’s primordial roots also happen to be the wellspring of global exchange, but only for the class that happens to control it. Meanwhile, in the encampment behind the children, Willie luxuriates in a bath of goat’s milk while the sheik’s many wives dutifully rub his chest and wash his feet. As Gabriel cries out for champagne under the torrid desert sun, a radio blasts an r&b song into his ear, intoning the words, ‘I want ice/Give me water/Ice man/Ice is nice …’. Although this appears to be an ironic comment on Gabriel’s need for something cool – presumably to chill the requested bottle of Veuve Cliquot – the word ‘ice’ is also criminal slang for ‘diamonds’, a reading reinforced in the film’s last shot. As the song continues over, we zoom into a tight close-up of Modesty’s eyes as she runs the sheik’s diamonds seductively through her fingers. The film thus ends abruptly on a metonymic series of substitutions, where luxury goods stand in for utilitarian bare necessities: crude oil, goat’s milk and champagne for water, diamonds for ice. This effectively points up the iniquities of a world where excessive demand for the surplus value of commodities feeds the characters’ narcissism at the expense of the subsistence requirements of the world’s children. This common rapacity of displacement and consumption extends to the film’s sexual relations, where gadgets and fetishes become mechanical stand-ins for true sensual contact and the masochist contract displaces the conventional loving ‘marriage’. Modesty and Willie might sing a duet in which they speculate on whether they ‘could have’ or ‘should have’ made love, but the film effectively takes away their power of choice by enveloping them in a plethora of substitutions, whether it be sense-numbing affluence or the sheer dictates of patriotic duty. The film suggests that respect and friendship – not to mention the couple’s obvious class difference – set amid a milieu of violence and intrigue, are incompatible with sex, a triple bind that defines many of Losey’s filmic

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relationships. Willie’s sexual activity, for example, is largely geared towards extracting information from his bevy of nubile contacts. But even here, every time he is about to consummate the union, Modesty exercises her contractual right of coitus interruptus by requiring him for a new job or immediate rescue. ‘She knows. She’s got an instinct for it’, he complains. In one instance he responds by throwing a knife across the room into a female mannequin, thus translating frustrated sexuality into a meaningless gesture of violence. At least Willie has a tactile relationship with his conquests, a simple pleasure that seems to elude the unfortunate Modesty. For example, when she links up with her former beau Hagan, foreplay consists of an elaborate series of violent judo throws, while the promised intercourse is forestalled by Hagan’s inability to unzip Modesty’s seamless, sheathlike cat suit: a case of the fetishistic lure acting as an effective prophylactic as Modesty literally ‘becomes the phallus’. Later, a further attempt at seduction over champagne degenerates into mutual paranoia over who has drugged the wine, leading to an elaborate switching and substitution of glasses – itself a substitute for the elaborate sexual positions we could be seeing – before Hagan draws the spiked flute and succumbs to the Mickey Finn. However, the film’s truly perverse masochist couple turns out to be Gabriel and Mrs Fothergill. Although the latter spends much of the film whipping her servile charges or crushing their necks between her muscular legs as a form of symbolic castration, she is less an active agent of her own sadistic tendencies than a contracted part of Gabriel’s anti-patriarchal masochist fantasy. Gabriel likes to watch rather than actively participate in these violent rituals, suggesting that he has eschewed the traditional phallic role in the ‘marriage’ and displaced his homosexual desire onto the more vicarious pleasure of seeing the contract fulfilled. The ubiquitous presence of McWhirter and his ledgers reinforces the contractual bond, for even displaced desires have their price tag. As Gabriel makes clear to his accountant as another of Mrs Fothergill’s victims is thrown off the balustrade: ‘We’re not in this for the money, McWhirter’, but rather, one might add, for the perverse pleasure of the fantasy itself. While Losey condemns the perverse and mercenary traits of his own protagonists, he at the same time takes on the fugitive artist’s creative role for himself. While Modesty Blaise goes for the easy reward of the sheik’s proffered ‘ice’, Modesty Blaise plays for much higher aesthetic stakes by dismantling its own prevailing assumptions. The first target, as we have already indicated, is the stability of the spy genre itself. Much like Godard’s Pierrot le Fou, Losey destabilizes the form by skidding

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willy-nilly between different genres. He shifts from the Barbarella-like camp of the opening scene in Modesty’s bedroom, through Bond-like intrigue and the anti-bureaucratic satire of Ealing comedies, to various appropriations from Hollywood musicals, Hope and Crosby’s Road movies and big-budget adventure epics. The overblown climactic battle on the island seashore evokes Help!, El Cid and Lawrence of Arabia in equal measure. This wilful disregard of convention also applies to the overall tone of the film, which shifts uneasily between light and black comedy. As Losey admitted, ‘It’s a bitter film, Modesty Blaise. It’s probably the mixture of bitterness and humour and gaiety, and the fact that it was intended to work at several levels, that puts people off.’60 Losey’s camp style also parodies attempts to give deeper critical meaning to the events in terms of auteur-related analysis. The film’s use of pop and op art, extremely complex mirror reflections and distorted camera angles, as well as the claustrophobic framing of seemingly vital action through opaque, often distorted glass, burlesques Losey’s own reputation as ‘baroque’ director, specifically the recently skewered stylistic excesses of Eve. Similarly, Gabriel’s masochistic mother-fixation is a comic deflation of the anti-Oedipal stance of both The Sleeping Tiger and Eve, while the theatrically exaggerated nature of his villainy is a clear send-up of the excessive melodrama of earlier Losey films such as Time Without Pity. One scene in the Excelsior Hotel in Naples, cut from the release print, even included a scene where Bogarde reprises his role as Barrett from The Servant, conscientiously shining the banister of the main stairs.61 More deliberately perverse however is Losey’s attempt to deconstruct Vitti’s Antonioni persona and the Italian director’s cinematic legacy in general. In 1961, Losey regarded L’avventura as ‘one of the most complete and satisfying films of its kind I have ever seen’.62 However, by October 1962, in an interview with Le Figaro littéraire, he had qualified his remarks dramatically: ‘L’avventura is a very full film, but Antonioni does not believe in life, nor in the spirit, nor in the senses. He sees beauty through black spectacles: for him the world is perhaps beautiful, 63 but it’s not worth the trouble to live there.’ In Modesty Blaise, Losey redefines ‘beauty’ through an op kaleidoscope, deliberately challenging Antonioni’s phenomenological world view by casting his favourite icon in a trashed-out, commercialized parody of his own world of expressive surfaces. The ever-perceptive Paul Mayersberg noted this tendency at the time of the film’s release, commenting on Vitti that ‘Losey has taken the image she projects and articulates in Antonioni’s films and twisted it inside out. She is now a kind of pop version of her usually academic self, just as Modesty Blaise is a pop version of the “serious” character, the independent woman.’64

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This rivalry over actor signatures had surfaced earlier with Eve, where Moreau was deliberately cast to counter her sensitive persona as Lidia in La Notte. Indeed, Modesty Blaise’s opening credits are a direct allusion to the beginning of that film, with Losey panning across the skeletal I-beams and glass walls of an Amsterdam skyscraper in much the same way that Antonioni opens his own film with a modernist view of Milan. But Modesty is conceived less as a spoof on the modern, independent woman than as a Warhol-like appropriation of the Vitti persona itself, rendering it as reproducible and disposable as Andy’s multiple silk-screen portraits of Elvis and Mao. Thus Modesty’s passport photo is in fact a famous still from Il Deserto Rosso (1964), while Vitti’s hunched, fearful gest in Gabriel’s op-art cell is a clear reference to Giuliana’s similar body language in the alienating modernism of the same film. ‘Antonioni just poses her against walls’,65 said a contemptuous Losey at the time. Revenge must have been sweet as well as spiteful, because in Modesty Blaise, Vitti just poses.

Notes 1 Walter Benjamin, ‘Conversations with Brecht’, Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York and London, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 219. 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York, Vintage, 1967), p. 86. 3 Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, pp. 197–8. 4 Losey, in Milne, Losey on Losey, p. 155. 5 Jones’s subsequent adaptation of Len Deighton’s Funeral in Berlin (Guy Hamilton, 1967) makes perfect sense in this context, for Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer is the ultimate masochist spy. Set adrift in Deighton’s Cold War dystopia, he is betrayed by everyone, especially his own superiors. 6 Losey, in Milne, Losey on Losey, p. 56. 7 Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 210. 8 Losey, in Leahy, The Cinema of Joseph Losey, pp. 56–7. 9 Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, p. 169. 10 Jeanne Moreau, cited in de Rham, Joseph Losey, pp. 126–7. 11 Unfortunately the Italian critics were not nearly so charitable. According to Giornale d’Italia, Losey was attempting ‘to remake Antonioni, and perhaps also Fellini, without possessing their talent’. Corriere della Sera dismissed Eve as ‘a rehash of Fellini, Antonioni, Visconti sewn together with Resnais gut’. Cited in Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 163, and de Rham, Joseph Losey, p. 140, respectively. 12 The version of Eve that comes closest to Losey’s original intentions is a 120-minute Scandinavian print with Finnish and Swedish subtitles, currently in the National Film Archive in London and included on King Video’s 2000 DVD release. 13 Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 216. Although the idea was ultimately nixed by the Hakims as too expensive, Losey had originally wanted a score by Davis himself – probably something similar to his evocative work for Louis Malle on the 1957 Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, which also starred Moreau. 14 Raymond Durgnat, ‘Eva’, in Frank N. Magill, ed. Magill’s History of the Cinema:

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Foreign Language Films, Vol. 3 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Salem Press, 1985), p. 1009. 15 See particularly Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962), Une femme mariée (1964) and Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (1966). 16 Theodor Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, cited in Martin Jay, Adorno (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 157. 17 Brontë’s text is: ‘Sweet Love of youth, forgive, if I forget thee/While the world’s tide is bearing me along;/Other desires and other hopes beset me,/Hopes which obscure, but cannot do thee wrong!’ 18 John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book III, ed. Scott Elledge (New York, W. W. Norton, 1975), p. 77. 19 And always will be, for this is a specifically future-directed time image. 20 Hugh Honour and John Fleming, The Visual Arts: A History, 4th edn (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice Hall, 1995), p. 393. 21 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 87. 22 Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 204. The film was renamed once again for its American release, belatedly surfacing in July 1965 as These Are the Damned with its running time cut from 87 to 75 minutes. 23 Jones, cited in de Rham, Joseph Losey, p. 122. 24 Losey argued that the Teds ‘were the sons of the servants and the general workmen that maintained these resorts for the rich when they were still there. So now you have the children of the working class trying to recapture some kind of power out of past elegance by wearing Edwardian clothes.’ Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 200. 25 Ibid., p. 201. 26 Paul Mayersberg, ‘Contamination’, Movie, No. 9, May 1963, p. 32. 27 ‘If there is a high percentage of artists among Losey’s characters’, writes Gilles Jacob, ‘it is because art is one of the last ditches from which one can still challenge man’s exploitation of man, the degradation of the individual, and the moments and causes of this destruction.’ Jacob, ‘Joseph Losey, or The Camera Calls’, p. 64. 28 Losey’s original plan was to have Freya shot from one of the helicopters, thereby impersonalizing her death as the product of an institutional machine. 29 Leahy, The Cinema of Joseph Losey, p. 98. 30 Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 211. 31 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p. 60. 32 Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, pp. 202–3. 33 Negri, The Savage Anomaly, pp. 214–15. 34 Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 244. 35 Losey, in Milne, Losey on Losey, pp. 124–9. 36 Ibid., pp. 125–6. 37 Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 245. 38 Leahy, The Cinema of Joseph Losey, p. 142. 39 Losey, in ibid., pp. 136–7. 40 Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 244. 41 Isabel Quigley, ‘Mr Losey’s Masterpiece: King and Country’, Spectator, No. 7119, 4 December 1964, p. 785. 42 Andrew Sarris, ‘Films’, The Village Voice, Vol. 11, 3 February 1966, p. 23. 43 James Palmer and Michael Riley, The Films of Joseph Losey (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 27. 44 Losey in Leahy, The Cinema of Joseph Losey, p. 135. 45 John Wilson, Hamp (London, Evans Plays, 1966), p. 46. 46 The quote actually reads: ‘“Will you walk a little faster?” said a whiting to a snail. There’s a porpoise close behind us, and he’s treading on my tail.’

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47 John Masefield, ‘Biography’, from The Poems and Plays of John Masefield, Volume One: Poems (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1922), p. 59. 48 Alexander Walker, Hollywood, England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties (London, Harrap, 1974 and 1986), p. 219. 49 Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 207. 50 Peter O’Donnell, Modesty Blaise (London, Souvenir Press, 1965), p. 23. 51 Mandel, Delightful Murder, p. 132. 52 Much to the distress of John Coleman in the New Statesman, who titled his review, ‘Wot, No Nailer?’ See Vol. 71, No. 1834, 6 May 1966, pp. 662–3. 53 Losey, in Milne, Losey on Losey, p. 145. 54 Ibid., pp. 120–1. 55 Jones, cited in Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 208. 56 Jones, cited in de Rham, Joseph Losey, pp. 170–1. 57 T. J. Ross, ‘Pop and Circumstance in Modesty Blaise’, Film Heritage, Vol. 2, No. 4, Summer 1967, p. 5. 58 Hirsch, Joseph Losey, p. 81. 59 Raymond Durgnat, ‘Symbols and Modesty Blaise’, Cinema, No. 1, December 1968, p. 7. 60 Losey, in Leahy, The Cinema of Joseph Losey, pp. 148–9. 61 Losey, in Gow, ‘Weapons’, p. 40. 62 Losey, in Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 316. 63 Ibid. 64 Paul Mayersberg, ‘A Woman Who Fights Back’, New Society, Vol. 7, No. 188, 5 May 1966, p. 26. 65 Losey, in Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 307.

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Harold Pinter’s time-image: The Servant (1963), Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1970)

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Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. (T. S. Eliot)1

At the time of his first collaboration with Losey in 1963, the thirty-twoyear-old Harold Pinter was only recently established as a major dramatist. His reputation rested on a mere handful of plays: the one-act dramas, A Slight Ache, The Room and The Dumb Waiter; and two fulllength works, The Caretaker and The Birthday Party. Yet what we have come to see as ‘trademark’ Pinter–Losey characteristics were already fully evident. The confining of action to a single room or domicile, and the invasion of that space by a guest or outsider who proceeds to transform it into the catalytic site of the host’s deepest fears and paranoia, are themes already familiar to us from The Sleeping Tiger and The Gypsy and the Gentleman. Moreover, Pinter shares Losey’s preference for action deliberately divorced from a wider social canvas, all the better to break down the characters’ real and implied master–servant relationships in true baroque fashion. And of course there is Pinter’s now-famous laconic dialogue, with its characteristic ellipses, pauses and protracted silences, which has given rise to its own terminology: ‘Pinteresque’. His characters use language to mock and punish each other, not to find common emotive ground. They speak as a means of tactical evasion/invasion, employing words as the main offensive weapon in a vicious psychological war. Yet this is never a direct assault, for Pinter’s conversation often comes across as light, oblique badinage, a verbal smokescreen designed to block communication rather than encourage it. This accounts for Pinter’s fondness for both verbal and physical games – the improvised

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ball game on the stairs in The Servant, and the recurring tennis and cricket matches in Accident and The Go-Between – that are ideal, playful fronts for expressing his characters’ more Machiavellian strategies. As Hirsch points out, ‘The real dramatic conflict in Pinter is not so much between characters as in the tension between what the characters say 2 and what they don’t say, between statement and implication.’ Instead of gradually stripping away layers of character in order to clarify motive and intent, Pinter’s spoken and unspoken dialogue actually occludes it. This leads to an unclear focalization in which the self-perception of both protagonist and antagonist is fractured and displaced, leading to an unnerving ambiguity of identity and a concomitant loss of personal sovereignty. Also, by removing the means of its psychological and historical specificity, Pinter opens language up to circular time and memory, allowing narrative to be read as allegory rather than through the denotative codes of conventional action-realism. All of this had obvious attractions for Losey at that time – for, as Durgnat notes, in the wake of The Damned and Eve, the director’s work ‘adumbrates a new kind of moral tone, both puritan and Nietzschean, rationalist, yet bursting with libidinal vigour. His subsequent collaboration with Pinter is as inevitable as it is surprising. Pinter’s absurdities of the interpersonal are precisely what Losey’s ferocity cannot but, intuitively, explain, and, in a valid, challenging sense, moralize. The director fits the scripts as a hand fits a glove.’3 But therein lie some serious antinomies. Given his Marxist roots, Losey is far more concerned with specific social evils and injustices, pointing his moralizing finger at concrete issues of right and wrong. This explains his aesthetic preference for Brecht’s didactic fusion of art and politics over Pinter’s more character-driven adherence to the Theatre of the Absurd. The common wisdom is that while Pinter softens Losey’s didactic tendencies, teasing out the director’s love of ambiguity and nuance while adding a spice of mordant wit to his Puritan dourness, Losey takes Pinter outside the confines of locked rooms into closer contact with the real world. Their common ideological denominator is a shared interest in social consequences, ‘not why such things happen but what it means that they have happened’.4 For their first literary adaptation Losey and Pinter turned to Robin Maugham’s The Servant, a sixty-two-page novella written in 1948 by the nephew of Somerset Maugham. Still reeling from his nightmare experience with the Hakims on Eve, Losey wisely kept an emotional distance from the material: ‘The Servant was not in any sense of the word an impersonal film, but nonetheless it was approached more 5 impersonally than any film I’ve done in many, many years.’ Perhaps for

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this reason, his relationship with the producers (Leslie Grade and Norman Priggen) and Pinter was a happy one: ‘The Servant is the only picture I have ever made in my life where there was no interference from beginning to end, either on script, casting, cutting, music or on anything else. The result, whether the film succeeds or not, whether one likes the film or not, at least it’s something that I can defend as being 6 mine.’ The Servant’s ostensible ‘master’ is Tony (James Fox), a likeable but self-indulgent young ‘aristocrat’. The scare quotes are deliberate, for 7 Losey sarcastically describes Tony as ‘fourth generation Harrods’, with its connotation of nouveau riche and pretentious conspicuous consumption. Tony compensates for his lack of an authentic bloodline with a lazy over-reliance on the luxurious trappings and creature comforts of his declining class. These include the homosocial atmosphere of the allmale London club (its musty aura invoking better days of Britain’s imperial past); weekend visits to Lord and Lady Mountset’s country house; and various fancy restaurants. Tony’s easy-going, almost slothful attitude also extends to his ‘career’, an ambitious multi-million-pound scheme to build three modern cities in the Brazilian jungle, which will house thousands of peasants imported from Asia Minor. What they will actually do there is never made clear. The ‘servant’ is Hugo Barrett (Dirk Bogarde), one of the actor’s most subtle creations. In the obliquely racist language of the book, Barrett is a repellent character, described through the subjective perspective of Richard Merton, an old army friend of Tony’s who acts as Maugham’s first-person narrator. Heavy-lidded and ‘oily’ (read: Jewish), with a prissy, affected voice (read: homosexual), Barrett looks like a dissolute cherub, ‘a fish with painted lips’.8 As in most of his novels, Maugham stresses this homosexual undercurrent as a key leveller between the different social classes. Losey and Pinter downplay this relationship, showing Barrett as less interested in sex per se than the latent power it allows him to wield over his ‘charges’, whether male or female. ‘Sexuality isn’t essential in the film because it intervenes inevitably in the description of a total inversion of human relationships’, argues Losey. ‘It’s this inversion which is the subject of the film, not the 9 sexuality.’ Pinter’s Barrett is vulnerable as well as slippery, disclosing a crippling need to serve as well as to dominate. As Losey confirms, ‘The servant isn’t all evil, the master isn’t all weakness. There is innocence in 10 both of them.’ As the film opens, Barrett is keeping a three o’clock appointment with Tony at the latter’s new town house in Chelsea’s exclusive Royal 11 Avenue. Finding the front door open, he moves stealthily into the

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empty shell of the living room and discovers Tony asleep in a deckchair on the rear patio. This initial dichotomy between Barrett’s punctiliousness and Tony’s lethargy is one of the film’s key temporal themes. Unlike Pinter’s subsequent scripts for Losey, The Servant unfolds chronologically, with only ellipses and different cutting rhythms to indicate dislocations or expressive uses of time. In the novel, Maugham uses the gaps between Merton’s infrequent encounters with Tony to highlight striking contrasts in his outward appearance and behaviour, thereby using the interstices of time as an index of his degeneration and decline. As one might expect, Pinter and Losey are less interested in marking the ravages of measured time than in expressing a subtle evolution in the characteristics of duration itself. These characteristics shift from a direct expression of the quantitative time at the beginning of the film (a temporal parallel to the strict class difference between the two men), to a cyclical duration at the film’s end as the master–servant relationship collapses into a more primordial, libidinally driven annihilation of sexual and class difference. Barrett thus makes a point of arriving punctually for his initial meeting with Tony, but this is merely Barrett’s bait, a seductive promise of order and efficiency designed to appeal to Tony’s inflated self-image and incite his dependence. Tony is suitably impressed, both with Barrett’s references and his cooking skills: ‘My soufflés have always received a great deal of praise in the past, sir.’ However, the servant’s embarrassing slip-up over the title of his former employer – Barrett refers to Viscount Barr, which Tony quickly corrects to Lord Barr, a friend of his late father – should have clued us in to the true depths of his deception. Certainly Bogarde plays Barrett with full awareness of his duplicity: ‘Barrett is a liar … If you know what a gentleman’s gentleman is like, you’ll know that Barrett never could have been one … [H]e has been a servant, but he was probably a pantry boy or a boot boy. He has lied and tricked his way in and out of lots of jobs; he probably was a batman in the Army, but that was about the only thing he says he’s done that he really did do.’12 In case there was any doubt, Bogarde provides the clincher: ‘I don’t think he’d ever made a soufflé in his life.’13 Barrett’s arrival causes an instant rift between Tony and his fiancée, Susan (Wendy Craig), who sees the servant as a potential sexual rival as well as a threat to the stability of her own tenuous class position. Losey originally felt that Craig was miscast, conceiving Susan as very upper 14 class, and considered Sarah Miles for the role. But in that case Susan would merely have been a carbon copy of Tony, treating Barrett with the same combination of noblesse oblige and ruling-class disdain. Instead, Craig plays Susan as the ambivalent linchpin of the entire film, the

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woman caught between the classes as much as she is trapped in a sexual and degenerate ménage à trois between the two men. Losey ultimately saw the value of Craig’s casting, for Susan was

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never intended, once Wendy Craig was cast, to be played as ‘posh.’ We made use of Wendy Craig’s slight regional accent (Derbyshire). The character of the fiancée could have come from a recently moneyed family. Her education was good, her mind better than that of Tony, but she still suffers from the terrible handicaps and social disadvantages of anyone slightly lower in the scale of the British class system. When she acts as upper-class ‘bitch’, she is trying to do something which is neither possible for her from the point of view of character, nor her class background.15

Woefully inexperienced in how to treat a servant and keenly aware of the tenuous nature of her own class position, Susan’s only weapon against Barrett is vulgar reverse snobbery. Thus at dinner, she ridicules his ‘knowledge’ of wine, as well as his affected use of white serving gloves. And we quickly see that she is right, for Losey subsequently shows Barrett in the kitchen, picking his teeth and tossing the gloves contemptuously to one side as he takes his proletarian pleasures in a satisfying smoke and a bottle of Guinness. But Susan’s middle-class disdain for pretentious airs only serves to strengthen the Barrett–Tony alliance, which is of course forged on such superfluities. Moreover Susan is at a distinct disadvantage because Tony has a natural aversion to meddling women in general: ‘Quite honestly, the thought of some old woman running about the house telling me what to do … rather put me off’, he tells Barrett. This misogyny extends to a down-to-earth sceptic like Susan who is far more of a threat to Tony’s self-delusions than the fawning Barrett, who provides him with a golden opportunity to flaunt his man-about-town persona. Indeed, Barrett quickly supplants Susan in all the traditional feminine activities: cooking, decorating, and playing ‘mother’ when Tony comes down with a bad case of the ’flu. In a brilliantly laconic expression of class and sexual antagonism, Losey and Richard Macdonald drew the battle lines between Susan and Barrett over who controls the decor and accessories in Tony’s house. In the novel, Tony rents the house already furnished. In the film, Barrett helps to decorate it, using his apparent connoisseur’s knowledge of interior design as an index of his growing power and influence, as well as his feeling of superiority over members of his own class, epitomized by his bossiness toward the workmen. Slowly but surely, Barrett metamorphoses the colour scheme to suit his own nefarious interests, so that by film’s end the prevailing atmosphere has changed from

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brilliant whites and blues to one of dark, heavy foreboding, neatly symbolized by the switch to black dinner candles, as if Barrett were an insinuating Lucifer secretly conducting a satanic mass. ‘The simple and classic is always the best’, avers Barrett, alluding to a neo-classical mythological painting next to the fireplace. ‘This isn’t classic, it’s prehistoric’, responds Susan, confronting this world of masculine formality like a new broom sweeping clean a lifetime of bachelor self-indulgence. She spitefully usurps Barrett’s role of domestic overseer by introducing her own exclusively feminine touches: freshly cut flowers, colourful throw pillows, chintz frills and, horror of horrors, a spice rack for the kitchen. Barrett fights back vigorously to defend his hard-won position, attacking on twin fronts. Firstly, he indulges in some enigmatic verbal sparring, so that even the most polite of statements takes on an ominous double edge, whether through idiomatic inflection or regional reversal of sentence structure (Barrett hails from Manchester). Thus on one occasion, as he deferentially opens the front door for Susan to leave, he adds the comment, ‘I’m afraid it’s not very encouraging miss’, seemingly alluding to the hostile state of their mutual relationship with Tony. But then he undercuts the implication, adding ‘… the weather forecast’, thereby throwing Susan off balance by cleverly appropriating that specifically British trait of displacing serious issues of class conflict into banal comments on the weather. Secondly, Barrett imports his own libidinal secret weapon in the form of Vera (Sarah Miles), a Lancashire sexpot whom he introduces as his sister but who is in fact his fiancée. Correctly assessing that Tony’s mother’s boy tendencies border on the dissolute – a ‘piss artist’ in the making – he sees Vera as the perfect weapon for luring Tony away from respectable Susan and bringing him under the servant’s control. With Vera safely ensconced in the household as Tony’s maid, Barrett quickly makes his move. Using the excuse of an emergency trip to Manchester to tend to their sick mother, Barrett sends Vera back to the house from the station at the last minute, where she promptly seduces the helpless Tony on the kitchen table. Losey punctuates the scene with the heightened sound of a dripping tap, its steady pulse suggesting the beat of a metronome. Leahy sees this as a concise image of Tony’s actual physical condition at this moment; Tony, seeking to repress or deny the physiological forces that are at the root of the human personality, turns the tap sharply to stop the sound of dripping, but then the ticking of a clock takes up the same excited pulsebeating rhythm … However hard one tries to repress one’s sexuality, it cannot be denied; if one channel of expression is denied to it, it will find another.16

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One should also add that the overlap of the dripping pulse and the clock suggests a growing merger of the two types of temporality, where Tony’s reliance on segmented, measured time (suggested by a ringing telephone – clearly Susan calling at a pre-arranged hour – that he fails to answer) is falling increasingly under the aegis of a more primordial time, one that quickens to the pulse of libidinal rather than material desires. This temporal transformation is paralleled by a concomitant spatial shift: rooms that were once clearly demarcated as a haven or sanctuary are now the site of desecration and open transgression. For example, during a less than scintillating weekend at the Mountsets’, Tony and Susan decide to return home early to Royal Avenue. They discover Barrett and Vera in their bed, not only a sign of sexual contamination but also a usurpation of their strict class sovereignty as master and mistress of the household. Although Barrett attempts to repair the damage by finally admitting that Vera is not his sister but his betrothed, the latter fans the flames by hinting that Tony has been sleeping with her too: ‘You’ve done all right, what are you worrying about? You can’t have it on a plate forever, can you?’ This is the last straw for Susan. Although her shocked silence shames Tony into reluctantly asserting his manhood and firing them both, he begs his fiancée to stay the night. This is essentially an invitation to sleep in the same desecrated bed, a clear indication of Tony’s emotional and sexual dependence on Vera. This is further underlined after the distraught Susan has left: Tony goes up to Vera’s room and lies sobbing on her bed, his body spatially ‘trapped’ behind the vertical bars of the banister rails. For Losey, this was the film’s turning point, Tony’s emotional Waterloo: The course of his life would probably have been quite different if he hadn’t happened to find the servants in his bed. If they’d come home that night and the servants had been quietly in bed and he and the fiancée had gone to bed and made love in the house, that would’ve been that; but there was such a crushing shock waiting for him, and also for her, that he wasn’t able to recover his balance, and from then on it goes the other way.17

In Barrett’s absence, Tony goes rapidly to seed, picking up girls at the local pub and making annoying hang-up calls to Susan. His deterioration is signified by a marked degeneration in the house and its normally ordered decor: the mail lies unopened by the front door, while Susan’s once-vibrant flowers are now dead stalks. Clearly, when Barrett meets Tony in the Queen’s Elm pub and makes a contrite pitch to return to service, Tony is already ripe for reconquest. Once again, Vera acts as the

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catalyst for the renewed collapse of the master–servant relationship. Both men have used her, and been used by her in turn. Their common victimization and the implied misogyny that cements it thus become the basis for their renewed homosexual bond, but Losey’s use of ensnaring mirrors in the pub and the subsequent changes in decor at Royal Avenue suggest that it’s now exclusively on Barrett’s terms. With little or no contact with the outside world, the two men retreat into mutual bickering, nagging each other like an ageing homosexual couple. However, there is little evidence to suggest that this is anything other than a sexless union. Instead, true bodily contact is displaced onto territorial battles and temporary claims to sovereignty, such as the ball game on the stairs, during which Tony hits Barrett in the face with the ball (a displacement of the sexual contact that they have both desired all along), and a paranoid game of hide and seek in which Tony is reduced to a quivering emotional wreck. By now it is all too apparent that Tony’s psychological need for order has become the absolute desire to be dominated. Indeed, the spatio-temporal signs of Barrett’s hegemony are everywhere. Lacking its original gloss, the house now has a gaudy, meretricious atmosphere more suitable to a high-rent brothel than a bachelor pad. Barrett’s once neatly demarcated belongings now mingle obtrusively with Tony’s, the television set has been moved into a prominent place in the middle of the room, while the once ubiquitous leatherbound library books have been replaced by cheap magazines. Reflecting Barrett’s Mephistophelian persona, the prevailing colour scheme is now black, which suggests that he is as much of a charlatan as an interior designer as he is as a butler. There is almost no natural light in the house: the curtains are perpetually drawn, creating a claustrophobic, womb-like atmosphere heightened by the carving up of concrete surfaces and bodily relief into a shifting chiaroscuro. Losey’s DP, Douglas Slocombe, used high-contrast lighting to create a cloying, plastic effect in the film’s final scenes. Illuminating the actors predominantly from below in order to cast elongated, distorted shadows, Slocombe brilliantly transformed Tony’s immediate surroundings into a psychotic nightmare. Barrett’s control also extends to Tony’s bodily comportment. The earlier strict separation of bodies has collapsed: Tony and Barrett now practise a ‘sexual’ intimacy that transcends the original master–servant relationship. Addled by the drugs that Barrett feeds him (LSD from ‘a little man in Jermyn Street), Tony’s movements slow into heavy languor.18 His speech is slurred and inarticulate, fractured by long pauses, as if it takes a great effort of will just to enunciate. In fact, as the

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separation of powers breaks down it becomes impossible to tell how much time is actually passing: it could be minutes, hours or weeks. This gradual slowing down of time and motor response is one of the chief ploys of the baroque intriguer as he subtly insinuates himself into the 19 spatio-temporal fabric of the plot. As the dynamic movement of space itself starts to replace the overt movements of bodies, it becomes increasingly difficult to discern the difference between the body and its ground. This suspension of motor activity within an indeterminate space–time means that motility has nowhere else to go but to internalize itself as impulse. However, as is typical of baroque drama, this phenomenological emptying out is also accompanied by a new filling up – in the form of masquerade and spectacle – so that Barrett enacts both a destruction and a new restoration of social order. This constructive dystopic gesture is enacted in The Servant’s culminating LSD ‘orgy’, in which Barrett transforms measured time and space into new somatic modulations by choreographing each character’s bodily movements. At one moment Barrett is encouraging Vera to take dirty pictures, at another he’s kissing the unfortunate Susan in a disgusting parody of the liberated sexual ‘swinger’. Tony, in contrast, seems to be going through the motions of sensuous transgression without actually participating. This helps explain why nothing really ‘sexual’ seems to happen, except the reiteration of the controlling powers of the libidinal rite itself. At the film’s end, Barrett kicks everyone out, leaving the impotent Susan with the empty gesture of slapping his face before she runs sobbing into the street, finally freed from the stranglehold of Barrett’s suffocating web. In contrast, Tony is a broken, leaden fragment, once again spatially trapped in the ‘prison’ bars of the staircase railings as Barrett bolts the front door and proprietarily climbs the stairs to Vera’s waiting bed. The camera pans down to the hallway, where the large white face of the grandfather clock shines in the darkness. Significantly, the clock has stopped, marking the end of linear time, but also beginning a new circuit of eternal return, a reiteration of immanent time and the temporal multiplicity of difference itself. Losey directly associates this multiplicity with Barrett, creating an immanent space in which sovereignty itself is called into question. ‘Even in the will of the servant I found the will to be master’, wrote Nietzsche, suggesting that we should read Barrett less in terms of the intriguing guest and more as an impulsive libidinal ghost who already haunts the unsuspecting host.20 As one might expect, it’s the defensive Susan who is most aware of Barrett’s ubiquity: ‘Every time you open a door in this house that man’s outside. He’s a Peeping Tom.’ ‘He’s a

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vampire too on his Sundays off’, jokes Tony, suggesting that Barrett’s domain is the very world of the primordial. Barrett and Vera typify this transgressive impulse, for they are nomadic destructive forces, moving from place to place until they have satisfied their appetites and drained each body of its vital juices. Because neither seems to have a ‘home’ independent of the different spaces that they inhabit as servants, Joanne Klein has perceptively compared them to Jean Genêt’s maids, for ‘like the maids Barrett and Vera lack authentic identity: in Tony’s presence they fake servility, and in his absence they imitate him … In each case the usurpers participate in the creation of the victim’s identity while retaining an inchoate, unpredictable identity for themselves, and through these means, derive the power to manipulate and overcome their prey.’21 Because the behavioural characteristics of impulse tend to be inseparable from perversities, Barrett’s suggestive ‘incest’ with Vera is less important as the breaking of a specific taboo than as a catalytic movement that transverses and folds into other, equally transgressive behavioural modes. These include Tony’s repressed homosexuality (which Barrett teases to the surface by reversing the master–slave relationship) and Susan’s shift from sadism (her initial brutal class snobbery) to masochism: marked by her self-degrading kissing Barrett during the ‘orgy’. The fragment, as the object of the impulse, is the fetish of these perversities in a Freudian sense, but also the bridge between the unconscious and conscious action, because it belongs to the primordial world while also being torn from a real object of the derived milieu of the house. In Barrett’s case, the convex mirror in Tony’s living room, the crystalline shapes of overhead lamps, and the contorted surfaces of kitchen serving bowls and dishes are the objective raw material and spaces of his own impulsive, primordial domain. His violence is an internalized force that permeates and engulfs all the characters in the film, a violence that gradually exhausts its surroundings in a long process of degradation. The main staircase in Tony’s house is Barrett’s main conduit, linking the ground floor of open public access with Vera’s attic room, with its private, windowless space, the scene of primordial degradations. Significantly, it is only the servant who has free access to all these levels. His right of entry suggests that servility itself is a reversible mode, ‘raised to the state of true elementary human impulse: “in act” in the servant, but latent and erupting in the master’.22 However, lest we read the film’s power dynamic in exclusively immanent terms, for Losey The Servant is still ostensibly about a specific social and cultural servility that reiterates many of the Marxist

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themes of his Hollywood pictures. As he admitted to Leahy, ‘this film 23 was about England as The Prowler was about America’, directly linking Barrett and Tony to Webb Garwood’s specific, class-based pathologies. For Losey The Servant was always a film about ‘the servility of our society, of our age, the servility of the master, the servility of the servant and the servility of attitudes of all kinds of people in different classes and situations who are afraid … It’s a society of fear, and the reaction to fear is for the most part not resistance and not fight, but servility, and 24 servility is a state of mind … servility as an attitude of mind’. In contrast to Losey’s more historical-materialist approach, Deleuze’s reading of the temporal within naturalism is, as one might expect, far more Nietzschean. It is through the film’s temporal circularity – Nietzsche’s eternal return – that impulse touches most directly on temporality. We can see specific examples of this relationship between naturalism and the crystalline in the circular convex baroque mirrors that dominate Losey’s mise-en-scène. Mirrors mark the circuit of Barrett’s constant movement between virtual and actual, past and present. When Tony first introduces Barrett to Susan in the hallway, for example, the couple are placed on the same plane, slightly in front of Barrett, framing him symmetrically. The circular motif that signifies Barrett’s immanence is present in the form of a circular lamp hanging from the ceiling to one side, much like a displaced halo (Barrett as fallen angel). Thus Barrett is defined as the occupier of spatial depth, but a spatial depth as a potentially dislocating asymmetrical movement, which is the defining characteristic of baroque space. As if unconsciously aware of Barrett’s commanding position, Tony and Susan move quickly into the newly decorated living room, where Losey cuts immediately to an establishing shot framed in a distorting convex mirror. This curved, spiralling space – itself a metaphor for primordial immanence – creates a deep circular warp that parallels the spiral of the house’s central staircase. Still caught in the mirror, Barrett follows them in and closes the door, as if to trap them in his spatial domain. Tony then walks toward the mirror and turns to face Barrett and Susan, so that the mirror reflection of his back faces the camera. Tony appears to command the space physically, yet because everything takes place within the distorted confines of the mirror, it is actually Barrett’s look that dictates the space: we are looking at Barrett looking at himself controlling the room. The same mirror is used again after Barrett and Vera have been caught sleeping in Tony’s bedroom. What ought to be a commanding showdown in which Tony asserts his mastery over his servant once again takes place within Barrett’s spatio-temporal realm. The scene is framed with the mirror placed directly between Susan (to the left) and

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Tony (to the right), both in actual space. The distorted reflection depicts Tony’s back, as he confronts Barrett standing in the doorway. Vera then joins Barrett in the reflection as the latter announces their engagement. The two servants are thus ‘married’ with the reverse of Tony in immanent space, linking them in a triangle of power, but clearly on the servants’ terms. Tony’s and Susan’s actual images, although they frame the mirror and appear to command the overall composition, are presented looking off in different directions (as if at cross-purposes), their gazes completely disconnected from each other, from the servants and from us. In this way, Losey cements Barrett’s and Vera’s control as an enveloping spatial hyperbole, undermining Tony’s position of mastery and separating him spatially from Susan – in effect, constructing a representational preview of the power shift that is to come. This deferral and slippage of spatial mastery is intensified by the deliberate separation of sight from the rest of the body, so that although Tony can ‘see’ what’s going on, he doesn’t really ‘perceive’, sense or feel it because he cannot make the immanent bodily connection with the libidinal seat of Barrett’s power. The mirror thus defines more of a preOedipal space that precedes the symbolic power of analytic and visual distance. This is Deleuze’s crystalline space, where a place and its obverse are endlessly reversible. In the spatial power play between Barrett and Vera, Tony and Susan, the virtual-becomes-actual-becomesvirtual in an endless unfolding to a zero degree of infinity. However, it is important to stress that the convex circle motif is not imported by Barrett like some devious Trojan horse, but is already present within the house before the servant moves in. It is the dominating architectural motif of the front door, the front window, the face of the grandfather clock in the hallway, and significantly, the circular vanity mirror that stands on the dresser in Tony’s bedroom. We begin to see the circular vortex everywhere as the dominant impulsive presence, right down to the undulating circular reflection in the top of Tony’s wine glass. Clearly, Tony has already domesticated the outward sign of his own virtual, immanent entrapment. All it takes is for Barrett and Vera to make it manifest. Losey’s baroque combination of depth, asymmetry and movement is economically summarized in the film’s opening shot, which firmly establishes the type of impulsive space that Barrett will inhabit, constitute and transform. The Servant opens with a perfectly classical, symmetrical view along tree-lined Royal Avenue. The flat, classical lines of Christopher Wren’s Chelsea Royal Hospital sit at the far end of the boulevard, at a sharp 90° angle to the street. Looming skyward behind the hospital’s barrack-like frontage is a baroque tower, which serves to

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establish both the metaphor of spatial occlusion, and thus the definition of a depth, and also the idea that the baroque lurks behind the ordered facade of the classical surface (creating an architectural metaphor for Tony’s double character). Then, in one long, continuous take (much like the opening and closing shots of Eve), the camera pans up and to the left, moving slowly across a tangle of wintry trees against the grey sky, producing a dynamic network of chaotic lines. The pan continues in a half-circle, then curves downward across roofs and upper-storey windows, then drops to rest on a close-up of HM The Queen’s coat of arms. The sign below it reads, ‘Thomas Crapper & Co. Ltd., Sanitary Engineers’. We pan down to street level to reveal Barrett, dressed in a black overcoat and hat, crossing the King’s Road. Losey’s joke is a good one: Barrett, the impulsive immanent being, emerges from the primordial depths of the toilet, like some backed-up excremental waste. He swings his umbrella jauntily as he enters Royal Avenue. As Barrett walks, the camera completes the other half-circle of its 360° pan; but not quite. The shot holds on the receding diagonal plane of the trees, partially cutting off the end of the avenue and the frontal symmetry of the Wren structure that completes it. Thus we end the pan with a dissymmetry: an ordered world slightly askew. Barrett has become the manifestation of the baroque that was occluded earlier. Now it is out in the open, its own agency of occlusion. Losey cuts to a reverse angle as Barrett approaches Tony’s front door: a specific class milieu, complete with its circular window and door motifs, waiting to be occupied. This occlusion in and through depth continues after Barrett enters the house. The camera precedes him into each room, edging backwards as if deferring to his ability to create movement-in-depth. As he moves into the empty living room, the camera pans left to reveal the full depth of three rooms, stretching from the front window to the back garden. At the rear, in deep space, Tony lies asleep in his deck chair, backlit against the light of the French windows. Barrett moves toward him, his dark frame enveloping our view of the suddenly vulnerable master. From the beginning, Barrett’s body commands and constitutes space, and through occlusion, creates depth, creates power. A major characteristic of baroque drama is that it tends to lack selfawareness and self-criticality of such power, to naturalize its plots and plotters as part of the regular (fallen) order of things. If Losey’s narrative and mise-en-scène are, as we have tried to demonstrate, innately baroque and immanent, one might ask whether there exists a possibility for criticality? If Losey’s cinema exists as an uneasy dialogue between contradiction and immanence, where exactly is the contradiction? Is there a dialectical space in Losey’s dramas above and beyond a stalled

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class conflict? The short answer is, yes. It lies in the stylistic shifts in and between certain scenes, which Losey shoots in an extremely mannered style, creating what one might call a hyper- or meta-baroque. As Losey explains, ‘the element of theatricality is called “baroque” or “overplaying” or “exaggeration” by the people who don’t like it. I would say that it’s emphasis and that it’s the use of the theatrical instrument in cinema to make the points more inescapable. Art for me has never been 25 the exact reproduction of life.’ This theatrical emphasis is of course easier to defend in Losey, given his background in Brecht’s Epic Theater, than in a conventional American realist. Edgardo Cozarinsky puts the Losey case succinctly when he argues that ‘the overwrought decoration, the emotional outbursts, the heightened effects of mise-en-scène, from actors’ gestures to camera movements, are all there as if between quotation marks: they illustrate something else, just as Brecht asked of actors that they should not seem to feel but to quote’.26 In this context, mannerism acts as a VEffekt or distancing device, in which the parameters of the narrative are opened up through internal formal alienation to encourage a greater criticality of the discourse-as-ideology. This meta-baroque is used frequently in The Servant, specifically at Lord and Lady Mountset’s country house; in the restaurant, where Tony’s and Susan’s lunch date is constantly interrupted by the camera eavesdropping on other conversations; in the ball game on the stairs between Tony and Barrett; and during the orgy at the film’s end. The objective of such stylistic opaqueness is to naturalize and make more realistic, relatively speaking, the baroque space of the rest of the film. In this way, Losey’s naturalism can masquerade as realism, his immanence pass as the space and depth of everyday life. Far from being the proverbial Other, Barrett becomes the very stuff of real life in the real world. In short, Barrett is very much like us. Losey and Pinter’s next collaboration, Accident, which was adapted from Nicholas Mosley’s novel, takes this naturalist variation one important step further. Triggered involuntarily by the chance occurrence of a fatal car accident, discontinuous time and memory are now depicted as mutually complicit with violently impulsive behaviour, to the point where they become indistinguishable. As Losey recalled, ‘I wanted to make a film about an accident in which there was no physical violence, only the inner violence of what people feel and the violent results of their behaviour.’27 Mosley’s novel, which was published in 1965, is written in a free-associative, stream-of-consciousness style focalized through forty-year-old Stephen Jervis, a fellow in philosophy at St Mark’s College, Oxford.

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Taken purely on the level of story or fabula, Pinter’s film adaptation is deceptively simple. Stephen (Dirk Bogarde) lives with his pregnant wife, Rosalind (Vivien Merchant) and two children at Palling Manor, a converted farmhouse in the heart of Oxfordshire. Their apparent marital stability is disrupted when Stephen becomes sexually infatuated with Anna von Graz und Loeben (Jacqueline Sassard), a beautiful Austrian aristocrat who also happens to be one of his pupils. Matters are complicated when Stephen discovers that Anna is involved with two other men. One is another of Stephen’s students, handsome, aristocratic William, the son of Lord Codrington (Michael York). The other is Stephen’s married colleague and professional rival, the archaeologist and novelist Charley Hall (the ever-abrasive Stanley Baker).28 This leads to a perverse, often unconscious rivalry between the three men that quickly degenerates into a series of competitive games and sexual oneupmanship. This battle of libidinal wills exacerbates Stephen’s preexisting insecurities about his advancing years – literally a fear of inexorable time itself – and dissatisfaction with his mundane academic career. Stephen thus attempts to mitigate his mid-life crisis through the illusory hope of a rejuvenating affair with the younger woman. Events reach a tragic climax when, driving to Stephen’s house following a late-night party, William is killed in a car accident. To make matters worse, Anna is probably guilty of drunk driving. After extricating her from the wreckage, Stephen takes Anna to his home – Rosalind is away with the children, spending the last days of her pregnancy at her mother’s – where he lies to the police on her behalf. However, after the authorities have left, Stephen takes advantage of Anna’s groggy condition and proceeds to rape her. Early next morning, after learning that Rosalind has given birth to a premature baby during the night, Stephen drives Anna back to Oxford and helps her climb into her college unseen. Later, as a defeated Charley looks on, Stephen helps her pack for her flight home. Stephen seems both resigned and relieved, his obvious guilt tempered by a sense of self-satisfaction: Anna’s complicity and abrupt departure will probably shield him from scandal, while he can take vicarious pleasure in seeing Charley lose his emblematic prize. The story ends as Stephen returns to Rosalind and the new baby, picking up his life where it had left off, albeit irrevocably changed by both the affair and the accident. Not surprisingly, Pinter and Losey’s plot or syuzhet restructures these events into a far more complex Proustian narrative and it is on this level that book and film part company. In the novel, although Stephen is writing a full two years after the events described, his narrative gains little in rational clarity with the distance of hindsight. In fact, it is often

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difficult to discern the difference between past memory and present exegesis, objective fact and subjective fantasy. Palmer and Riley have argued that the novel juggles at least two different levels of subjectivity:

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the narrator’s remembered experience and his narrational act of remembering. In Mosley’s complex handling of point-of-view, objective reality is twice removed. The narrator presents his memories, which are inherently fragmentary and associative, and their substance is not so much the original events as it is his subjective experience: the events occurred; the narrator as a character experienced them; and that experience is in turn remembered and narrated.29

Because nothing exists outside the text of the character’s recollection, the process of narration becomes just as important as the ostensible narrative it produces. Pinter’s most radical change from the ‘writerly’ text of the book is to expand the narrative beyond the exclusive focalization and staccato free association of the subjective narrator. Pinter trims Mosley’s interior dialogue to an exterior surface more suitable to the audio-visual film medium, a set of perceptions that can be objectively examined by the viewer. He also compresses the already elapsed, linear time frame of the novel, where the past is seen as a form of moral sustenance – ‘We need the past like we need water’,30 says Stephen – to a more Proustian weave of voluntary and involuntary memory, which culminates in the active production of ‘time regained’ through the creative labour of Stephen’s subjective narrative. Like Proust, Pinter’s ‘concern lies with the exploration of internal time: that nebulous expanse of the past that qualifies, enriches, and betrays the present moment. We know the past, however, only as it is sustained in the present, and the present seeks inevitably to 31 erase it. Time reforms external reality, just as it reforms memory.’ Like all Proustian structures, Stephen’s flashback to the recent past is as much a meditation on the nature of time and memory as such, as it is an artistic apprenticeship geared towards affirming his own future actions. In fact, Losey uses several different cinematic expressions of both immanent and segmented time as selective means of disclosing Stephen’s violent instincts, creating a mutual envelopment of time and impulse. The most dominant structural device is the flashback itself. This is not only because it carves a gigantic temporal ellipse into the linear events following the accident, thereby producing the film’s apprenticeship structure in the first place, but also because it subsumes the present and future narrative time of the prologue and coda into a meditation on the past, a past necessarily inflected with the spectre of William’s untimely death. No matter how many times an envious

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Stephen might recall William as youthful and alive, a young man with his entire future before him, he knows full well that this future will be cut tragically short. This naturally feeds Stephen’s fear of his own advancing years, of life and loves still unfulfilled. Stephen’s apprenticeship is thus a coming to terms with the immanent reality of death as such, an oblivion inextricably linked to his own sexual desire, which the prologue makes quite clear. Accident opens in the early hours of the morning with a symmetrically framed establishing shot from outside the front gates of Stephen’s house. We’re immediately positioned as distanced observers, while the long, extended take expresses the importance of the house as an image of order and stability, reinforced by the faint but comforting sound of a typewriter hard at work. However, this sense of conscientious labour and domesticity is undercut by the piercing shriek of animal cries, creating an aural link between art/narrative and primal instinct, which turns out to be one of the film’s key contiguities. Then, just as we hear the increasing volume of William’s approaching car off-screen, the camera starts to move, disrupting the static classicism of the opening, and we begin a slow track in through the gates so that only the house is visible. This movement will be reversed at film’s end with a complementary track out from the same house, so that the film’s apparent formal symmetry is undercut by the more ‘baroque’ events of its narrative interior. The sound of the car culminates in a splintering crash. Although the camera keeps tracking forward, as if indifferent to the off-screen accident, a dog starts barking and Stephen emerges from the house to investigate. We thus have an immediate split of interest between the narrative role of the camera and Stephen: the objective recording of the house and accident is one thing, Stephen’s subjective reaction is another. Losey then cuts away to a jerking, tracking shot along moonlit foliage, as if the camera were moving parallel to Stephen as he runs offscreen to the scene of the crash. It’s an eerie, almost surreal sequence, dreamlike and timeless. With its punctuating animal and bird cries, this is the film’s originary world, the beginning and end of cyclical, primordial time. In this case it is associated with death (signified by the fatal accident), an immanent force that will be ever-present in the interstices of what follows. Losey reinforces this suggestion in two ways. Firstly, he cuts in a brief close-up of a snorting horse, directly associating non-linear duration with the impulsive traits of becoming-animal, both of which will be associated with Stephen. Secondly, the soundtrack heightens the constant ticking of the wrecked car’s ignition, an insistent, metronomic throb like that of the dripping tap in The Servant,

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both signs that measured time has run down in favour of a more libidinal pulse. We first see the accident victims, battered and bloody, reflected upside down in a smashed wing mirror. Because this shot is too close to be Stephen’s subjective point of view – he is still running towards the car – we assume that it constitutes the camera’s independent rendition of the couple as a fractured virtual image. The film’s structural, narrative and most importantly, temporal role will be to piece them back together again through Stephen’s present and mnemonic focalization. This turns out to be more difficult than it might seem, for as Stephen struggles to help Anna out of the wreckage, Losey alternates disconcertingly between differently angled close and long shots, as if both Stephen and the camera itself were having trouble sorting out the tangle of bodies from the twisted metal. The result, as Klein argues, is ‘a vacillation between intense involvement with and indifferent alienation from the situation. Pinter’s reproduction of this clash of sentiments conveys masterfully the ruminations of Stephen’s mind in the novel as he sifts through the disaster.’32 This fracture of spatio-temporal continuity is paralleled by a similar disjuncture in moral tone. Anna’s immediate response to William’s death, for example, is a blank numbness. She is effectively reduced to an unfeeling automaton, mechanically retrieving her purse and hairbrush from the wreckage so that she can comb her hair. In contrast, Stephen is all frantic concern, epitomized by his cry of horror as Anna tries to lever herself out of the wreckage: ‘Don’t! You’re standing on his face.’ However, this admirable respect for the integrity of the dead doesn’t stop Stephen from committing his own legal and ethical deception as a means of protecting Anna from the authorities. Back at the house after calling the police, Stephen assumes that Anna – who, as we later discover, doesn’t possess a driving license – was actually driving the car. Given the tutor’s paternal and sexual interest in the girl, we wonder what he is going to tell the police. The decision is made even more difficult by Anna’s own reaction to events. Just as the police pull up outside, Losey cuts to a close-up of Anna’s glazed eyes. They seem to be vacant, a complete enigma, but we learn ex post facto that it’s at this very moment that Anna is making her decision to hide from the police in the upstairs master bedroom, her momentary disorientation overridden by an instinctual drive for self-preservation. Apart from her decision to fly home at the end, this turns out to be her one and only decisive act in the entire film. Her seeming inscrutability thus turns out to be a mirror reflection of Stephen’s tendency to project and displace his own ambivalence onto others. The enigmatic Sassard plays Anna as an emotional

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void throughout, a ‘bloodless cipher’ who accurately reflects Stephen’s perceptive comment in the book that, ‘we were fascinated because of that nothingness about her, so that we could put anything we liked on to 33 her’. During his interview with the two policemen (Terence Rigby and Brian Phelan) Stephen deliberately fails to mention Anna, providing us with an early clue that he tends to dissimulate his own emotions through deliberate silence or avoidance. Stephen’s moral ambivalence over his lie by omission is indicated through an involuntary guilty stutter as he speaks, as well as a barely discernible temporal dislocation in the narrative continuity. Thus, after the police have left, Losey cuts to a shot of Stephen leaning pensively over the kitchen table. A clock chimes two o’clock. This is odd, given that Stephen earlier informed the police that the accident occurred at 1:45. Surely fifteen minutes is inadequate time for Stephen to have dragged Anna from the wreckage, phoned for the police and then made an official statement. The only possible explanation is that this shot is itself a subjective flashback to the period before the police arrive. It’s a form of past-conditional tense: Stephen goes back in his mind’s eye to a time when he could have started over by telling a different story than the misleading statement he has just given to the cops. This is an important point because it discloses in Stephen’s character a direct conflation of memory, desire and guilt, a link between disjunctive crystalline time and the negative repercussions of impulsive behaviour. Moving into the master bedroom Stephen discovers Anna stretched out asleep on the bed, breathing with great difficulty. From subsequent scenes we gradually realize that Stephen fantasizes Anna as a sexual substitute for his wife, at one point mistaking her in this same bed for the sleeping Rosalind. This not only exacerbates the sexual osmosis between the women in the film but also suggests that Stephen’s impulsive lust is mitigated by simultaneous feelings of adulterous bad conscience. From his point of view we then see Anna in a tighter shot from the waist down, one shoe off, her dress pushed up erotically around her thighs. As her leg and foot twitch involuntarily, Losey cuts to a brief close-up of Anna’s foot kicking the loose shoe, a visual analogy to Stephen’s earlier guilty stutter. Palmer and Riley have persuasively argued that Losey’s abrupt change in camera angle suggests a deliberate break from Stephen’s subjective focalization in the previous shot.34 At the same time, however, this isn’t necessarily a return to the objective narrative of the first establishing shot. It’s both subjective and objective, a form of character narration or projection, a focalization that is more than simple point of view (which is essentially a limited form of

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perception restricted to seeing) but rather a representation of Stephen’s emotive ‘mind’s eye’, a conditional ‘what if’ like the earlier flashback in the kitchen. This is an image clearly compromised by a combination of analytical interpretation and bodily affect, essentially the moment where Stephen starts to narrate. More importantly, it is a narration where sexual lust and guilt become the catalysts for memory, because Losey then cuts to Stephen’s involuntary recollection of Anna treading on William’s face, accompanied by his own off-screen cry of ‘Don’t!’ Like Proust’s Madeleine, this horrific image of death and desecration is Stephen’s first faltering step into time past, for we then cut to a close-up of William, vibrantly alive in Stephen’s college rooms as the film’s central flashback begins. The prologue already gives us important clues regarding the nature of Stephen’s temporal apprenticeship. Firstly, it indicates that time-past will entail a recognition and working out of Stephen’s impulsive desire for Anna as well as an overcoming of his guilty relationship with both William and Rosalind. Secondly, it is a vehicle for Stephen to come to terms with the march of time itself, specifically his almost pathological fear of ageing and death. Early on in the flashback, for example, it becomes readily apparent that his ten-year marriage to Rosalind has sunk into a typical Pinteresque rut, marked by dull familial routine and emotional dissimulation. As usual, Pinter expresses this indirectly, employing clipped, laconic utterances designed to obfuscate the couple’s real feelings as much as express them. Moreover, Rosalind’s pregnancy not only accentuates her unbecoming ‘homeliness’ in Stephen’s straying eyes, but offers a clear reminder of marriage’s tendency to restrengthen its ensnaring bonds through the cyclical recurrence of new, everdaunting parental responsibilities, a major theme of Pinter’s script for Jack Clayton’s The Pumpkin Eater. Like Peter Finch’s Jake, time is clearly running out for whatever youthful ambition Stephen still has left. Stephen’s emotional ennui is exacerbated by his frustrated attraction to Anna. While his lustful intentions are inhibited by his professional duties as Anna’s tutor and protector of her moral welfare, he also has a serious rival in the form of the patricianly self-confident William. However, although he may be caught between the twin jaws of middle age and class inferiority, Stephen is at least sanguine and philosophical about his shortcomings as a would-be suitor. He generously retreats from the sexual fray by offering to introduce William to Anna, as if using the younger man as his sexual surrogate. Jonathan Baumbach has argued that this tendency to pursue relationships by proxy is endemic to the whole film:

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The film admits to almost every possible configuration in the relationships of the characters … Anna, it seems, is interested in William because he is Stephen’s student and in Charley because he is Stephen’s friend, Stephen the interlocutor in both relationships. Stephen, wanting to sleep with Anna, only partly aware of his motives, turns her over to William (surrogate and rival, son, other self) and to Charley (he puts a copy of Charley’s novel in her purse – a fine Losey touch), with whom identification is even more profound.35

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William refuses Stephen’s offer, largely because he has little need of Stephen’s help, either as a matchmaker or as a social go-between. Indeed, unbeknownst to Stephen, it is only a short time before William and Anna are punting romantically together on the idyllic Cherwell. At first glance then, it appears that the outward, linear surface of Stephen’s recollection shows him to be a good sport about his class and sexual inferiority complex. This apparent sober objectivity concerning his own neurosis is reflected in both the film’s languid pacing and Losey’s mise-en-scène, which reinforces Stephen’s seemingly levelheaded meditation on the past with an unassuming visual neutrality. However, as is typical of a Proustian flashback structure, Stephen’s true feelings and fears are not expressed in the literal recollectionimage but are instead hidden in the ellipses between the recalled sequences, in the interstices of immanent time. For example, when Stephen first tells Rosalind about Anna – he provokes her with the fantastic claim that she’s an Austrian Princess – his wife half-jokingly asks, ‘Has she made advances to you?’ ‘Oh no. I’m too old’, he responds. ‘You’re not too old for me’, she adds, partly seeking to reassure him but secretly reassuring herself about her own drift into matronly middle age. Our suspicions are confirmed when Losey cuts to a tight angle up on Rosalind as she looms over the seated Stephen and completes her unfinished thought: ‘… and I’m not too old for you’. This is followed by a match cut from Rosalind to a close-up of Anna in Stephen’s college room. ‘Write me an essay on what the problem is’, says Stephen, ‘or rather, on what the problem seems to you to be.’ In light of the jarring ellipse, which accentuates the wide gulf in age between the two women, it’s clear that both Rosalind’s and Stephen’s superficial dialogue is mere smokescreen. The truth lies in the gaps between the shots, not in the shots themselves. They tell us that the ‘problem’ is Stephen himself and that the real issue is age and frustrated desire. This unconscious trajectory continues as we then cut from Anna to a high angle down on the senior common room, where Stephen, Charley and the college provost (Alexander Knox) sit reading. Losey cuts to a

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series of floor-level medium shots as the group is joined by another professor, Hedges (Nicholas Mosley himself):

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Charley (reading aloud): ‘A statistical analysis of sexual intercourse among students at Colenso University, Milwaukee [on Stephen, whose own sex life is also in question], showed that 70% did it in the evening, 29.9% between 2 and 4 in the afternoon, and 0.1% during a lecture on Aristotle.’ Provost: ‘I’m surprised to hear that Aristotle is on the syllabus in the state of Wisconsin.’

Then, just as the provost confirms his intellectual pedantry with a boring anecdote about his predecessor’s run-in with a step ladder, Losey returns to the scene’s opening downward angle, distorting the dons and their closed-off environment while at the same time deflating their smug self-importance. Punctuated by the monotonous sound of a ticking clock throughout, the scene illustrates the mind-numbing aridity of Stephen’s academic life and the all-too-likely possibility that one day he too will end up like the provost. Stephen’s wishful backsliding from an image of his ageing wife to the youthful Anna is thus undercut by the unconscious premonition of his own impotent future: in effect, desire transformed into a living death. This chain of temporal skidding concludes with a shot of Stephen walking along the banks of the Cherwell. Suddenly William shouts his name and he turns to see the young man punting on the river. He is accompanied by Anna, who reclines seductively, à la Goya’s Maja, in the warm sunshine. It seems that during the previous ellipses, which express Stephen’s unconscious fear of death and ageing, the youthful William has ‘scored’, thereby adding libidinal insult to immanent injury. To make matters worse, after the young couple invite Stephen to join them, the vanquished suitor is forced to lie in tight proximity to Anna’s bare legs and midriff, leaving him uncomfortably aroused. Then, as if in challenge to William’s graceful handling of the punt, Stephen responds with a demonstration of his own youthful bravado by standing up in the boat. Alas, while grabbing for the overhanging branch of a tree he falls in the river, once more underlining his declining physical skills. Significantly, Stephen’s subjective narration of the incident only includes the sound of the splash, not the visual. This illustrates his tendency to repress disturbing facts and incidents from his memory and replace them with more benign ones. We have already seen an example of this from the prologue, where Stephen’s involuntary recall of William’s bloodied face is immediately replaced by a voluntary

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recollection of him alive and smiling. Later in the film, Stephen similarly represses the disturbing memory of the violent ball game at Lord Codrington’s mansion (which he reads metaphorically as an aristocratic death wish) with an abrupt cut to a more benign English pastime – William gracing the cricket field with an elegant display of batsmanship. This is a good example of Losey’s ability to use omniscient narration to provide insight into Stephen’s unconscious foibles that his own character-narration might repress through selective recall. These elliptical displacements thus form a key part of Stephen’s apprenticeship, for the temporal shifts from romantic idealizations of sex, class and death to a growing awareness of their deep-seated, somatic repercussions leads him to realize that most of his relationships have hitherto been an emotional fraud. Much of this self-deception is the result of Stephen’s misplaced and misguided jealousy of Charley and his need to compete on his rival’s own narrowly sexual terms. Like Stephen, Charley is also married with children – his neglected wife Laura (Ann Firbank) is featured in but one scene, forlornly watering her garden in the pouring rain – but while the former contents himself with the harmless ‘what if’ of conceptual adultery, the cocksure, indiscreet Welshman puts it into macho practice. Stephen is thus doubly vanquished, first by William’s advantage in class and age, secondly by Charley’s more assertive and animalistic libido. This unacknowledged sexual jealousy plays out in the form of yet another displacement: through a purported professional rivalry with Charley. While the public side of Stephen contemptuously dismisses the Welshman as a pseudo-intellectual, a man whose celebrity as a popular television pundit has ‘devalued’ his scholarly credentials and corrupted his integrity, the ambitious egotist in Stephen would willingly trade places. This is confirmed by Stephen’s triumphant announcement over Sunday dinner that he has an upcoming appointment with Charley’s television producer, that he too is in line to be a guest on Charley’s panel show. However, as is typical with their rivalry, this seemingly careerist counter-attack is really a sexual power play designed to demean Charley in Anna’s eyes. This explains why, following his subsequent humiliation at the BBC, Stephen turns in consolation not to a form of academic solace but instead to a night of disappointing, meaningless sex with an ex-girlfriend, the provost’s daughter, Francesca (Delphine Seyrig). Francesca is therefore yet another displacement from his true desires, a pathetic stand-in for both the abortive television job and for Anna. Losey expresses the disjuncture between Stephen’s remembered high expectations and the sad reality of an irrelevant affair long dead, by shooting Bogarde and Seyrig’s dialogue in non-

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synchronized voice over, creating an audio-visual split that effectively expresses the devastating effects of temporal and mnemonic slippage. Ironically, the one time Stephen plucks up enough courage to cheat on his wife it is with a woman he no longer desires. Although Anna, as the object of the competition between Stephen, Charley and William, is cast in the traditional Losey role of the outsider/ intruder, threatening the sanctity of both Stephen’s and Charley’s marriages by drawing out the latent violence that lies dormant within them, she is much more of a passive catalyst than a deliberately insidious intriguer like Barrett. As a result, the film’s dynamic centre is not the destructive role of a duplicitous femme fatale – Accident is not a film noir – but the triangular conflict between the three men, ruled in turn by the moral corollaries of pride, guilt, envy and lust. Moreover, like those of the inhibited Glenda in The Sleeping Tiger, Stephen’s desires are never acted upon or stated directly until the impulsive explosion of the film’s climax. Instead, they are deferred and disguised through a series of unconscious competitive games – a favourite Pinter strategy, as we saw in The Servant – so that Stephen appropriates Charley’s and William’s actual relationships with Anna as a way to feed his own vicarious sexual appetite. This appropriation begins after the punting incident when Stephen invites William and Anna to Palling for Sunday lunch. This is really an invitation to Anna alone, with William added only as a useful smokescreen for the jealous eyes of Rosalind. In retrospect, the narrating Stephen seems to sense this deception, for he recalls that Rosalind greets him at home with a long, erotically charged kiss. On one level, we could read this as a suspicious Rosalind asserting her territorial rights to her potentially wayward husband. On another, more Freudian level, the kiss can be seen as an affective displacement, whereby Stephen’s recollection exaggerates its sensual ardour in light of his present-tense, post-accident desire for the sleeping Anna, thereby shifting his current adulterous urge onto a previous marital reaffirmation. The latter reading, with its suggestion of sexual overcompensation, is all the more likely because Stephen is fully aware, in retrospect, that on that particular Sunday his best-laid plans came to naught. This was due to the unexpected arrival of Charley, who turns up uninvited with a couple of bottles of gin and his tennis racket and proceeds to dominate the day’s proceedings, literally and figuratively taking over the film’s psychological narrative. In one of Pinter’s trademark ‘master scenes’, the guests gather in Stephen’s back garden for some after-lunch sexual baiting. Losey frames the characters in carefully arranged groups at calculated distances from each other, so that while Charley and William

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dominate the centre foreground, Stephen and Rosalind are relegated to the periphery of the garden, as if they were ostracized outsiders at their own party. When William admits that he would like to write a novel, Charley patronizingly argues that it’s child play, seizing the opportunity to take some well-timed digs at Stephen: ‘All you need is a starting point. Here for instance, on this lawn. What are we all up to? Describe to me what we’re all doing.’ Lacking both Charley’s imagination and his secret knowledge of the true facts, William resorts to a literal description of the immediate scene: ‘Rosalind’s lying down. Stephen’s weeding the garden. Anna’s making a daisy chain. We’re having this conversation.’ Charley responds by going further, describing the melodramatic plot of a possible novel: ‘Rosalind is pregnant. Stephen is having an affair with a girl at Oxford. He’s reached the age when he can’t keep his hands off girls at Oxford. Well he feels guilty, of course, so he makes up a story.’ William: ‘What story?’ ‘This story.’ As Leahy points out, ‘Charley’s story is a confession of what he actually is doing, and a forecast of what Stephen might do’, given the chance.36 Charley’s account is not only another example of fiction’s sublimating power of sexual displacement, but it also represents a temporal fork in relation to Stephen’s overall flashback. Charley’s oblique allusion to his own affair with Anna simply reflects Stephen’s retrospective knowledge of something that only becomes clear much later in the linear narrative of his flashback. The scene thus points up the inherent fracture between the narrating Stephen’s all-knowing memory as a form of circular time, and the character Stephen’s limited knowledge in past, linear time, which can interpret and act on events only as they unfold. As in Proust, this is the difference between undergoing the apprenticeship, with all its necessary pratfalls, and learning from it in hindsight. On the other hand, because of his ex post facto omniscience, Stephen can also be smugly prescient; he knows what’s going to happen next: ‘Thus Charley’s superior knowledge in the scene is temporary and ultimately illusory from the perspective of the mind screen narrator, who knows his own failings as well as Charley’s.’37 Consequently, there is a significant shift in will-to-power wrought by the temporal displacement from the past event itself to the very different knowledge of the present moment. Nonetheless, in presenting the scene as part of time-past, Stephen temporarily suppresses his subsequent knowledge, as does Losey’s omniscient camera, so that the two narrators come together as part of the same dramatic story-telling strategy. This is designed to exploit maximum immediate impact from Charley’s insinuations as the sexual competition over Anna becomes keener. Ultimately, ‘what matters is

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not the remark (situation, emotion, gesture) itself, but the way it brings 38 new, unexpected facets to light’. Thus Anna’s simple action of placing a daisy chain around Stephen’s daughter’s neck becomes an objective correlative for the psycho-sexual ‘daisy chain’ that has been going around the garden. Similarly, as the sexual battle continues on the tennis court, an otherwise innocent game is transformed into an outrageous display of macho prowess. According to Losey, ‘this is a sort of Sunday afternoon brothel where nobody is pretending to play tennis – 39 they’re playing sex’. Thus, while the physically ‘disabled’ Rosalind watches disgustedly from the sidelines, the couples pair off along the lines of their true alliance: the actively sexual couple of Charley and Anna against the libidinal also-rans, William and Stephen. Once again it is the boisterous Charley who disrupts the proceedings, whacking the ball unnecessarily hard or kicking it as if he were playing football, parading his superior masculinity for all to see. The contrast in acting styles between Baker and Bogarde pays rich dividends here, for as Hirsch rightly notes, ‘the bonhomie, brashness, blatant egoism, and proud virility that Baker always projects is altogether different from Bogarde’s more refined and ascetic aura’.40 However, it is Bogarde’s polite self-effacement that holds Stephen back and causes him to miss his one golden opportunity to seduce Anna. Following the tennis match, Stephen decides to go for a walk and Anna, clearly attracted to him, invites herself along. They eventually reach a barred wooden gate where Losey cuts to a close-up of their hands resting lightly on the top, close but not touching. For a split second, Stephen makes a move to place his hand on hers, but resists the temptation. Losey then pulls back to show the rolling countryside before them, accompanied by distant church bells. The moment passes and the pair walks back to the house. However, instead of following them, the camera holds on the empty landscape, as if lamenting a lost opportunity, the end of the affair before it has begun. Like Antonioni, Losey often lets the camera arrive before his characters in a particular setting, and lets it linger long after they have left, creating what one might call pre- and post-diegetic space. This is a highly resonant spaceas-place, pregnant with unconscious significance, as if the character’s emotion has been incarnated in the very flesh of the world. It is also an innately temporal space, evoking an expectancy of arrival or nostalgia for what has just past, often simultaneously. In Stephen’s flashback, it expresses a memory that is still palpably present, as if he still painfully rues his failure to make his sexual move. French critics call this lingering shot temps mort, but it is less a literal ‘dead time’ than an overdetermined allegorical time of lost opportunity begging to be taken

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up again and revitalized. Seymour Chatman describes the effect admirably:

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What is established is not ‘the same place’ but the possibility that it is in reality ‘another place’, perhaps even an extradiegetic place. The scene is made portentous by a delay that challenges the whole tissue of fictionality. The film says not that ‘this is such-and-such a place, in which plot event X occurs’ but rather that ‘this place is important quite independently of the immediate exigencies of plot, and you will sense (if not understand) its odd value if you scrutinize it carefully. That is why I 41 give you time to do so.’

In many ways this shot is the psychological heart of the film, the central incident of Stephen’s recollection, for it continues to haunt him throughout the scenes that follow. This is expressed specifically in Losey’s later resort to another temps mort as Anna accompanies Rosalind for a similar walk in the garden. By switching her peripatetic allegiance from Stephen to his wife, Anna is indicating quite clearly that Stephen has forfeited all sexual claims to her. This is brought home a few days later when, following his disastrous trip to London, Stephen returns home in the early hours of the morning to discover Anna and Charley sleeping in the guest bedroom. The full ramifications of Stephen’s lost sexual opportunity are only played out as time is regained and his apprenticeship comes full circle. This unfolds in two distinct stages, so that one disturbing revelation is ultimately superseded by another, far more constructive. Firstly, Stephen’s flashback ends with a reversal of the very steps that began it. Following the cricket match, Stephen recalls a mind-screen image of a newly engaged, blissful Anna and William kissing in silhouette. However, this is accompanied by the delicate, Japanese-like sounds of a plucked harp, Johnny Dankworth’s recurring leitmotif for Stephen’s simmering, unfulfilled desire. This is the emotive catalyst for Stephen’s wilful obliteration of this happy connubial image, for we immediately slam cut to the earlier shot of William’s bloody head trapped in the car – only this time it is a voluntary memory – followed by rapid inserts of Anna climbing out of the wreck and lying prone on the grass. The symmetrical reverse of the movement to time-past now transitions us back to time-present, but Stephen’s apprenticeship and recall of his earlier frustrations have now harnessed time-regained into a violent impulse determined to erase forever the missed opportunity of the earlier temps mort. As Stephen stands in the shadows of the master bedroom, Losey cuts to the film’s sole mirror shot, a circular image of Anna spread-eagled and panting on the bed, as if she were simulating

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sex. This suggests that Stephen has formed an imaginary, crystalline circuit, linking Charley’s and William’s actual affair with Anna, his own past sexual exploits with Rosalind on this same bed, and his own present/ future desire to possess Anna. The ensuing rape thus serves multiple purposes: Stephen earns a belated victory in his ongoing sexual competition with his two male rivals while also cancelling out the temporal and libidinal woes of his unsatisfactory marriage. Moreover, it also becomes clear that the unpleasant fruits of Stephen’s temporal apprenticeship are the self-realization of his own violent animal instincts, ‘the discovery of his other self acting out his unadmitted desires like something dreamed’,42 the fulfilment of the very same becoming-animal that was signified via the snorting horse in the film’s prologue. Stephen is thus the film’s ‘sleeping tiger’, but instead of drifting instinctively into Glenda Esmond’s self-destructive liebestod, he is able, like Frank Clements, to channel his impulsive desires into the phallocentric structure of the Oedipal family. Moreover, his subjective narrative has also given him the power to generate at least a modicum of self-criticality. Significantly, the rape isn’t in Mosley’s book, and the author was clearly unhappy with its inclusion in the film: ‘One knew that if one was going to have a Pinter script one was going to have one’s characters brutalized.’43 Although the scene does play as a descent into the obscene, with Stephen claiming Anna as a final lascivious prize, it also accentuates the displacement of his grief from William’s death, creating a complex mystification of motives. Fortunately, the return to omniscient narration creates distance, forcing us to pass moral judgement on Stephen’s actions through a form of extra-diegetic critique. For example, the rape is punctuated by the ringing of the downstairs telephone, which Stephen refuses to answer. Next morning, as Stephen prepares to drive Anna back to her college, we discover that the call was the hospital trying to reach him about Rosalind’s difficult birth. This temporal fork, pointing forward from the time of the rape to a negative, future anterior value judgement, makes Stephen’s actions at the time seem all the more inexcusable. This is subsequently underlined by another temps mort focused on Stephen’s empty hallway as we hear his car pull away outside. It is as if this later pregnant moment were responding critically to the libidinal stimulus of the one earlier at the farm gate. The impulsive outcome of Stephen’s temporal apprenticeship (unfulfilled desire leading to brutal rape) is thus superseded by the omniscient narration’s suggestion of Stephen’s subsequent feelings of guilt and remorse. We see this in the obvious irony that William’s death and Anna’s sexual victimization occur at the very moment that Rosalind’s and Stephen’s baby is born. This creates the possibility of a renewal of

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the life force through a channelling of the violent, purely libidinal side of impulse into the more affirmative and selfless act of procreation. Yet, as in all apprenticeships, there is a necessary downside. As Beverle Houston and Marsha Kinder suggest, ‘Stephen has maximized his payoffs – triumph over Charley, sex with Anna – and has minimized his losses, but in the process he has ruined three lives and shaken 44 several others, his own included.’ Losey expresses this ambivalence in the film’s closing shot as we return to the prologue’s frontal view of Stephen’s house, but this time in daylight with his children playing in the driveway. In light of earlier events, the classically framed symmetry no longer fools us into assuming psychological harmony. As the children run in through the front door of the house to greet their father, and we begin our slow track out through the front gates (thereby symmetrically doubling the opening’s slow track in), we once again hear the sound of the car crash on the soundtrack. However, this is no longer the prologue’s real-time diegesis, but the omniscient narrator’s metaphor for Stephen’s ongoing moral tragedy (the inescapable presentness of the past, as well as its inevitable return as future difference): the sound that will haunt him forever. As Losey confirms, ‘Although Stephen finally returns to the life he has left and nearly destroyed, he returns as a changed man.’45 This sobering, albeit instructive return to a devastating event in a character’s past is also the subject of The Go-Between, Losey and Pinter’s final collaboration (excluding the unfilmed Proust Screenplay) and one of the director’s most critically acclaimed films.46 In this case, however, the primordial emerges less as a latent presence within the conventional master–servant, teacher–pupil relationship than as a ticking time bomb, exploding across the reaches of genealogical and historical time with devastating results for all concerned. Derived from L. P. Hartley’s award-winning 1958 novel, the film opens with the prophetically ominous words: ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’ We later learn that this voice-over is spoken by sixty-five-year-old Leo Colson (Michael Redgrave), who is looking back on the tragic events that shaped his life from the historical vantage point of the early 1950s. However, before we can meet our modern-day narrator we are whisked back to the suffocatingly hot summer of 1900 as the twelveyear-old Leo (Dominic Guard) arrives at Norfolk’s Brandham Hall to spend three weeks with the wealthy family of his school friend, Marcus Maudsley (Richard Gibson). Like The Servant’s Barrett, young Leo is the film’s designated outsider/intruder. However, unlike the earlier film, where the interloper is a dynamic agent of change, forcing the household to reveal its buried class and sexual dynamics, in this case the stakes are

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more complex. Although the bourgeois young man ‘invades’ the sanctity of the ruling classes, he himself falls tragic victim to their often arcane and unfathomable socio-sexual mores. Also, because the Maudsley household is already going through a latent crisis of its own, Leo becomes the reflective screen of the different stages of this crisis as it passes into disequilibrium. Although solidly middle-class, Leo’s family is recently impoverished. This financial embarrassment helps to explain the boy’s relatively marginal status at school, an institution exclusive enough to harbour even a snob like Marcus. It is only Leo’s reputation as an expert in black magic and secret codes – he once placed such a fearful curse on two of his tormentors that they fell off the school roof and became ‘severely mutilated’ – that earns him the veneration of his peers. Of course, Leo is no Harry Potter. In fact, he is little more than a sorcerer’s apprentice: his ‘Mickey Mouse’ incantations only work by mistake or through sheer coincidence. Unfortunately, his fortuitous successes have gone to his head, creating an unrealistic belief that his magical skills can also influence events in the adult world. This childish hubris is revealed in his remark to Marcus’s father, Mr Maudsley (Michael Gough), when he affirms his omniscient power over the fate of the two schoolboys: ‘Well, it wasn’t a killing curse, you see. There are curses and curses. It depends on the curse.’ The ambitious but impressionable Leo is quickly seduced by Brandham Hall’s wealth and opulence which, like Tony’s house in The Servant, is dominated architecturally and hierarchically by another spectacular Losey double staircase. With its ubiquitous windows and doorways leading off into the secret recesses of the house, the staircase is the mercurial Leo’s fluid link between the service kitchens below and the guest bedrooms and balconies above. The latter offer spectacular views of the croquet lawn and deer park below, as well as excellent vantage points for watching the comings and goings of Brandham’s rich panoply of guests and residents. However, the deliberate split in perspective between Leo’s subjective narration and Losey’s objective camera suggests that Leo cannot (and will never) know all the house’s secrets. When Leo first arrives at the house, for example, Marcus stops to show him the view from an upper landing window. Instead of cutting to a point-of-view shot so that we can share their view, Losey gives us a partially obscured angle down on the croquet lawn from another window, hinting that Leo’s subjective view and the camera’s omniscient perspective are not necessarily the same. The slippage also underlines the lack of authority in Leo’s specular gaze. Thomas Elsaesser calls this opening visual plan a Cubistic space:

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To penetrate into Brandham Hall is literally and metaphorically to have different vantage points from which to observe other worlds outside, and the scene is constructed in such a way that there is an immediate sense of inner complexity (the angles at which the interior, the staircase, the landings are framed) offset by the seemingly idyllic vistas leading the eye to project itself beyond – a thematic conjunction of distance and desire, proximity and emotional turmoil, which the film develops in the direction of a dualism between the need to belong and the awareness of being excluded, in short, the dilemma that the voyeur shares with the exile.47

Losey reinforces this duplicity both visually and aurally. Firstly, he invariably places his camera so that we either look down the stairwell with Leo, sharing his omniscience, or down upon him, minimizing his stature in relation to the vertical thrust of the house’s architecture. In this way, the stairs are used to spatialize a double movement, encompassing both Leo’s lofty, Icarus-like detachment, but also his earthbound physical inadequacy. This provides an early premonition that his hubris will eventually be punished, a fact noted by the narrating Old Leo who later adds the self-critical comment, ‘You flew too near the sun and you were scorched.’ Secondly, Michel Legrand’s uncommonly loud score creates a provocative sound-image counterpoint. With its breathless, staccato rhythm, suggesting haste and urgency (often bursting in on a scene unexpectedly, or ending abruptly before the image track completes its sequence), the music draws attention to a disjunctive, often suffocating sense of foreboding that prevents the viewer from being lulled into a false sense of security by the film’s lush, pastoral images. If the film’s visual is firmly planted in the bucolic past, its soundtrack seems more aligned with Old Leo’s ex post facto knowledge of the horrors to come. Eager to understand the inner workings of Brandham, the voyeuristic Leo quickly discovers that its domestic politics are regulated by a strict social etiquette, overseen with fastidious diligence by Marcus’s mother, the redoubtable Mrs Maudsley (Margaret Leighton). Leo is quickly drawn into the machinations of this elusive inner world, specifically through his schoolboy crush on Marian, Marcus’s beautiful older sister (Julie Christie). His first view of Marian is from an upstairs balcony as she lies languidly in a hammock in the back garden. Significantly, because she is partially obscured by a parasol, Leo sees her not as a literal face or a body but as a dress. By excluding Marian’s specific personality from this catalytic stimulus to Leo’s burgeoning sexual curiosity, Losey expresses the boy’s attraction to outward frills and trappings rather than the substance of the things themselves. More

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importantly, the overblown folds of Marian’s summer wardrobe act as metonyms for Leo’s desire in general, and over the course of the film these signifiers skid from the beautiful older sister to a more ominous association with the similar dresses worn by Mrs Maudsley, so that from a distance mother and daughter are often indistinguishable. The outward lure of one ‘dress’ thus becomes a set-up for Leo’s ultimate annihilation by the inner fury connected with the other. The deadly, contagious ramifications of Leo’s attraction to Marian are reinforced by an additional recurring motif: a flourishing Deadly Nightshade that has taken over the Brandham Hall outhouses. ‘Every part of it is poison’, states Leo, who smartly recognizes it by its Latin name Atropa belladonna (i.e. ‘beautiful lady’). Losey holds on a close-up of this riot of luscious leaves before cutting to a medium shot of a smitten Leo. We then cut to a close-up of Marian lying sleepily in the hammock, suggesting that Leo is no longer admiring the plant but this other ‘beautiful lady’. Leo is thus caught temporally and thematically between the two belladonnas, between two images of ravishing (but deadly) beauty, which will ultimately define his fate. As the film unfolds, we will come to see this duality as a contiguity of different spells. While Leo falls under Marian’s seductive charm, he will later use the belladonna itself as part of his own private fantasy – his sorcery – in a vain attempt to counteract the contagious effect of Marian’s sexual power. In the book, Leo describes the annihilating spatial and temporal characteristics of the belladonna: ‘There was no harmony, no proportion in its parts. It exhibited all the stages of its development at once. It was young, middle-aged, and old at the same time.’48 The plant’s encapsulation of an entire life-cycle within the depths of its deadly being naturally reflects back on Old Leo himself, who is relating the story of his own adolescence from the vantage point of old age. Moreover, this temporal aspect of the belladonna associates Marian once again with her older surrogate – Mrs Maudsley – who, as we shall see, is the film’s primordial force, spreading the association of sex/death across the reaches of immanent time. True to her poisonous nature, Marian encourages Leo’s infatuation as a means to furthering her own selfish designs, notably a secret affair with the swarthy tenant of Black Farm, Ted Burgess (Alan Bates). Appropriately, Leo and Marian’s emotive pact is cemented through an act of mutual defiance against the prying, controlling designs of Mrs Maudsley herself. When the sweltering Leo is teased by the family for his lack of appropriate summer clothes, the seemingly kind and understanding Marian comes to his rescue by offering to take him into Norwich to buy a new lightweight suit. For Marian, of course, the

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shopping expedition is really an opportune cover for another tryst with Ted. When her suspicious mother later ‘debriefs’ her, asking if she met anyone in town, Marian turns to Leo for an alibi: ‘Not a soul. We were hard at it all the time, weren’t we, Leo?’ After a reflective pause, Leo nods: ‘Yes we were.’ With this deliberate lie, the eager-to-please Leo is recruited as Marian’s conspirator. This ‘mutual understanding’ may have remained an innocent flirtation if only Marcus hadn’t come down with a severe case of measles. Without his quarantined friend to keep him company, a bored Leo is gradually drawn to Black Farm, and it is only a short time before Leo is acting as Ted’s and Marian’s unwitting go-between, carrying ‘business’ messages that in reality facilitate their sexual assignations, thereby transforming their illicit affair into a habit-forming ritual. Deleuze sees this triangle as a continuation of Losey’s fascination with the impulsive predator that began with The Servant, ‘since the farmer not only takes possession of the daughter of the house, but the two lovers take possession of the child, constrained and fascinated, petrifying him in his role as go-between, subjecting him to a strange violation which redoubles their pleasure’.49 Leo’s role is complicated, in terms of both his own loyalties and the transgressive class implications of the affair, by the arrival of Marian’s good-natured fiancé, Hugh Winlove, the Ninth Viscount Trimingham (Edward Fox). A badly scarred veteran of the Boer War, Hugh is the actual owner of Brandham Hall; Marian’s family are merely leasing the house. Unfortunately, the Winloves’ financial woes mean that Hugh cannot afford to run his own estate. In contrast, the book’s allusions to Mr Maudsley’s various ‘financial operations’ in the City suggest that he is a wealthy member of the haute bourgeoisie, more privileged than Leo but lacking Hugh’s landed estates and pure-bred aristocratic lineage. Hugh’s prospective marriage to Marian is thus beneficial to both families. While Hugh will obtain sufficient financial reserves to reclaim his rightful family seat, the Maudsleys will acquire, through Marian’s offspring, a titled stake in the future Trimingham lineage. No wonder Mrs Maudsley is so protective of her daughter’s ‘innocence’. The only problem seems to be the wilful Marian herself – she is marrying Hugh not because she loves him, but because she has to. By treating Leo familiarly as ‘one of the boys’, the affable Hugh immediately wins the young man’s devotion. In fact, by giving him the simple task of returning Marian’s prayer book after church, it is Trimingham who gives Leo his first job as go-between. Caught in the middle of a sexual and class triangle between Marian and her dialectically opposed lovers, Leo is suddenly torn by increasingly divided

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loyalties. Blinded by the god-like radiance of his class betters on the one hand, he is equally intrigued by the earthy sexuality of the working-class Ted on the other. Furthermore, Leo’s allegiance to the farmer is reinforced by a contractual bond. After Marcus’s rapid recovery from measles threatens Leo’s ability to carry further illicit messages, Ted strikes a deal: he will teach the inexperienced messenger the facts of life if he will go on being their postman. As it turns out, Ted never does explain the secrets of ‘spooning’ (as he cryptically puts it). This emotional blackmail catches Leo in a classic Losey double bind: between loyalty to Hugh on the one hand, and the affective stirrings of the libido on the other; between the duty of class deference and the necessity of carnal knowledge. As one might expect in a Losey film, the only escape lies in the destructive release of hitherto repressed violence, a violence that will ultimately make time stand still. In typical Pinter fashion, Leo’s dilemma is expressed through the allegorical displacement of organized sports, in this case the annual cricket match between Brandham Hall and the local village. Appropriately, the rival captains are Marian’s two class-crossed lovers, Hugh and Ted, with Leo pencilled in as the Hall’s ‘twelfth man’. As if to symbolize Brandham’s usurpation by the vulgar moneyed classes, it isn’t Hugh but the opportunistic Mr Maudsley who anchors the home innings, patiently accumulating runs the same way that he presumably accumulates capital, by laying off the awkward ball and taking the easy single from the hittable ones. Ted, in contrast, is all animal aggression, an ill-disciplined slogger whose towering hits for six send Marian and Mrs Maudsley scurrying for cover. Leo is inextricably torn, wanting the Hall to win, but at the same time rooting for Ted to put up a good fight. Ironically, it is Leo himself who decides the outcome of the match. After replacing an injured fielder, he puts an end to Ted’s irresistible knock by catching one of his lofted sweeps over mid-wicket just short of the boundary, much to the delight of the victorious Hugh. ‘It was a damn good catch’, says Ted generously. ‘I never thought I’d be caught out by our postman.’ As the narrating older Leo well knows, the innocent ‘postman’ will catch him out in far more tragic circumstances before the summer is over. The post-game tea in the village hall marks the high point of Leo’s acceptance at Brandham. Hailed by a gushingly poetic Mr Maudsley as the David who slew the Goliath of Black Farm, Leo basks in the spotlight and joins in the celebration. Alas, Leo’s momentary integration into the world of the upper classes is based not on real social acceptance but on rootless imposture, fashioned by the combination of a lucky catch and his opportunistic manipulation at the hands of Marian’s and Ted’s

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impulsive desire. Indeed, the rosy flush of success has hardly left his cheeks before Leo’s patrician fantasy starts to unravel. Learning from Marcus that Marian’s engagement to Hugh is to be announced at the upcoming ball, Leo mistakenly believes that this will put an end to Marian’s illicit affair once and for all, and more specifically his own increasingly uncomfortable role as go-between. Instead, Marian overrides his anguished loyalty to Hugh and bullies him into continuing as her postman. Losey underlines Leo’s shrinking will-to-power and envelopment by impulsive forces by shooting this reluctant Mercury in extreme long shot, dwarfed by the fecund originary world of the surrounding deer park as he runs teary-eyed toward Black Farm. Fearing that the affair will end in jealous violence, perhaps a fatal duel between Hugh and Ted, Leo turns in desperation to the belladonna and his trademark skills in black magic, hoping that the enchanting properties of one beautiful lady can counteract the deadly spell of the other. That the resultant incantation fails to end the affair shouldn’t surprise us because throughout the film Leo has shown a fatal lack of ability to read the outward signs of Brandham’s impulsive forces and to respond with an appropriate form of behavioural conduct. Like many members of the ruling class, the Maudsleys use social and leisure pursuits as a sublimating code both to protect themselves from outside intrusion and to mitigate their own internal dissolution. Thus churchgoing, morning prayers, planning the day’s activities, cricket and bathing all have their strict codes of etiquette designed to smooth the outward tissue of what would otherwise be a frayed and fissured libidinal organism. For example, it simply isn’t done, as Leo would like to do, to wear a school cap at a private cricket match. Similarly, gentlemen cricketers bat with a combination of flair and finesse – not, like Ted, in such a crudely aggressive way as to endanger the ladies. Most importantly, when Leo cryptically imparts his fears of a duel between Hugh and Ted by laying the moral blame on the cheating woman, Hugh quickly responds, ‘Nothing is ever a lady’s fault.’ By resorting to the received formulas of patriarchal gallantry Hugh is less the cuckolded dupe than a shrewd player who knows the rules and the score. Unlike his brother James in The Servant, Edward Fox knows full well what primordial degradations lurk behind a dignified surface. Unfortunately, the inexperienced Leo is alarmingly literal. He constantly misinterprets the Maudsleys’ slippery nuances and idioms that help to occlude libidinal heat and passion. Instead, he falls back on strictly rational, numerically based codes. When Hugh takes to calling him Mercury, the messenger of the gods, with its connotation of a fluid,

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reversible movement between libidinal forces, Leo sees the objective correlative in more fixed terms, both as ‘the smallest of the planets’ and also as the mercury in the thermometer, soaring to ever new heights. Instead of drawing a somatic connection between the summer’s rising temperatures and the increasing libidinal heat behind Marian’s or Mrs Maudsley’s behaviour, he obsesses on the weather’s quantitative measurement. Seemingly immune in his new, lightweight suit, he even casts a spell in hopes of forcing the mercury to record levels. The hotter it gets the more excited he becomes, because he is mistakenly using the heat wave as an index of his own hierarchical rise to acceptance in this elite class. Similarly, when Ted informs him that his woman (i.e. his cleaning lady) doesn’t come on Sundays, Leo, ever the encyclopedia of quantitative data, files this information away and reuses it later when chatting with Mr Maudsley and Hugh in the smoking room. Referring to Ted’s rumoured mistress, Mr Maudsley comments: ‘They say he’s got a woman up this way.’ Leo jumps in: ‘I know. But she doesn’t come on Sundays.’ Leo is thus temperamentally and semiotically unprepared when events reach their fateful climax on his (unlucky) thirteenth birthday. The day starts badly when eagle-eyed Mrs Maudsley catches Marian slipping her reluctant messenger yet another letter for Ted. Marian covers her blunder by claiming that the note is for Nanny Robson, the Maudsleys’ ailing former retainer whom she plans to visit that afternoon. Primed with insider knowledge by her trusted informer Marcus, Mrs Maudsley knows otherwise and traps Leo in a compromising lie: while he purports to have taken several of Marian’s notes to Nanny Robson, it’s obvious that he doesn’t know the way to her house: ‘If you don’t take them to Nanny Robson, to whom do you take them?’ Later that afternoon, as the summer heat finally breaks into a torrential downpour, Leo celebrates his birthday to the ominous, Wagnerian accompaniment of thunder and lightning, highly appropriate given Mrs Maudsley’s Valkyrie-like presence. The whole family is gathered, with the notable exception of Marian. By planning her illicit tryst with Ted to coincide with Leo’s party, she has foolishly drawn more attention to her absence. Mrs Maudsley can tolerate the suspense no longer: ‘I’m going to look for her. Leo, you know where she is, you shall show me the way.’ As she gets up from her seat, Losey cuts to a brief close-up of the hem of Mrs Maudsley’s red dress. This is associated metonymically with Marian’s dress in the hammock, as well as a later shot – framed and cut identically – of the hem of her skirt as she vanishes into a thicket for a quick liaison with Ted. Marian is visually linked with her mother via the same common denominator: Ted

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Burgess. This suggests that Mrs Maudsley’s mission to disclose Marian’s assignation is not born simply of her concern for the forthcoming marriage to Hugh, but has other, more jealously guarded motives. Does she know where the assignations take place because she has first-hand knowledge of the outhouses herself? Significantly, as his wife sweeps Leo from the room, an alarmed Mr Maudsley stands up and shouts after her: ‘Madeleine!!’ This is the only time she is ever called by name. Its Proustian connotations are obvious, suggesting that Mrs Maudsley is contiguous with Proust’s catalyst of involuntary memory, which not only annihilates structured time but, given young Leo’s almost obsessive predilection for precise, numerical signs, lies at the very heart of Leo’s life-long trauma. Mrs Maudsley is thereby exposed as the film’s libidinal and temporal ‘time bomb’. She drags the reluctant Leo to the derelict outhouses and the belladonna, the sign of Leo’s illusory power and his sexual defeat. Inside, they discover Marian and Ted in flagrante delicto, to the mother’s stifled cry of dismay and Leo’s dumbstruck confusion. Significantly, having turned Leo into an unwilling informer, then sadistically dragged him against his will to witness this traumatizing reenactment of the primal scene, Mrs Maudsley takes great pains to shield his eyes from it. This ambivalent gest can be read in two contradictory ways: (1) as an instinctive, motherly reparation for her earlier vindictiveness, designed to protect an innocent child from beholding an ungodly scene; and (2), following Oedipus’s own self-blinding, as the infliction of a symbolic act of castration by a ferocious primal mother for Leo’s betrayal of her family, her hospitality, and as Neil Sinyard convincingly argues, her own desire for Ted: ‘The explicitly sexual revelation suggests a sexual motive, which the film deftly supplies. Mrs Maudsley’s strategy is not only a punishment of Leo; his presence is a humiliation for Burgess and Marian. The scene is so powerful because it represents a hideous and perverted acting out of Leo’s own suppressed desire for Marian and Mrs Maudsley’s for Burgess.’50 The libidinal heart of the film – Ted’s and Marian’s affair, which we have hitherto only seen in disconnected fragments – is thus no longer an absence, no longer yet another immanent reality concealed behind the veil of the Maudsleys’ distracting innuendo. Mrs Maudsley is thus the impulsive current that smashes the surface of dissimulating language, who actively breaks the unwritten family code and its ‘form’ by forcing Leo to confront the primal reality of sex. Perhaps if Ted had explained ‘spooning’ or told Leo the truth of his love for Marian, the boy might have been spared the worst. Instead, this horrifying confrontation with adult sexuality and betrayal, followed by Ted’s subsequent

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suicide, fixes in Leo a picture of love and sexuality as dangerous and forbidden, a case where unbridled passion leads to punishment and death. This premature life lesson turns out to be the defining event of Leo’s existence, destroying him emotionally and condemning him to a 51 maturity devoid of both physical sex and love. Fifty years later, the film returns full circle to Leo’s opening narration as he revisits the village, drawn by curiosity, nostalgia and a desire for some form of emotional exorcism. Alas, the irrevocable pain of Leo’s life history is visible for all to see in Redgrave’s ravaged features. The haunted, lifeless face of this withdrawn celibate is a shocking counterpoint to the fresh, ardent, life-affirming boy he used to be. Although Marian too is old and wrinkled, her face a shadowy death mask, she has lost none of her self-centred calculation.52 We learn that her marriage took place as planned: ‘Hugh was as true as steel. He wouldn’t hear a word against me … Everyone wanted to know us, of course. I was Lady Trimingham, you see. I still am. There is no other.’ She is also oblivious to her betrayal of Leo, deluding herself that far from being emotionally devastating, his role as go-between was instead a great privilege: ‘We made you happy, didn’t we? We trusted you with our great treasure. You might have gone through life without knowing. Isn’t that so?’ Then, to add insult to injury, she adds the kicker: ‘You ought to have married. You’re all dried up inside, I can tell that. Don’t you feel any need of love?’ As one might expect, Marian has another, more future-oriented motive in painting the past in such a rosy light. Earlier that same day, Leo met her grandson Edward, the Eleventh Viscount Trimingham, who happens to be a dead ringer for Ted Burgess. In the novel, Old Leo carefully traces the Winlove lineage from the tablets in the local church transept and discovers that young Edward’s father, Hugh Maudsley Winlove (the Tenth Viscount) was born 12 February 1901, suggesting that he was almost certainly Ted’s son. Moreover, if we count back nine months to the approximate date of conception (12 May 1900), we discover that Marian was already pregnant not only well before her marriage to Hugh, but also prior to Leo’s arrival at Brandham Hall (9 July), proving that he played a marginal role in a genealogical upheaval long in the making. It also suggests that marriage to Hugh helped Marian hide the scandal of Ted’s baby before indexical time could point to another source for its paternity. Unfortunately, Ted’s bastard lineage – Edward has no Trimingham blood whatsoever – seems to be extremely disconcerting to Marian’s grandson. He bears a grudge against Marian, implying that he holds her responsible for his working-class bloodline. This is particularly serious

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because he would like to marry a girl (a Winlove cousin, which would return the degenerated Maudsley lineage back to the blue-blooded Trimingham line) but refuses to propose to her. ‘I think he feels he’s under some sort of spell or curse you see’, explains Marian to the silent Leo: ‘Now this is where you come in. You know the facts … Tell him everything, just as it was. Tell him he can feel proud to be descended from our union, a child of so much happiness and beauty. You loved taking our messages, bringing us together and making us happy. Well this is another errand of love, and the last time I shall ever ask you to be our postman.’ At this point Hartley’s book and Losey’s film part company, which radically changes our reading of Leo’s motives and the true import of his harrowing apprenticeship. The closing lines of the novel suggest that he does deliver the message: I hadn’t promised to and I wasn’t a child, to be ordered about. My car was standing by the public call-box; nothing easier than to ring up Ted’s grandson and make my excuses … But I didn’t, and hardly had I turned in at the lodge gates, wondering how I should say what I had come to say, when the south-west prospect of the Hall, long hidden from my 53 memory, sprang into view.

Is this return to Brandham Hall an overriding of Leo’s involuntary flashback by his self-determined present and future action, thereby completing a circuit in which time and memory are regained through a reassertion of his will? Or is it a sad and pathetic return to Leo’s old cycle of forever playing the faithful messenger? Hartley argues that in old age Leo has finally mastered the moral and aesthetic distance required to respond critically to Marian’s self-centred facade, a case where art and reality finally coalesce. His adult role as go-between demonstrates a capacity for affirmation and transcendence, finally rid of his boyhood class hubris and childish fascination for witchcraft, thereby supplanting the archaic hypocrisies of the Victorian era with a more modern sense of affirmative identity. In contrast, it is clear from the film that Leo doesn’t deliver the message, for his chauffeured limousine drives right past the entrance road leading up to the Hall. His apprenticeship – too late as it turns out – has taught him not to fall into the old trap of playing the servile postman. Losey expresses this decision in visual terms, framing Leo in the back seat of the car through the side rear window. At first we see Brandham Hall as a sharply defined reflection in the glass, superimposed over Leo’s grey, out-of-focus face as he looks blankly out at the estate. The focus then changes, so that it is now Leo who is sharply

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etched and Brandham Hall that is blurred, as the car drives away. This switch in focus suggests that Leo has finally relegated the MaudsleyTriminghams to the dim recesses of time-past where they belong and has moved on with a clearer sense of what remains of his active immediate self. In a sense then, Leo is reborn as an old man and gradually grows (spiritually) younger. Although it has taken Leo his entire life to put things into perspective, ‘the old man finally refuses to allow himself to be used, and perhaps because of the parallel time sequence, this creates an impression of relief, as if it were the boy 54 refusing. And indeed it is the boy refusing, but 55 or 60 years on’. In the book, this parallel time frame is structured using a present-day prologue and epilogue as temporal bookends for a long central flashback. Leo’s recollection of Brandham Hall is triggered by the discovery of his boyhood diary which, like Proust’s madeleine, transports him back in time: ‘My secret – the explanation of me – lay there’,55 says Leo. Pinter appropriated this structure for his early drafts but gradually discovered that he was missing the story’s main point: ‘I had concentrated on a straight dramatization of the central story about the young boy and the lovers. Now what I find most exciting about the subject is the role of time: the annihilation of time by the man’s return 56 to the scene of his childhood experience.’ Pinter came to be ‘conscious of a kind of ever-present quality in life … I certainly feel more and more 57 that the past is not past, that it never was past. It’s present.’ By destroying linear, causal time and replacing it with a kaleidoscopic, crystalline duration, Pinter ensures that past, present and future exist as a single, indivisible reality, what Marsha Kinder and Beverle Houston call ‘a loop feedback system in which causality depends on where a person enters the circle of events and interactions’.58 A simple flashback structure is inadequate to express this more complex weave of memory, so Pinter and Losey resort to a more innovative strategy that owes a considerable debt to Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961). The film begins in time-present (c. 1953) as the opening credits unfold over a rain-streaked window, which we later discover is Old Leo’s blurred view of Brandham Hall from his chauffeured limousine. We then cut to a long shot of the Hall in the bright summer sunshine, marking the beginning of the flashback. The events of the summer of 1900 then unfold in chronological order, so that Leo’s remembered past becomes the predominant narrative. However, this smooth linearity is disrupted with increasing frequency by brief cut-ins from time-present as the man we gradually realize is Old Leo revisits the village haunts of his youth. Because we are fully immersed in the late Victorian past at this point, these 1950s sequences seem more like flash-forwards than

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the return to the pre-existing present of the opening credits. What starts out as an autonomous and subsidiary modern-day narrative becomes so interwoven with the main story that by the time Marian and Ted are discovered in the outhouses the present-day action has become the dominant narrative as Old Leo visits Marian in time-regained. What began as clearly demarcated fractures in historical time now form a double articulation, in which both the present and past narrations weave into each other. The film opens as a grammatical presentperfect – 1900 remembered from the omniscient perspective of 1953 – but is then transformed into a future anterior – 1953 re-evaluated from the dominant perspective of 1900, representing Leo’s life allegorically in terms of ‘what will have been’. Old Leo now becomes a furtive shadow rising to meet his twelve-year-old self at the twilight of his life, instead of the self-reflecting and controlling narrator of Hartley’s book who rejuvenates himself by exorcising his childhood traumas. Instead of the present attempting to erase the past by bringing memory into alignment with contemporary actions and needs, it ‘seems to rush forward and throw itself into the arms of the past’.60 Present action thus commits a form of impulsive suicide, using time itself as its loaded gun. This ‘suicide’ is enabled by the fact that the present-day sequences do not unfold in chronological order but are themselves temporally dislocated, as if Leo’s recollection of the traumatic events of his past had thrown all time out of joint. Leo’s adult world is not just dried up, it lacks all form of connectedness, infected with the contagion of memoire involuntaire much like Marcel’s narrative in Proust. The present thus turns out to be as much of a foreign country for Leo as the past of his opening remark. What many commentators on the film miss is that the bulk of the scenes featuring Old Leo are themselves flashbacks. The actual present-tense linchpin of Leo’s double recall takes place during his drive from Marian’s cottage to Brandham Hall, where he ponders whether or not to deliver Marian’s final message to Edward. Losey reinforces this reading through an anomalous flash-forward from Leo’s final meeting with Marian to a close-up on a pensive Leo looking straight ahead as the car approaches Brandham, just as Marian’s voice-over says, ‘You see, you can tell him, Leo. You can tell him everything.’ The fractured memories of the immediate past all feed into this single narrative instant as the vital decision is made, for Losey then flashes back to Old Leo sitting sternly by Marian’s window, underlining the temporal omniscience of the previous shot. That this is a painful decision for Leo is clear, because it not only leads to his voluntary recall of the summer of 1900 but also feeds back into the earlier events of that same day in 1953 and radically disrupts

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their chronology. The train of events that leads to his ultimate decision not to deliver the message is thus worked out through the intricate weave of two different trajectories of time-past separated by over fifty years. The true reason for Leo’s negative decision thus lies somewhere in the yawning interstice of this giant ellipse, the fifty years of literal ‘lost time’ in which the once vibrant Leo degenerated into the mere shadow of a man. The clue to his motives however can be found in the anomalous chronology of the discontinuous fragments of the recent past, as well as their exact placement within the main flashback. Using the chronological time frame of Hartley’s novel as a guide, we can reconstruct Old Leo’s filmic itinerary as follows, taking note of the number of prolepses (flash-forwards) devoted to each stop, and their non-chronological sequence within the central flashback. After arriving at Norwich Station (one scene, placed second in the proleptic sequence), Leo gets into his chauffeured limousine and drives to the village churchyard (three scenes, prolepses #1, #3 and #5) where he stares at the gravestones of the people who populate his memories. He moves on to the cricket field (one scene, prolepsis #7), the site of his greatest glory, and then meets with Edward Trimingham in front of Marian’s cottage (four scenes, prolepses #4, #8, #10 and #11). After arranging his appointment through Edward, he then waits to be received by Marian (three scenes, prolepses #12, #9 and #6). The actual meeting with Marian is divided into two scenes (prolepses #13 and #14), the second of which is interrupted by the additional prolepsis featuring Leo’s drive towards Brandham when he makes his decision not to deliver the message. Leo’s final view of the Hall is split evenly between the film’s opening and closing credits. The visit to the churchyard is a key moment, because it envelops specific details of Leo’s past memories of Brandham Hall with the spectre of death, creating an ex post facto haunting of his own boyhood innocence. The first shot of Old Leo’s car pulling up alongside the churchyard is embedded with the bathing party scene where young Leo loans Marian his swimsuit in order to protect her dress from her wet hair. This is the moment of his first intimate physical contact with Marian and the occasion of Marian’s first white ‘lie’, where she disclaims her intimate ‘knowledge’ of Ted. This chain of associations suggests that Old Leo is already tracing his future woes to Marian’s sexual deception. This is reinforced by our second view of the churchyard, featuring a close shot on Leo’s legs getting out of the car. This is spliced between a hidden camera shot of Marian’s skirt flitting through the undergrowth on her way to the secret assignation with Ted and a close-up of Mr Maudsley’s thermometer, creating an elliptical conti-

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guity of illicit sex, death and the index of Leo’s rising hubris/libido. Finally, the film’s very first prolepsis shows Old Leo in his raincoat and bowler hat, his back to the viewer, staring through the cemetery gates. Losey places this shot immediately after Marian’s and Leo’s arrival in Norwich, as Young Leo’s voice-over repeats his earlier line to Mr Maudsley: ‘Well, it wasn’t a killing curse, you see. There are curses and curses.’ Marian’s tryst with Ted and her manipulation of Leo in Norwich is thus associated with black magic and the belladonna. The victims of the killing curse will turn out to be Leo and Ted, with Marian as its sorceress. It’s clear from these associations that Marian’s past duplicity and her seminal role in Leo’s subsequent sexual pathology is a key motivation for his belated refusal to play go-between. However, Marian is not the chief reason for Leo’s refusal. Just as important as the catalytic role of the churchyard visit is Leo’s meeting with Edward himself. This is broken down into four different scenes, presented chronologically but embedded within past events at deeply significant moments. This shouldn’t surprise us because it is the socalled ‘curse’ on Edward and his reluctance to marry his Winlove cousin that is the main issue at stake in terms of Leo’s refusal to play postman. At first glance, we might expect Leo to be sympathetic toward the grandson and want to lift this mythical curse. Both, in their different ways, are victims of a genealogical ‘crime’ with repercussions across several generations: Edward through his father’s proletarian birth as a result of Marian’s tryst with Ted; Leo via Marian’s emotional betrayal of his youthful trust. Both, for different reasons, are unable to marry; both are probably the last of their family line. Certainly, there is little evidence from the first three prolepses that Leo harbours any grudge against Marian’s and Ted’s progeny. In the first, Old Leo stares at Marian’s cottage from across the village green prior to Edward’s arrival. This is embedded between the Maudsley family entering and leaving church, where Leo meets Hugh Trimingham for the first time. Hugh is thus symbolically associated with Edward’s absence, as if he can play no paternal role in this bastard line. In the second flash-forward, Old Leo watches Marian’s grandson as he approaches across the green. This is embedded in the sequence after the cricket match when Marcus tells Leo of Marian’s engagement to Hugh. Because Old Leo is still unable to conjure a close-up of Edward’s face, revealing his resemblance to Ted, for one brief moment he appears to be clutching at the ideal that Edward is really Hugh’s grandson, as if by affirming Edward’s genealogical purity he can somehow re-embody the ghost of his own. All this is dashed with the third prolepsis, as we zoom past Old Leo into a close-up of the young man. If there were any doubt

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that Edward is Ted’s grandson, the shot is embedded in the sequence where Leo bids his fond farewells to the farmer as Old Marian’s voice is heard on the soundtrack: ‘So you met my grandson?’ ‘Yes I did.’ ‘Does he remind you of anyone?’ ‘Of course. Ted Burgess.’ If the first three prolepses indicate Leo’s sad regret that the ‘accursed’ Edward is the future victim of the sexual ménage between Hugh, Ted and Marian, it is the fourth and final insert that gives the real clue to Leo’s feelings. As Old Leo and Edward shake hands in front of Marian’s cottage, Losey frames them in an extreme long shot, shrinking both men into small specks as if to minimize their importance in the bigger scheme of Leo’s apprenticeship. Instead, we pay closer attention to the soundtrack, which features the time-past voice-overs of the Maudsleys: ‘The rain seems to have stopped, for the moment anyway’, comments Mr Maudsley. To which his wife responds: ‘It seems that all will be well for Leo’s birthday.’ However, Old Leo well knows that all will not be well on his birthday, of all days, largely due to the jealous and sadistic behaviour of Mrs Maudsley herself. By setting up this contiguity across time, Leo makes a direct link between the grandson’s perceived curse, his own sexual impotence, and Mrs Maudsley as the contagious agent of violent impulse. Moreover, it is Mrs Maudsley’s sexual rivalry with Marian and her own class ambitions to marry her daughter into the titled aristocracy that push Marian into an impossible liaison with Ted in the first place. So what does Old Leo do? He refuses to reprise his role as gobetween, in effect refusing to lift the ‘curse’ on Edward. In this way he refuses to abet the Maudsleys’ reconnection with the Trimingham lineage. The real target of this vengeful act, the one person who really cares about bloodlines, can only be Mrs Maudsley. In one fell swoop Leo repays his temporal nemesis – the woman who forestalled his own future inheritance by destroying his sexual potency – by once again derailing her life-long ambition for her family. Leo not only strikes back across the reaches of history, but also corrupts future genealogical time. He has finally learned how to harness the power of annihilating temporality in order to regain his own self-respect. Like Proust (not to mention another of history’s exiles, Losey himself), Leo has literally and figuratively vanquished Madeleine/the madeleine.

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Notes

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1 T. S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’, in Four Quartets (San Diego, New York and London, Harcourt Brace, 1971), p. 13. 2 Hirsch, Joseph Losey, p. 88. 3 Durgnat, A Mirror for England, p. 255. 4 Palmer and Riley, The Films of Joseph Losey, p. 63. 5 Joseph Losey, ‘The Monkey on My Back’, Films & Filming, Vol. 10, No. 1, October 1963, p. 54. 6 Ibid., p. 11. 7 Losey, in Jacques Brunius, ‘Joseph Losey and The Servant’, Film (London), No. 38, p. 29. 8 Robin Maugham, The Servant (New York, Harcourt Brace, 1949), p. 19. 9 Losey, France-Observateur, 16 April 1964, cited in Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 309. 10 Losey, in Brunius, ‘Joseph Losey and The Servant’, p. 28. 11 Actually located across the street from Losey’s own London home. Royal Avenue is also the fictional residence of Ian Fleming’s James Bond. 12 Bogarde, in Jonathan Gili, Misha Donat and Sherwin White, ‘Dirk Bogarde’, Isis, No. 1456, 1 February 1964, p. 30. 13 Bogarde, cited in Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 16. 14 See Ciment, Conversations with Losey, pp. 226–7. 15 Losey, in Brunius, ‘Joseph Losey and The Servant’, p. 29. 16 Leahy, The Cinema of Joseph Losey, p. 132. 17 Losey, in Jonathan Gili, Misha Donat and Sherwin White, ‘Joseph Losey’, Isis, No. 1456, p. 18. 18 Interview with Dirk Bogarde, July 1990, in Brian McFarlane, An Autobiography of British Cinema (London, Methuen, 1997), pp. 71–2. 19 For a detailed discussion of baroque narrative elements in The Servant, see Colin Gardner, ‘Naturalism, Immanence, and the Primordiality of Class: Deleuze’s “Impulse-Image” and the Baroque Intriguer in Joseph Losey’s The Servant’, Iris, No. 23, 1997, pp. 109–28. 20 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1961), p. 137. 21 Joanne Klein, Making Pictures: The Pinter Screenplays (Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 1985), pp. 18–19. 22 Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 137. 23 Losey, in Leahy, The Cinema of Joseph Losey, p. 127. 24 Losey, in Gili, Donat and White, ‘Joseph Losey’, p. 18. 25 Losey, cited in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 105. 26 Edgardo Cozarinsky, ‘Joseph Losey’, in Richard Roud, ed., Cinema, A Critical Dictionary: The Major Film-makers, Volume Two (New York, The Viking Press, 1980), p. 635. 27 Losey, in Milne, Losey on Losey, pp. 18–19. 28 Baker’s character is spelled ‘Charlie’ in the book, ‘Charley’ in Pinter’s screenplay. 29 Palmer and Riley, The Films of Joseph Losey, p. 65. 30 Nicholas Mosley, Accident (Elmwood Park, IL, Dalkey Archive Press, 1985), p. 72. 31 Klein, Making Pictures, p. 52. 32 Ibid., p. 53. 33 Mosley, Accident, p. 60. 34 See Palmer and Riley, The Films of Joseph Losey, pp. 68–71. 35 Jonathan Baumbach, ‘The House That Losey Built’, Partisan Review, Vol. 41, No. 1, 1974, p. 84. 36 Leahy, The Cinema of Joseph Losey, p. 163.

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37 Palmer and Riley, The Films of Joseph Losey, p. 79. 38 Tom Milne, ‘Two Films (1): Accident’, Sight and Sound, Vol. 36, No. 2, Spring 1967, p. 57. 39 Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 271. 40 Hirsch, Joseph Losey, p. 125. 41 Seymour Chatman, Antonioni or, The Surface of the World (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press), pp. 125–6. 42 Baumbach, ‘The House That Losey Built’, p. 85. 43 Mosley, cited in Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 185. 44 Beverle Houston and Marsha Kinder, ‘The Losey–Pinter Collaboration’, Film Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 1, Autumn 1978, p. 28. 45 Losey, in Milne, Losey on Losey, pp. 15–16. 46 For a detailed analysis of recurring Losey themes in The Proust Screenplay, see Colin Gardner, ‘Time without Pity: The Contagion of différance in Harold Pinter and Joseph Losey’s “Proust Screenplay”’, Interdisciplinary Humanities, Vol. 19, Nos 1–2, Special Issue 2002: Dialogues in Film and Literature, pp. 30–41. 47 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘The Go-Between’, Monogram, No. 3, 1972, p. 18. 48 L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1958), p. 192. 49 Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 137. 50 Neil Sinyard, ‘Pinter’s Go-Between’, Critical Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 3, 1980, p. 33. 51 In the novel, Leo then suffers a nervous breakdown, leading to his subsequent disclosure that he ultimately missed out on the pleasures of ‘spooning’: ‘Ted hadn’t told me what it was, but he had shown me, he had paid with his life for showing me, and after that I never felt like it.’ Hartley, The Go-Between, p. 265. 52 Ironically, she’s living in Nanny Robson’s old house, as if she had been punished for her scandalous behaviour by being reduced to the servile status of her own false alibi. 53 Hartley, The Go-Between, p. 281. 54 Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, pp. 304–5. 55 Hartley, The Go-Between, p. 19. 56 In John Russell Taylor, ‘Dateline: Report on The Go-Between’, Sight and Sound, Vol. 39, No. 4, Autumn 1970, p. 203. 57 Pinter, in Mel Gussow, ‘A Conversation (Pause) With Harold Pinter’, New York Times Magazine, 5 December 1971, p. 132. 58 Houston and Kinder, ‘The Losey–Pinter Collaboration’, p. 22. 59 There are fourteen such prolepses embedded in the main flashback, with an additional pair of voice-overs featuring Old Leo’s present-day commentary on the images of past events. 60 Walker, Hollywood, England, p. 437.

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Three allegorical fables: Boom! (1968), Secret Ceremony (1968) and Figures in a Landscape (1970)

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Nothing is more substitutable and yet nothing is less so than the syntagm ‘my death’. (Jacques Derrida)1

Between the Proustian temporal convolutions of Accident and The GoBetween, Losey took a much-needed break from his collaboration with Harold Pinter to direct three films which document his disastrous, albeit brief flirtation with big budgets and even bigger egos, in this case the high-magnitude star power of Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and Robert Shaw. By all accounts Losey’s involvement in Secret Ceremony, Boom! (both 1968) and Figures in a Landscape (1970) was a case of blatant economic necessity: he was having crippling tax problems and simply needed the money. Indeed, all three projects were conceived as commercial ventures from the start. Boom! and Secret Ceremony were developed by John Heyman’s World Film Services (who later financed The Go-Between and A Doll’s House) as part of a larger package of more than a dozen British films financed by Universal Studios between 1967 and 1969 at a total cost of $30 million.2 Although Losey was paid handsomely by his usual standards ($96,000 for Boom!, $225,000 for Secret Ceremony), in the case of the former over 50 per cent of the $3.9 million budget went to the Burtons, who also happened to be Heyman’s clients. Losey’s connection to Figures in a Landscape came through his actor– writer friend Robert Shaw, who was fresh from his Oscar-nominated performance as Henry VIII in Fred Zinnemann’s A Man for All Seasons. Along with co-star Malcolm McDowell (in only his third film), the suddenly bankable actor was stranded in Morocco on a troubled production that was threatened with cancellation unless he could come up with a suitable director. Saddled with a clichéd script by Stanley Mann and James Mitchell adapted from Barry England’s novel – which Shaw reluctantly promised to rewrite himself – and the start of principal photography only four weeks away, the actor begged Losey to bail him out. Eager to work following the box-office disaster of Secret Ceremony,

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Losey eventually signed up with producer John Kohn for a fee of 3 $250,000. Although, with the possible exception of Secret Ceremony, these films can hardly be called personal or ‘signature’ projects, they can be usefully grouped together because of their stylistic and thematic similarities. In each case, Losey supplements his trademark baroque mannerisms with an overt, fable-like narrative structure, all the better to polarize his latent Manichaeism. This isn’t a new development in Losey of course: both The Boy With Green Hair and The Damned are obviously allegorical in intent; Eve is a thinly disguised biblical fable; while the later Mr Klein employs an old-fashioned doppelgänger motif as a means of furthering Losey’s moral dialectic between good (commitment) and evil (indifference). Richard Chase traces this tendency to a specifically American Puritan legacy: ‘The American imagination, like the New England Puritan mind itself seems less interested in redemption than in the melodrama of the eternal struggle of good and evil, less interested in incarnation and reconciliation than in alienation and disorder.’4 As a Wisconsin-born product of this tradition himself, Losey was understandably ambivalent regarding this simplified form of binary thinking. He admitted to Ciment, for example, that he considered an overreliance on the fable form to be ‘a weakness because it’s a way of evading’.5 On the other hand, as he confessed to Gordon Gow, ‘Of the existence of good and evil I have no doubt. To make people aware of it, in an honest way and without any distortion of the facts of our contemporary life, is a very important thing to do.’6 For Losey, the deciding issue was not so much Manichaeism per se as its reductive tendency to propagate an abstract moral absolutism divorced from the messy ideological realities of the real world. Like Brecht, who often resorted to fables in his political theatre because they helped him not only to designate what is narrated but also to draw attention to the ideological structures of the mode of telling, Losey usually appropriated fable and allegory for strictly didactic, historical materialist purposes. By purging these two debased forms of their Christian, self-penalizing guilt he was able to use them instead to give a fresh intellectual validation to the opposition between left-wing commitment and the injustice of the bourgeois social order. The films of this chapter are perched precariously between these Puritan and Marxist extremes. At their best – Secret Ceremony – Losey was able to foreground moral questions in light of their cultural constructs, producing a didactic distance in which basic instincts such as incest can be simultaneously felt and critically examined through both Freudian and Marxian frameworks. At their worst – Boom! – Losey

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tends to confine his protagonists within hermetically sealed environments so that serious ontological issues of life, death and sex are divorced from all social and political (i.e. class) relevance. This has led critics such as Jean-Pierre Coursodon to question whether Losey had any legitimate Brechtian credentials in the first place:

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Losey, no matter what many critics and he himself may say, is no Brechtian director. Distancing to him is not an ethical concept of the artwork’s relationship to its audience but rather, it seems, an almost pathological compulsion to keep the outside world at a distance. Hence the dialectics of Losey’s cinema; as a result of his aloofness, he loses touch with reality, which he then gets busy reconstructing in a vacuum 7 and in terms of his own obsessions and fantasies.

This is not an unreasonable complaint. With the exception of Les Routes du sud and Mr Klein, Losey rarely allowed spontaneous events and topical references from the real world to invade the claustrophobic insularity of his films’ milieux. This has lead to repeated charges of stiffness, lack of humour and emotion, and a tendency toward predesigned artificiality that produces a ‘laboratory chill’ in the construction of the films’ characters. As Losey himself admitted to the editors of Cahiers du Cinéma, ‘It was one of Brecht’s principles, and the only one I am in entire agreement with, that the moment emotion interrupts the audience’s train of thought, the director has failed.’8 On the other hand, as we shall see in the next chapter, Brecht’s and Losey’s predilection for didactic distance is mitigated by a common sympathy for bodily appetite, the Artaud-like notion that real thinking can only explode out of somatic drives. Ciment, for one, denies that Losey’s later films are clinical or cold: ‘Let’s say simply that emotion is held at a distance. Losey’s cinema constitutes a sort of equilibrium between sensibility and 9 reflection.’ The resultant mind–body standoff is less an emotive or intellectual vacuum than Losey’s means of stalling the dialectic in order to explore his naturalist and temporal concerns. ‘Reality’ is thereby reconstructed so that we can tap into the primordial’s effects directly, whether through the characters’ obsessive fantasies and secret rituals, the contractual masochism of the master–slave relationship, or, in the case of Boom!, Secret Ceremony and Figures in a Landscape, the ambivalent presence of death in the very fabric of life itself. Derived from a prize-winning short story by the Argentinian novelist and playwright Marco Denevi, Secret Ceremony is by far the most accomplished and psychologically complex of these commercial projects. Although the book’s absurdist, ‘magic realist’ flights of fancy and profoundly Catholic obsession with guilt and expiation would seem to

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make it unlikely raw material for a dialectical materialist such as Losey, the narrative’s clear moral distinction between good and evil and the main protagonist Leonides Arrufat’s obsessive need for perpetual purgation of sin obviously appealed to the director’s Manichaeism. In addition, recalling his childhood fascination for the grandiose Victorian mansions in La Crosse, Wisconsin – ‘The façades of houses in big cities always intrigued me in terms of mythology, of what went on inside 10 them’ – Losey was also attracted to the story’s claustrophobic setting. In Denevi’s novella, the bizarre, secret rituals that serve as atonement for the characters’ various moral ‘crimes’ take place in a large, decrepit house hidden in the shadows of modern skyscrapers in contemporary Buenos Aires, offering intriguing possibilities for exploring a latent, primordial time hidden in the interstices of the present. As one might expect from a former disciple of Brecht’s Epic Theater, George Tabori’s adaptation of Secret Ceremony eschews Denevi’s rhetorical linguistic exuberance and mythic hyperbole in favour of a far more analytical and objective narrative voice, rooted specifically in Marx (the political economy of surplus value) and Freud (the libidinal economy of desire), but tempered by wry and often mordant humour. Like The Sleeping Tiger, to which it bears a more than passing resemblance, the film is structured around a series of Oedipal displacements, in which the two primal instincts, Eros and Thanatos, are cathected through a complex economy of incestuous desires, obsessive neuroses (particularly guilt), confused identities and fetishistic substitutions. Denevi’s avenging angel Leonides is now Leonora Grabowski (Elizabeth Taylor), a small-time, Anglo-American prostitute living in a modest London bedsit. Leonora is haunted by the tragic loss of her ten-year-old daughter Judith, who was accidentally drowned five years earlier. The mother blames herself for the young girl’s death, for in a scene subsequently cut from the release print Leonora is seen making love to her American husband Bernard behind a windbreaker on the seashore (the primordial world is contiguous with water throughout the film) as Judith succumbs to the ocean’s current. This inextricably links healthy sexual pleasure with the oblivion of death (Eros-become-Thanatos) in Leonora’s unbalanced psyche. As self-punishment for her fatal negligence, Leonora at first attempts suicide, but then, following her break-up with Bernard, gradually sinks into prostitution as a form of moral atonement; as if by selling her body for money she will somehow exorcize the spectre of her earlier sexual ‘indulgence’. Leonora’s self-abnegation, her attempt to somehow appropriate her daughter’s death by ‘killing’ her own will-to-life in symbolic form, pinpoints two contrasting philosophical responses to the

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‘subjectivity’ of death. Leonora subscribes to Emmanuel Levinas’s view that ‘the death of the other is the first death [and] it is for the death of the other that I am responsible, to the point of including myself in death. This may be phrased in a more acceptable proposition: “I am respon11 sible for the other insofar as he is mortal.”’ Leonora will gradually come to realize the impossibility of this position, ultimately learning the painful Heideggeran lesson that, as Derrida argues, ‘it is in dying proper and properly speaking that “mineness” is irreplaceable, that no one can die for the other, in the experience of the hostage or of the sacrifice, in the sense of “in the place of the other”, and that no testimony can testify 12 to the contrary’. The film opens as Leonora, already showing a rare talent for deceptive identity, removes her prostitute’s blonde wig and dons her mourning weeds before taking the bus to the Catholic cemetery – appropriately named after Mary Magdalene, the whore/saint – where Judith is buried. Placing fresh flowers on her daughter’s grave is part of Leonora’s ongoing ritual of atonement, her own secret ceremony which gives some semblance of meaning to a life irretrievably destroyed by guilt. This link between Judith’s death and her own expiation through self-abasement is underlined by a single telling detail: Leonora’s mourning attire includes her prostitute’s fishnet stockings, thereby bringing together Losey’s usual trinity: death/desire/money. On the bus, Leonora is approached by the similarly black-clad Cenci Engelhard (Mia Farrow), a waif-like woman-child with long, jet-black hair and a deathly pale pallor. Although she is actually twenty-two years old, Cenci could easily pass for twelve or thirteen. Taking a seat next to Leonora, the young woman stares at her longingly, as if in a trance. And indeed she is, for Cenci is a hysterical schizophrenic playing a diabolical duplicitous game. In her catatonic state she has regressed back to her early childhood and is convinced that Leonora is her mother Margaret, who recently passed away after a long illness. Denevi’s description of the meeting evokes another familiar Losey triad, that of host/guest/ ghost, for ‘from the moment their eyes met the girl had ceased to be a stranger. She was taking possession of her, invading her. She was transferring to her a responsibility, a burden, a danger. The very coincidence that they were both wearing mourning created a mysterious bond between them which set them off, separate and apart from the others.’13 As Leonora gets up to leave, Cenci sits, open-mouthed, and utters imploringly the same word she will mime, speechless, at her own death: ‘Mummy’. The pair’s mutual necessity is thus readily established through an exchange of affects: while the woman lacks a child, the child/woman

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lacks a mother. This psychic marriage of convenience is consummated first at the church, where a christening is taking place (symbolizing new born life), and then at the cemetery (signifying death). It is at the gravesite that Leonora sees Cenci’s uncanny resemblance to Judith for the first time and suddenly flashes in her mind’s eye to a communion photograph of her daughter. This triggers a brief flashback to Judith’s burial five years earlier, so that, as in The Go-Between, a disturbing genealogical recollection causes a dislocation of non-linear time, which forces the protagonist into the black hole of involuntary memory. Cenci thus becomes, all too conveniently, a surrogate means for Leonora to temporarily regain lost time and retrieve her own role as a loving mother, to symbolically give birth and ‘christen’ a new daughter. After Cenci leads a wobbly Leonora back to the grandiose Engelhard mansion in Kensington (where she lives alone) and installs her in Margaret’s bedroom, the two women’s mutual entrapment and the inevitable ritual games of self-deception are ready to begin. Seduced by the Engelhards’ wealth – not to mention Margaret’s opulent art nouveau bed and fabulous collection of evening gowns – Leonora quickly smooths the rough edges and crude inflections of her prostitute’s brogue and takes to her new role as society widow and surrogate mother with obvious theatrical relish. Leonora may be caught in a complex, psychopathological masquerade but that doesn’t mean she has to eschew the rewards of surplus value. Cenci, it turns out, is the sole heir to the Engelhard fortune, her father Gustaf having died when she was nine. Her mother Margaret remarried, rather too quickly for the comfort of Gustaf’s devoted spinster sisters, Hilda (Pamela Brown) and Hannah (Peggy Ashcroft), who, much like the Tommies in King and Country, act as the film’s comic expository chorus. Cenci’s new stepfather, Albert, is an oversexed Philadelphia professor of cybernetics (played with offhanded relish by a bearded, satyr-like Robert Mitchum). Significantly, Tabori changes the Christian name of Denevi’s waiflike victim from Cecilia to Cenci, thereby grounding the film in the urtext of Shelley’s 1819 tragedy on incest, The Cenci, which was a key source for Antonin Artaud’s 1935 play of the same name. However, whereas Shelley’s Beatrice is the unwilling victim of an incestuous father, and Denevi’s Cecilia is brutally raped by a gang of street thugs (the direct cause of her catatonia), Tabori’s Cenci is a frustrated virgin who uses the prospect of incestuous rape as part of a regressive masturbatory fantasy of sexual relations with her stepfather (who is absent from Denevi’s original story). Indeed, Cenci sees her virginity as a psychological millstone, the sole defining characteristic of her already fragile sense of self-identity: ‘Cenci Engelhard, virgin’, she declares during one

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of her reveries. ‘That’s me. That’s all I am.’ With Gustaf reduced to a fetishistic white marble death mask in the Engelhard library, Cenci has clearly displaced her simultaneous desire for, and desire to become, her dead father (to both possess and become the phallus) onto Albert, who 14 represents a far more viable flesh-and-blood substitute. This is further signified by her deliberate erasure of Gustaf’s head from his wedding photograph in Margaret’s bedroom, setting up a vacant space to be filled by another, whether it be Cenci herself (as a means of denying her sexual difference by marrying her own mother) or Albert, as the desired father substitute. It appears, on one level at least, that Cenci’s hysterical guilt over Margaret’s death has less to do with the usual regret at ‘not doing enough’ during her mother’s last months, than with a repressed desire to have her permanently eliminated so that she can enjoy an uninterrupted Oedipal ‘marriage’ with Albert. To make matters worse, the professor is hardly an unwilling bystander. Long banished from the house by Margaret for molesting Cenci in the kitchen when she was thirteen, he has recently been arrested for seducing a minor in Philadelphia. Like Tony’s similarly complacent hold on his Royal Avenue domicile in The Servant, the snugly enclosed world of Leonora’s rejuvenated maternal paradise is immediately threatened, this time on three fronts. Firstly, Cenci is visited by her two predatory aunts, Hilda and Hannah, who try unsuccessfully to convince her of the reality of her mother’s death. However, like a pair of vultures, they seem to be less interested in Cenci’s psychological and physical well being than in simply robbing her blind. They take every opportunity to appropriate family heirlooms – specifically a music box and child’s doll – either for their own sentimental gratification or for eventual resale in their antique shop. Leonora, it seems, is not the only one with a mercenary interest in the Engelhard fortune. Passing herself off as Margaret’s cousin, Leonora angrily confronts the sisters at their shop. Here, she not only learns of Albert’s earlier attempted ‘rape’ of Cenci but also inadvertently tears the limbs off the purloined doll during a struggle with Hilda, an ominous symbolic allusion to the tragic results of her meddling, referencing both Judith’s earlier fate and Cenci’s future destruction. Secondly, manoeuvred into the role of a curious Peeping Tom, Leonora ‘discovers’ Cenci lying seductively on the kitchen table in a revealing white nightdress, re-enacting her abortive seduction by Albert with obvious relish. Until now, Leonora appeared content to ease into a quasi-lesbian, albeit chaste compatibility with Cenci – another of the prostitute’s stock roles – when Albert appears as the narrative’s main psychological disruption. In this case, Cenci is clearly no victimized innocent and the simulation is most likely a piece of psychological

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theatre for Leonora’s eyes only, as if Cenci were deliberately freeing herself from her homosexual attachment to her ‘mother’ by taking Margaret’s place in her fantasized masquerade of the primal scene. Instead of jealously watching her mother make love to Albert, Cenci now forces Margaret (in the form of Leonora) to stand passively by and watch her usurp her rightful place. As Freud describes the ritual, ‘instead of choosing her mother as a love-object, she identified herself with her – she herself became her mother … “If my mother does it, I may do it too; 15 I’ve just as good a right as she has.”’ Cenci and Leonora are thereby caught in yet another secret ceremony, as competitive rivals for the sexual identity of Margaret. As Cenci teases her imaginary Albert with a combination of seductive come-ons and steadfast refusals to give up her virginity, Losey shoots the scene from Leonora’s subjective point of view as she peers in through the hallway window. We are forced to share the scopophilic role as Leonora/Margaret watches her displaced self (as Cenci-as-Margaret) play out the primal scene, only in this case she has been humiliatingly cast in the regressive, infantile role of a curious child. Then, as the re-enactment becomes more violent and Cenci simulates an orgasmic gasp at Albert’s urging, Losey switches to a third-person, omniscient narration. This objectively undercuts the seductive fantasy of the scene in the audience’s mind, thereby distancing us critically from Cenci and Leonora’s increasingly pathological Oedipal bond. Finally, this alarming simulacrum of incestuous desires becomes all too real with the unexpected arrival at the house of Albert himself, who is initially unaware that his wife is dead. Exuding much of the same violent, perversely sexual urges that made him so frightening as the exconvict who terrorizes Gregory Peck’s family in J. Lee Thompson’s Cape Fear (1962), Mitchum is the epitome of becoming-animal, which, like Glenda’s paranoid desires in The Sleeping Tiger, will ultimately prove too much for the contrived structures of Cenci’s and Leonora’s Freudian rituals and displacements. This is confirmed when Albert once again tries to seduce Cenci in the kitchen, stage managing an accurate replay of her earlier fantasy (sans Leonora), right down to the simulated gasp of orgasm. After kissing Cenci hard on the lips, the scene ends with Albert’s self-incriminating cry of despair: ‘I can’t help myself’, the very words uttered by the child killer Martin Harrow at the end of M. For the ritual ceremonies to reach their logical Oedipal climax, all that remains is for Cenci to offer final proof of the consummation of the ‘rape’ in order to consolidate her psychological usurpation of her mother’s place. While Leonora is at confession, desperately praying that she might hang onto Cenci and make a new life with her adoptive daughter, the young girl acts out another simulation of the kitchen seduction, this

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time in Margaret’s bedroom, the original site of the primal scene. By ransacking the room to give the impression that a struggle has taken place, and by dripping blood from her finger onto the rumpled sheets, Cenci gives the deliberate impression that she has lost her virginity to Albert. Indeed, when Leonora returns home to discover Albert’s calling card – a single white rose – on the kitchen table, she immediately assumes the worst. Rushing upstairs, she discovers the ‘child’ huddled and whimpering like a frightened animal under the sink. ‘Who was he?’ demands the furious surrogate mother. ‘Albert’, replies Cenci. On an obvious level, this contrived piece of theatre serves to lock Leonora into an even tighter jealous bond with her sexual rival, in addition to encouraging an almost pathological desire to protect Cenci from Albert’s annihilating influence. Because of the film’s seeming abhorrence for the physical expression of untrammelled sexual desire (filtered, of course, through Leonora’s Catholic guilt), Michael Dempsey has noted a Jansenist strain in the film’s moral tone, ‘in which man’s flesh and its appetites become loathsome and horrifying because they appear to express a desperation so twisted and hideous that, in trying to save himself from it, man careens into madness and death’.16 In this regard the film has close ties with Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (1966), which also traces a young girl’s neurotic withdrawal from intimate sensual contact and her eventual suicide. On the other hand, from Cenci’s perspective, the regressive tendencies inherent in this backward-looking reconstruction of infantile sexual fantasy – ‘regressive in more than one sense’, argues Freud, ‘in so far as there is involved simultaneously a shrinking-back from life and a 17 harking-back to the past’ – are offset by new, equally powerful progressive drives that are singularly lacking in Bresson. As we subsequently discover, Cenci imagines herself to have become pregnant from this bedroom ‘encounter’ with Albert. Losey sees this as Cenci’s ‘drive toward life’, an affirmative movement that would ultimately pull her away from Albert and the perpetual recycling of an incestuous childhood. Alas, she has no means of realizing this burgeoning élan vital except through charade.18 Freud confirms this reading, arguing that the young girl’s desire for a baby is part of her developing emotional maturity, her acceptance of sexual difference: the little girl’s recognition of the anatomical distinction between the sexes forces her away from masculinity and masculine masturbation on to new lines which lead to the development of femininity … She gives up her wish for a penis and puts in place of it a wish for a child; and with that purpose in view she takes her father as a love-object. Her mother becomes the object of her jealousy. The little girl has turned into a little woman.19

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Alas, Cenci’s drive toward a more progressive sexual identity is forestalled by the increasingly self-interested Leonora, who seems determined to stall the young woman’s re-entry into aborted adulthood by recreating her in the image of her own adolescent daughter, Judith. Alarmed by Albert’s persistent pursuit of his stepdaughter at the Engelhard mansion, Leonora decides to consolidate her own holdings by removing Cenci from Albert’s destructive orbit. The two women repair to the Dutch coast for a seaside holiday where Leonora, dressed to the hilt in Margaret’s dinner gowns, can finally cast off the last residues of her guilty prostitute’s role and publicly play the proud and doting mother. Unfortunately, her strategy is forestalled on two fronts. Firstly, Cenci, her hair cut short as a symbol of her new would-be maturity, suddenly announces that she is ‘expecting’ by stuffing a Muppet-like toy frog under her dress and walking gingerly down to dinner as if she were eight months pregnant. Leonora’s maternal claim to Cenci-as-Judith is thereby immediately undercut by Cenci’s own competitive drive to motherhood. Secondly, having made enquiries as to the identity of this mysterious interloper – he quickly discovers that Margaret’s only known cousin was a man called James – Albert turns up at the hotel to reassert his own claim as Cenci’s lawful guardian. Confronting Leonora on the beach as the ‘pregnant’ Cenci gallops on horseback along the sand in the background, Albert relates his side of the Engelhards’ Oedipal saga. Insisting on the purity of his own intentions, he paints a less-than-innocent picture of a Lolita-like Cenci, experienced beyond her years, taking the sexual initiative and seducing her ‘excruciatingly shy’ stepfather by lifting her skirts at the slightest provocation and giving him long, sensual massages with rubbing oil. Echoing Freud, Albert is fully aware that this is a necessary stage in Cenci’s passage from a regressive motherfixation into healthy genital maturity: ‘The best thing her mother ever did for her was to die’, explains Albert to Leonora. ‘If you don’t let her go she’ll just keep getting smaller and smaller, until finally at about twentyfive or thirty you’ll find her in a coma with a baby bottle.’ Torn between the paranoid disavowal of difference on the one hand, and its celebration through genital sexuality on the other, Cenci is caught, Janus-faced, on the delicate cusp between a psychotic regression to permanent infantilism and her own future as a healthy adult. Once again, Secret Ceremony finds Losey caught in a contradiction between conflicting temporalities, an impasse that will lead inexorably to that ultimate abyss, death itself. By reframing Cenci as her own lost daughter, Leonora is unable to let go of her own Oedipal fixation. She ends up repeating her earlier fatal mistake yet again, only this time

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through overprotectiveness instead of negligence. Because of her suffocating refusal to let Cenci grow up and leave the matriarchal nest, Leonora inadvertently becomes the unwitting agent for her eventual destruction. At this point, Leonora seems to have sensed that Cenci’s fantasy ‘rape’ was in actual fact an attempted seduction of Albert, much like her earlier so-called ‘massages’. Awakened by Cenci’s return to the hotel, she decides to put her theory to the test by innocently asking for a back rub. Delighted, the ‘daughter’ willingly obliges, removes the top of Leonora’s nightgown, and proceeds to kiss her tenderly down the length of her back with a mixture of childhood innocence and knowing eroticism. Her suspicions confirmed, Leonora violently pushes the seductress away: ‘Get off my back, you little bitch!!’ Tom Milne sees this scene as the apotheosis of Losey’s Manichaeism, ‘for Cenci is at one and the same time, indistinguishably, the sweet, innocent child Leonora sees at the beginning, and the sly erotomane she discovers at the end; and Secret Ceremony is constructed on the dualist view of man as a battleground for the twin aspirations of Good and Evil’.20 Milne overstates the case, however, for Losey’s critical distance from his characters suggests a greater degree of ambivalence than the simple reduction of Cenci’s Oedipal odyssey to an allegorical struggle for the moral rights to her sullied soul. Moreover, for all her Catholic guilt, Leonora is hardly equipped to play the role of both surrogate mother and father confessor, and Losey is equally critical of her own role in Cenci’s tragedy. In addition, Taylor has to play Leonora in at least four different registers: both as herself, as the prostitute, as Margaret’s fictitious cousin, and as Cenci’s idealized recreation of Margaret. The complex interaction of these different personae is expressed in the mise-en-scène, where Leonora is invariably caught in multiple mirror reflections, so that the relationship between the numerous virtual and actual images of both Taylor and Farrow becomes confusing to say the least. An obvious question arises: how much is Leonora so submerged in her disguise that she cannot resurface, cannot pull back and make objective moral judgements? Although she may be blinded by guilt over Judith’s death and is therefore overprotective toward Cenci as her surrogate, as played by an earthy, no-nonsense Taylor Leonora is at the same time too much of a materialist (and pragmatist) to indulge Cenci’s maternal fantasy on either religious or psychological grounds. And this is her crucial psychological mistake. As Losey himself puts it, Leonora ‘feels some sort of horrible sadistic necessity to destroy that sham’21 (i.e. the pregnancy) by pulling the stuffed toy out from under Cenci’s dress. In the hysterical struggle that follows, the poor frog is effectively

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disembowelled, and the scene ends with the jarring dissonance and Theramin-like whine of Richard Rodney Bennett’s soundtrack as Cenci screams, ‘My baby! My baby!’ With all her carefully constructed psychological barriers reduced to rubble, there is little recourse for Cenci except to put her Oedipal dream into shocking, irreversible reality. That same evening, as Leonora watches helplessly from her hotel balcony, Albert finally makes love to his stepdaughter on the beach and the terrifying fulfilment of Cenci’s primal fantasy is complete. The combination of the destruction of her ‘pregnancy’ with the consummation of her desire for Albert snaps Cenci out of her psychosis and back into stark reality. Lying in bed, she turns toward Leonora and speaks with blunt, rational candour for the first time: ‘What are you doing in my mother’s clothes?’ Her Oedipal fantasy come true – her real mother’s dead, she’s slept with her ‘father’ – she no longer needs Leonora as a surrogate mother because she has fulfilled the primal objective of her infantile regression. Returning to London, Cenci is now finally able to accept Margaret’s death and symbolically lays flowers on her mother’s tomb. The insistent, intrusive sounds of the outside world – a passing train, the hum of traffic – suggest that the magical spell of her previously insulated existence has been irrevocably broken. With the Engelhard mansion up for sale, Leonora, suddenly stripped of her role as the surrogate Margaret, is now forced into the humiliating position of having to reapply for the job, this time as the sometime prostitute ‘Leonora’. She offers to become Cenci’s housekeeper, simply as a means to be close to her ‘daughter.’ Unfortunately, Cenci’s return to reality has at the same time recast her into her original class role, and she dismisses Leonora’s request with haughty disdain – ‘Are you applying for a position? Do you have references?’ – before ultimately expelling her from the house. Despite her class superiority, Cenci is not immune to the larger cultural ramifications of what has transpired. She has committed the ultimate taboo and must pay the ultimate price. Unbeknownst to Leonora, Cenci has taken an overdose of sleeping pills and is slowly dying during the course of their uncomfortable interview, ironically at the very moment that Leonora recalls her own attempted suicide following Judith’s death. According to Freud – and it is perhaps here that Losey’s Manichaeism re-enters the film’s moral edifice through the back door, as it were – it is a great fear among ‘primitive’ peoples that incest violations will be followed by an immediate punishment of the perpetrator, either by serious illness or death. The violation must be automatically avenged, for ‘what is in question is fear of an infectious example, of the temptation to imitate – that is, of the contagious

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character of the taboo’. The fear of contagion is a common theme in Losey, and it lies at the heart of the impasse between the ritualized secret ceremonies that are so necessary for his characters’ peace of mind and the immanent primordiality that threatens to overwhelm them. Leonora is no exception, and the film reaches its denouement with her attempt to redress the moral balance in yet another disguise: the societal role of Freud’s pious avenging angel. Once again in her mourning black, she visits the church where Cenci’s body lies in its open casket and waits for Albert’s arrival. Walking determinedly out of the shadows, she plunges a knife into his heart and he falls dead beside Cenci’s coffin. The film ends as it began, with Leonora alone, lying on her prostitute’s bed in her gloomy bedsit. As the joyful sounds of children and the jingling music of an icecream van are heard off-screen – a bitter symbol of Leonora’s own childless future – she tugs the pull-cord of the overhead lamp and recites Tabori’s version of a Brechtian parable: ‘There were two mice fell in a pail of milk. One of them yelled for help and drowned. The other kept paddling around and around ’til in the morning he found himself on top of butter.’ Leonora let Cenci ‘drown’ by misinterpreting her inarticulate cry for help (the mouse that drowns), but saves herself by blaming and killing Albert (to make her pat of butter). Although the parable reiterates the film’s two main themes of mutual need and desperate survival (doubled by their translation into the cultural imperatives of totem and taboo), Losey and Tabori seem to find both drives unpalatable. ‘The whole thing is a game’, says Losey: ‘While rituals are supposed to protect you, once you disbelieve in them it’s as though you were naked and totally unprotected.’23 Although Cenci and Leonora’s Oedipal rites seem to be repetitive, they are actually more about becoming-other than a simple reiteration of fixed psychogenetic structures. In this sense, of course, they betray their Dionysian origins. Each character is using the other in order to transform herself, but, as Ciment points out, to be innocent and off-guard like Cenci is to risk destruction, and although self-protective forethought may keep you 24 alive, it also leaves you childless and alone. In this sense, Secret Ceremony continues and expands the similar cases of Marian and Leo in The Go-Between, and Stephen, Charley and the ill-fated William in Accident: ‘The survivors win nothing in either case, just as the competitors in Accident merely found themselves back at the starting line, but the intrusion by which battle was joined has illustrated yet again that 25 interference is an ambiguous blessing.’ This ‘ambiguous blessing’ is taken an important step further in Tennessee Williams’s Boom! (1968), which Losey shot in spectacular Panavision on location with the Burtons off the Sardinian coast.

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Although far inferior to the Denevi-based film in terms of character and plot, Boom! is one of Losey’s more interesting, albeit failed meditations on the subjectivity of death expressed predominantly through the affective resonance of sound and mise-en-scène, something more akin to grand opera than mainstream commercial cinema. This helps explain the film’s onomatopoeic title, which derives from one of Burton’s more poetic (many would say, pretentious) lines in the film – ‘Boom! The shock of each moment of still being alive’ – as he reacts to the sound of the ocean breaking on the rocks below. The film was scripted by Williams himself from his unsuccessful, Kabuki-influenced play, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Any More, which, by the author’s own admission, would ‘come off better the further it is removed from conventional theatre, since it’s been rightly described as an allegory and as a “sophisticated fairy tale”’.26 Admitting that he had neither seen Milk Train’s failed theatrical productions nor read the original play, Losey approached the script with complete lack of bias: I was enormously attracted by two things: one, the words, just the sound of the words, and with the idea of using words poetically in film, which I think is rarely enough undertaken; and also because it ‘stretched’ me. It was a new way of working … essentially a 2-character play and the dialogue essentially variations on the same, it had all the Unities, and it was all words, whereas I prefer normally to work with all images and practically no words.27

Despite this affinity for Williams’s sonorous qualities, the collaboration is an odd one. By any reckoning, the coolly didactic Losey is the last director one would think of to direct a play by the hot-blooded, emotionally cauterizing Williams. On the other hand, Milk Train is Williams at his most aloof. Similarly to Losey’s handling of Cenci and Leonora, he treats the characters with both emotional and aesthetic distance. Like the play, Boom! traces the last two days in the life of Flora ‘Sissy’ Goforth (Elizabeth Taylor), the widow of five industrial tycoons and Alec, her one true love, a young mountain-climbing poet who fell 5,000 feet to his death in a field of snow. Refusing to accept the fact that she is dying of tuberculosis, Sissy has retired for the summer to her mountain villa on a volcanic island off Capo Caccia where she has exclusive droit de domaine. Protected against intruders by the sheer inaccessibility of the island, her proto-fascist dwarf bodyguard, Rudy (Michael Dunn) and his trained pack of dogs, Sissy is spending the season dictating her lurid memoirs through an elaborate intercom system to her widowed secretary, Blackie (Joanna Shimkus). Racked by increasingly persistent stabs of pain and addled by the morphine administered by her resident

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medic, Dr Lullo (Romolo Valli), the ex-Follies strumpet tyrannizes her servants with the same contempt she reserves for the local villagers. Sissy’s island sanctuary is suddenly invaded by the unexpected arrival of another ‘poet’, the ragged, penniless Christopher Flanders (a windswept Richard Burton). A sculptor as well as a writer, Chris has come bearing gifts: a ten-year-old copy of his one and only book of poetry, which he uses as a calling card, and an Alexander Calder-like mobile with the pseudo-metaphysical title, The Earth is a Wheel in the Great Big Gambling Casino. Narrowly escaping a fatal savaging at the hands of Rudy’s dogs, Chris is taken in by a sympathetic Blackie, who loans him one of Alec’s old Samurai robes while he holes up in the Goforth annexe until Sissy is ready to receive him. Suspicious of Chris’s intentions, Sissy herself dresses up in an elaborate Kabuki costume and invites her friend Bill Ridgeway, a.k.a. The Witch of Capri (Noël Coward), for dinner in order to get the lowdown on this mysterious interloper. She’s alarmed to discover that this sometime gigolo is nicknamed ‘The Angel of Death’ because, as The Witch puts it, he ‘has the unfortunate reputation of calling on a lady just a step or two ahead of the undertaker’, and then relieving her of her assets. Riffling through Chris’s address book, Sissy finds nothing but the names of dead women. ‘What are you?’ she demands, ‘some kind of graveyard sexton?’ ‘I am a man who has lost many friends’, replies the unflappable Chris. Torn between her growing fear of his continuing presence – she assumes that Chris must have heard rumours of her impending demise, a horrifying confirmation that she is fatally ill – and her desire to take on this seductive poet as her lover (he bears an uncanny resemblance to the late, lamented Alec), Sissy eventually succumbs to this ‘Trojan Horse guest’ and invites him into her bed. Burton’s justly famous vocal delivery pays dividends here, giving the necessary sonorous tonality to the poetry in Williams’s writing: he literally conquers Sissy with his voice. Chris declines Sissy’s offer, however, reproaching her for her lack of generosity – he’s starving for want of a decent meal – and her inability to see beyond the surface glitz of her decadent lifestyle. Sissy, he states, is unable to recognize the hand of God when it’s offered: ‘That tough as you are, you’re not so tough that one day perhaps soon, you’re going to need someone, or some thing that’ll mean God to you, if it’s only a human hand or a human voice.’ Moreover, time is moving on and Chris has to leave: he has a pressing ‘appointment’ on another island with an elderly spinster whose mother died the previous night. As Losey’s camera dollies peripatetically around her deathbed in a 360° movement (thereby accentuating the ritual qualities of the scene),

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Sissy sinks into her final sleep. As she does so, bathed in a rich, golden chiaroscuro, the so-called ‘Angel of Death’ removes her prized possession from her finger – a huge diamond known as The Aurora – and relates the story of how he stumbled across his vocation. Some years earlier he had travelled to Baja California where a great Indian teacher had gathered disciples, and passed a rest home for the incurably ill. A little further along the coast was an ocean inlet. One day, as he lay floating on his back in the water, he heard an old man on the shore crying for his assistance: ‘Help me to get out there. I’ve gone past pain I can bear.’ Chris obliged, taking the man’s hand and leading him out into the ocean. The dying man gave Chris all his money and the tide carried him out to his watery grave. Chris returned to his Hindu teacher and told his story: ‘“Master, I have just helped a dying old man to get through it.” And what he said to me was, “You have found your vocation.” And I gave him all the money the old man had given to me.’ ‘I’ll bet you did’, responds Sissy faintly, as she fades silently into oblivion. After closing Goforth’s eyes – she has finally ‘gone forth’ – Chris walks out onto the terrace, drops ‘The Aurora’ into a glass of wine and, as if pouring a libation to the dead, throws it over the balustrade where it smashes on the rocks below. Losey then cuts back to the dark chiaroscuro of Sissy’s deathbed, before dissolving to the waves breaking on the rocks below, so that for a few moments Sissy’s corpse is superimposed on the foaming water. The film ends with Chris’s resonant baritone as he states, for one final time: ‘Boom!’ On one basic level, Boom! represents a more stylized version of Williams’s usual overwrought sexual conflicts, as if Blanche Du Bois and Stanley Kowalski had suddenly become mythic Olympian characters in a remote Mediterranean setting. Hirsch rightly argues that Sissy and Chris are not flesh-and-blood ‘real’ people but allegorical caricatures of archetypal sexual forces: ‘Chris is one of a long line of Williams’s sexual heroes who save and becalm a desperate female. For Williams, as for many of his characters, the sexual promise of the beautiful male contains a kind of holiness; most of Williams’s ravenous women lust after sexy men to fulfil them as well as, in a curious and usually unexamined way, to absolve them.’28 Herein lie the roots of the film’s fable-like Puritan sensibility, for as in the case of Cenci and Leonora in Secret Ceremony, otherwise healthy sexual fulfilment is directly linked with taboo, punishment and ultimately death. On another level, the film reiterates several familiar Losey themes, not least that of yet another house invaded. However, unlike the case of Tony and Barrett in The Servant, here it is the proverbial ‘woman who has everything’ (with the major exception of her health) who turns out

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to be the sexual predator. It is the man who arrives empty-handed – but 29 for a book of poems and a mobile – who alone has something to offer. This mystical poet, analogous to both Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, thus takes on the simultaneous role of both guest and geist: he ‘saves’ his growing inventory of sexually frustrated widows ‘by refusing to give them his body, by making them aware – through the beauty of his physical presence – that there is a world beyond, one higher than that of 30 the flesh’. Williams’s original play heightens this dialectic between the fleshly desires of the earthly body and the transcendental purity of the heavenly spirit by contrasting Sissy’s down-to-earth, drug-addled vulgarity with Chris’s more saintly beauty. Losey was singularly unimpressed by this obvious Dionysian/Christian binary: I thought that the old woman who was about to die was terribly uninteresting, and I thought that the young man who was beautiful and homosexual, godlike and unreal, was terribly uninteresting, so I more or less turned that upside down. I also thought that the kind of place he described (Victorian Baroque) was terribly uninteresting, and what I tried to do was abstract all that while making the reality of … Elizabeth Taylor in real life playing herself in opera.31

Williams however considered Burton too old for the role of Chris, while Taylor (then 36) was far too young to play the decaying Goforth. In addition, the hard-drinking Burton was too physically dissipated to look cosmically ethereal, while his wife was too plump and well fed to be knocking at death’s door. On the other hand, Taylor has the right amount of good-natured vulgarity, earthy wit and shrill sarcasm to anchor the film with a degree of human realism, playing up the nouveau riche elements of Sissy’s working-class background. Burton, as one might expect, transforms the vaguely homosexual ‘prissiness’ of Milk Train’s Flanders into a more materialist manifestation of the immanent (as opposed to transcendental) quality of Freudian Thanatos. As Losey later acknowledged, ‘We were both aware, Williams and I, that Burton was changing the conception of his role; Burton’s angel of death is less courtly and more cynical than in the original play, and all for the better, I think.’32 This immanence of the life and death drives within the seemingly ‘safe’ interior fabric of the claustrophobic domicile is expressed largely through an elaborate mise-en-scène and heightened sound. Much like The Damned, with its opening shots of Portland Bill, Boom! begins with the powerful sounds and images of a timeless originary world – blinding sunlight, violent sea, howling wind and an almost prehistoric volcanic landscape – as Losey fades in to a high angle down on the ocean waves smashing and booming at the foot of the island cliffs. The film’s

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first image is thus the same as its last, producing Losey’s habitual circular return to an evocative image of both birth (the frothing, spermlike spume of the ocean) and death (the sheer destructiveness of primordial natural forces). Chris’s evocative cry of ‘Boom’ is thus a recognition of the ocean’s eternal power and almost cosmic indifference, a sublime immanence beyond the powers of concept and analytical language. This opening shot continues with a slow zoom out and simultaneous track backwards as we move indoors through a slit window into the cool, restful shade of the Goforth villa. The aperture gradually narrows the overall pictorial frame so that when the backward track into the room is complete, the sea and sky have been reduced to a narrow shaft of light surrounded by the shadow of the interior wall. Losey therefore slips inexorably from exterior to interior, sunlit movement to shadowy stillness (the Goforth domicile), from life to being-toward-death, in one continuously flowing movement. Losey saw this movement as itself a form of intrusion, marking the villa as a vulnerable fortress ripe for invasion, an artificial haven that signified ‘the selfishness of wealth, the protection of property, the attempted escape from old age. I wanted that lashing sea, that climate, that terrace, those floating curtains, suggested by Williams in his text, the sense of rooms and of space, and at the same time the sense of absolute isolation and enclosure and the private domain, the sovereignty.’33 This sovereignty will be usurped when, like Botticelli’s Venus, the intruding and intriguing Chris literally emerges out of the sea onto Goforth Island, just as Sissy will later return to it, thereby completing the ontological and political life cycles as a series of dissolutions. Losey reiterates this dialectic later in the film, after Chris has successfully wormed his way into Sissy’s good graces. As the wind billows the curtains into the main living room, Chris quotes the famous opening lines from Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’: ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran/ Through caverns measureless to man/Down to a sunless sea.’ Then, reinforcing Coleridge’s own dialectic between the excess of material wealth and the savage abyss that threatens to engulf it, Chris adds, ‘Death is one moment – and life so many of them.’ At this point, Losey’s camera goes on a walkabout of the mansion, tracking in and out of several empty rooms (echoing the ebb and flow of the sea), as Chris’s off-screen voice explains to Leonora: ‘You’re suffering from the worst of all afflictions. And I don’t mean one of the body. I mean the thing people feel when they go from room to room for no reason, then go back from room to room for no reason.’ On one level, the film/camera is

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suffering from the same affliction, as if objectively simulating Sissy’s subjective, disorienting malaise for the benefit of the cinema audience. On another, Losey sees the camera movements as being in harmony with the movement of the exterior waves and the wind – the feeling of nature – thereby literally bringing the undulating movement of natural 34 forces into the very substance of Sissy’s domicile. If the houses in The Servant and The Go-Between represent Losey at his most baroque, then the Goforth villa is positively rococo in its use of pastiche, what Penelope Houston has jokingly described, ‘From Easter 35 Island to Kabuki by way of Fortnum’s’. Constructed from the ground up by Richard Macdonald, it resembles an eclectic, postmodern reworking of Le Corbusier’s Notre Dame du Haut chapel at Ronchamp, particularly in his predilection for amoeboid curved walls, biomorphic forms and white stucco surfaces with slitted and oddly shaped apertures. The villa’s paintings and interior design are dominated by allegorical images suggesting the perpetual presence of death, creating a necrophiliac atmosphere that pervades the entire film. A Renaissancestyle painting featuring a chess set echoes the metaphorical game between death and the knight in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1956); while a large floor mosaic in Goforth’s living room is ‘another mythological image of death: a central sunburst around which there are four black figures, half-men, half-beast, carrying swords in both hands as another sword is thrust down their throats. Enclosed by glaring whiteness and surrounded by inanimate objects heralding death, Flora is thus rendered in visual terms as a doomed figure, a sitting duck.’36 In contrast, the annexe where Chris sleeps is predominantly pink, dominated by a Chagall-like painting of a flying angel – a visual echo of Chris’s self-appointed role as the angel of death. Caute has rightly argued that Macdonald’s ‘passion for bravura display was increasingly responsible for Losey’s reputation as a director of style-without-substance’,37 which may explain both critical and public resistance to Losey’s more stylistically baroque films of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the director’s subsequent return to critical favour with Alexandre Trauner’s altogether more sober work in the Frenchproduced films following The Romantic Englishwoman (1975). On the other hand, as we saw in relation to The Servant, Losey rarely uses stylistic excess without a specifically didactic intent and this is certainly true here. This Brechtian use of décor as gest is reinforced by Losey’s deliberately expressive use of sound, which combines Burton’s ripe vocal mannerisms and the natural roar of the ocean below with the raucous, artificial soundtrack that blasts intermittently over Sissy’s intercom system. In his production notes, Losey commented:

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The system of push-button Hi-Fi throughout the villas and terraces makes possible music wherever desired … Music should be Wagnerian and horrifying. It should merge with the sizzling sound associated with the image of the sun and the diamond. Sound effect of the sun should be musical and probably mechanically distorted … an intense, hissing, almost supersonic sound, which recurs with variations throughout the film.38

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This association of Wagnerian excess with the blinding qualities of the unforgiving sun is complemented by Losey’s extremely mannered framing and composition, which serves to isolate the characters in highly charged, enveloping primordial spaces. Making full use of the widescreen format, Losey habitually wedges Sissy between sexually evocative emblems of death, whether the pagan symbolism of the Goforth crest – a golden griffin rampant, licking the sun – the miniature Easter Island totems that grace the cliff top behind the main terrace; or, most significantly, two recurring motifs that dominate her lobby. The first is a large, semi-abstract bronze sculpture (constructed by Macdonald in the style of Lynda Benglis’s ‘knot’ sculptures) which, as Losey admits, ‘we thought of as a kind of mantle of death’.39 The second motif is the hallway grandfather clock, a well-worn allegorical device that we have already seen in the closing shot of The Servant. In this case, however, the clock hasn’t stopped, but rather acts as an objective correlative of the dying Sissy’s need to control the annihilating effects of primordial time through its deliberate segmentation. We gain a key insight into Sissy’s concern with the immeasurability of true duration in a remarkable after-dinner scene on the terrace, where she treats Bill, The Witch of Capri, to a Proustian treatise on the fugitive nature of memory. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that life is all memory except for each present moment that goes so quickly you can hardly catch it?’ She then proceeds to demonstrate by walking a few steps: ‘I walk. When I was there is a memory. I take another step. Where I was before I took the other step is a memory, Bill. Now watch, watch. I walk to the end of the terrace. I come back. When I was at the end of the terrace is a memory now … It’s a memory. All husbands, all lovers, are a memory now.’ ‘You seem very wrought up, dear’, says The Witch, failing to see the full ontological ramifications of Sissy’s dilemma. Sissy has fallen into the mistake of reading memory as the irrecoverable past, not as a joyful élan vital or Proustian-time regained-asart. She is unable to make Proust’s aesthetic leap into affirmation and difference, and thus cannot affirm death and the past as inexorable parts of life, which is, of course, what The Angel of Death is there to teach her. This helps explain her need to tame and reduce the fugitive qualities of memory-as-past to the more manipulable status of language and text

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(i.e. as a form of grammar): thus the importance of dictating her memoirs, which reassert the powers of spatio-temporal organization. Chris’s arrival puts this power to the ultimate test, for as a revenant of an earlier attractive poet in Sissy’s life, he represents a temporal return to Alec. This animation of love and death into a cyclical temporality threatens to overwhelm Sissy’s ability to restrict memory to a controllable phenomenon of/as the past. Instead, the coincidence of time past as a ‘moribund’ voluntary memory (Alec) intersects with Chris as an involuntarily trigger who pushes time past and present into a future being-toward-death. Significantly, Chris is also a poet, with its Nietzschean overtones of art as a form of annihilating but also affirming multiplicity – a common Losey theme, as we have seen. We see the full implications of this ineffable temporality in the one memory that escapes Sissy’s ability to textualize it: the death of her first husband, Harlon Goforth, ‘King of Munitions’. Significantly, the impotent Harlon’s death occurred while he was vainly trying to make love to Sissy – an overlap of frustrated Eros and Thanatos every bit as powerful as Cenci’s self-destructive, fantasized engagement with the primal scene in Secret Ceremony. As she sprawls on her bed, dictating her recollection of Harlon’s death, her memories, like Cenci’s re-enactment of the kitchen seduction, become inseparable from her fantasized simulation of the act itself. Caught in a trance in which past, present and future are inseparably interwoven, Sissy learns the full meaning of death and the untameable nature of Proustian memory. As Harlon vainly tries to make love, he’s suddenly stricken with a terrible pain in his head. Sissy relives the tragic moment as Chris, Blackie and the servants listen in on the intercom: ‘He has death in his eyes, but he has something worse in them – terror! He has terror in his eyes. I see it. I feel it myself.’ She starts to simulate Harlon’s actions, merging his past terror with her own fear of impending death. ‘I get out of the bed as if escaping from quicksand. I don’t look at him any more. I move, I move away from the bed … death! Terror!’ After encountering her own shadow of death on the wall, she sleepwalks onto the terrace, stares down into the primordial abyss below and, suddenly at one with Harlon, cries out in a desperate embrace of death: ‘Oh wind, cool wind, clean release, relief, escape … death behind me now … body of Goforth. Go forth Goforth, – die!!’ Finally, as the wind and waves well up below her, she collapses into Blackie’s arms. In this brief fantasy, Sissy witnesses the problem of death as an impossible passage (of passing over from life into death, of witnessing and therefore of appropriating ‘my death’); death as a fixed limit or line (the deceased’s inability to delineate the exact moment where living

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becomes dying); and, through her becoming-Harlon, the state of mutual possession (i.e. a haunting), where life and death prove to be immanent in each other. Chris’s role, as The Angel of Death, will be to teach Sissy the true meaning of this impasse, of death as a form of active silence far beyond her ability to put it into words, whether as past memory or memoir. She will learn, as Williams so eloquently puts it, ‘how not to be frightened of not knowing what isn’t meant to be known, acceptance of not knowing anything but the moment of still existing, until we stop 40 existing – and acceptance of that moment, too’. Losey plays a political variation on this theme in Figures in a Landscape. Far removed from Losey’s familiar milieu of Oedipal ‘family romances’ and the timeless claustrophobia of the invaded domicile, Barry England’s allegorical war story is a right-wing companion piece to the anti-war moralism of both King and Country and The Damned. In this case, the stifling stasis of the mud-soaked dugouts and billets is transformed into the infinitely more mobile warfare of the Vietnam era, with its ever-present choppers hovering and swooping like giant birds of prey across the wide-open spaces of untamed natural landscapes. This atavistic destructive movement is the fruit of the so-called ‘contained’ technological war concocted by scientists like The Damned’s Bernard and rationalized by the moral indifference of the backroom boys in Whitehall. As Robert Shaw puts it at one point in the film: ‘Anybody could have a war now. I mean, you just get a bit of equipment and you start, don’t you.’ Although Losey detested the book’s implied apologia for neo-colonialist policies and gratuitous violence – the pursued men (obviously English) are chased by an unnamed army referred to as ‘goons’ (as opposed to ‘gooks’), implying that they are North Vietnamese regulars – he felt that by resetting the story in 1970 within an ideologically and geographically neutral context (the film was actually shot in Spain) it could be turned into a fable or allegory about the brutalization and ultimate redemption of the human spirit. Shot in Panavision by Henri Alekan (reunited with Losey eighteen years after their collaboration on Stranger on the Prowl) with the aid of some brilliant aerial photography by Guy Tabary, the film opens with a ravishing wide-screen shot of a watery pink and orange sunrise, whose pastel beauty belies the fearful horrors that both nature and technology have in store. Menace lurks just below the surface, however, for this picture-postcard view is quickly undercut by the sinister, vaguely electronic timbre of Richard Rodney Bennett’s agitated, Ligeti-like strings. Suddenly, we see two silhouettes running along a beach, their hands tied behind their backs. MacConnachie (Robert Shaw), a grizzled, middleaged professional soldier, and Ansell (Malcolm McDowell), a raw young

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recruit, are on the run from military captivity. As the strings increase in both dissonance and tempo, we discover that the two fugitives are pursued by a helicopter, which buzzes them at zero feet, forcing them to scurry for cover. The helicopter pilot (Henry Woolf) seems less interested in killing or apprehending the escapees than playing a cruel catand-mouse game. This tactic of in-your-face taunting followed by immediate retreat infuriates the crude, instinctual MacConnachie (Shaw is playing the traditional Stanley Baker role here), who vows to bring this ‘great black bat’ to heel. Realizing that their chances of survival are slim unless they can free their hands, MacConnachie overrides Ansell’s squeamish protests and brutally kills a goatherd in the futile hope that he has a knife. Disgusted at Ansell’s refusal to help – ‘Wouldn’t have been so messy if you’d helped me. Hate a messy killing’ – Mac takes out his inhuman rage on the helicopter, risking decapitation as he literally goes head-to-head with the unrelenting war machine. That night, under cover of darkness, the two men creep silently into a village and steal a razor, a rifle and some canned food from a house of mourning. With his hands now free, MacConnachie plans to ditch Ansell, split up the provisions and go it alone. Ansell, however, with great foresight, has purloined the can opener, Mac’s only means of access to the food. MacConnachie reluctantly agrees to take the young pup with him into the mountains until they can cross a friendly border, on the strict understanding that he gives all the orders. Next day, when the helicopter picks up their movements once again, Ansell devises a plan to shoot it down. He will distract the pilot by running into open terrain, so that MacConnachie can take aim at the petrol tank behind the rotors. Unfortunately, the veteran shifts his sights at the last second and aims instead at the cabin, bringing down the observer (Christopher Malcolm), plus the added bonus of his machine gun. Now it’s Ansell’s turn to be furious: MacConnachie deliberately passed up the chance to destroy their nemesis. Caught up in the perverse competition of macho combat, he preferred to surprise the pilot with his newfound firepower and let him live to fight another day – so that they could continue the ‘sport’ on more equal terms. MacConnachie placates Ansell by explaining that to have shot out the petrol tank would probably have blown up his comrade as well. With the pilot now forced to keep his distance, the pursuing ground troops push on, eventually cutting off the two men in a cane field. Pinned down by machine-gun fire, Ansell and MacConnachie can only lie helplessly as the helicopter pilot sets the field ablaze with incendiary bombs. Fortunately, they make a lucky escape when the local villagers try to save their crop by flooding the field. Now utterly obsessed with his

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personal vendetta against the pilot, MacConnachie leads Ansell by nightfall toward the helicopter’s base of operations. The veteran’s plan is to take out the chopper pilot and at the same time force Ansell into making his first kill. The younger man is thereby forced to capitulate to Mac’s insatiable appetite. Unfortunately, after Ansell cuts a guard’s throat, going ‘blood simple’ in the process, the pair set off a series of alarms and are forced to fight their way out without disabling the chopper. That evening, they trudge wearily into the mountains through a heavy rainstorm and spend a bedraggled night under the lee of a cliff. Weak and demoralized, a horrified Ansell is suddenly appalled at both their physical and moral degeneration: ‘Christ Jesus, what have we done to ourselves? We’re dead. We should never have tried it.’ As he buries his head in Mac’s shoulder, the older man hugs him, trying to comfort him in much the same way that Private Sparrow gave bodily succour to the doomed Hamp in King and Country. But it does little good: ‘We’re worse than animals’, sobs an agonized Ansell. In contrast, the drunken MacConnachie cheers himself up with a combination of hard liquor purloined from the village and tearful reminiscences of his loyal wife and their long wartime courtship. Next morning the storm lifts and the two men stagger through the rocky terrain into the higher altitudes of the snowfields, finally reaching the frontier. However, as Ansell crosses the border marker toward the apparent safety of the approaching frontier guards, MacConnachie once again hears the droning buzz of the helicopter and walks back one final time to confront it. Dropping down on one knee he fires maniacally up at the chopper as it flies in for the kill and is mown down in a torrid burst of machine-gun fire. As the camera soars skyward, gazing down on Mac’s dead body in the snow, Ansell trudges on alone toward the command post. Figures in a Landscape eschews the edge-of-one’s-seat suspense and progressive action of the conventional war film and substitutes instead a more analytical, fable-like structure organized around a series of dialectical juxtapositions: freedom v. slavery, man v. landscape, reason v. instinct, and becoming-animal v. becoming-machine. Despite being filmed on location – both the ‘figures’ and the ‘landscape’ of the title are all too ‘real’ in their tactile immediacy – the story and characterizations are left deliberately vague and abstruse in order to enforce a more didactic and allegorical reading. We know little about either the film’s narrative context or its time frame. Who are MacConnachie and Ansell? Why were they imprisoned and by whom? Are they fleeing from fascists or communists, or are they simply mercenary soldiers taking their lumps for money? Similarly, we never see the human face of the

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helicopter pilot. Like the giant diesel truck that terrorizes Dennis Weaver in Steven Spielberg’s Duel (1971), moral evil remains completely abstract, in effect a faceless machine. As Victoria Radin rightly argues, ‘This is the ambiguous logic of a dream, a death-in-life state where the mood of panic, threat and fear is more significant than the 41 events which might have created it.’ This is the logical extension of the ingrained violence of Bernard’s military installation in The Damned: the choppers that hover above Freya’s balcony and pursue the contaminated Simon and Joanie out to sea have now become a more generalized evil, fused into the single image of the helicopter in which the military panopticon is combined with an annihilating ubiquity of movement. This allows the enemy to see all and to strike at will before disappearing into the ‘ether’, as if the mechanical overkill of American firepower in Vietnam had been fused with the hit-and-run guerrilla tactics of the Viet Cong. In this sense, disruptive action is used less as a means to test the protagonists, to force them into overcoming their doubts and foibles, than as an ongoing harassment for its own sake. Violence is thereby universalized as an immanent part of the fabric of nature itself, surfacing as a sudden, almost inevitable punctuation mark that acts as a catalyst for more ontological and moral concerns. The result is Losey’s most abstract film, his most direct expression of impulse, in which mitigating detail is deliberately stripped down to produce a universal statement about the ubiquity of oppression. Losey achieves this abstraction through a clever reductive move, in which the primordial natural world and the specific contextual milieu become synonymous: the ever-changing landscape is now both subject and catalyst for Losey’s expressive mise-en-scène. However, we should make a clear distinction here between the characteristics of natural phenomena – the landscape as terrain, the unpredictability of natural elements such as weather, fire and water – which are used both symbolically and allegorically, and Losey’s expressively cinematic manipulation of time and space, which he uses to express the immanence of violence and evil. The landscape and natural forces, for example, are depicted as uniformly indifferent, both a help and a hindrance to both sides. Thus the blinding sun and lack of cover that mark the first day of Ansell and MacConnachie’s ‘freedom’ threaten to expose them to the ever-prying eyes of the helicopter, so that their eventual survival is doubtful at best. However, come nightfall, the two men are able to acquire both food and weapons under the cover of darkness, thereby increasing the odds in their favour. In this way the ability to see or be seen – the film’s visual matrix as a form of hide-and-seek – is ontologically connected to the

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natural temporal cycle of the earth’s orbit. Similarly, the torrential downpour that accompanies their final climb into the mountains, while dampening their spirits and restricting their movements, also temporarily grounds the helicopter, thereby levelling the playing field for both man and machine. Spatially, however, the film is far more equivocal, for Losey’s use of wide screen brings out the contrast between the wide-open spaces of the terrain and the characters’ inescapable entrapment. Through a carefully choreographed mix of jarring cuts, which switch us from high-angle long shots to closer set-ups (or the reverse), from movement to stasis, long takes to rapid montage, subjective to objective focalization, Losey is able to translate the phenomenological effects of the hermetic enclosure of Secret Ceremony and Boom! into a terrifying agoraphobic space. The sense of oppression is everywhere, so that even when we don’t see the stalking helicopter or tracking ground troops, we expect them to appear at any moment. Losey achieves this expectant sensation by eschewing the overt disjuncture of the Pinter films in favour of explicit spatial– temporal continuity. Often, the fleeing characters are only glimpsed inside a small fragment of the frame – between a narrow shaft of rocks, or caught in a gully – as if it were difficult to contain them within the yawning expanse of the landscape as a whole, and impossible for them to command and create space by asserting the phenomenological intentionality of their bodies. Through a simple zoom or pan, Ansell and MacConnachie can thus switch from a commanding position in foregrounded space to become ineffectual, insect-like specks, overwhelmed by indifferent natural forces. Similarly, Losey invariably shows victim and oppressor in the same frame, thereby creating a spatial complicity between them, much like the dopplegänger effect of a man and his advancing shadow. Thus a scene might start off with MacConnachie and Ansell in the foreground of the shot, framed against a stunning backdrop. Suddenly, we leave them behind as the camera pans left or right to pick up the inexorably advancing army in the distance, as if to underline the immanent palpability of danger within even the most benign of landscapes. Or, as a variation, Losey shoots the two men huddled in the bottom foreground, with the helicopter’s off-screen sound buzzing overhead, linking victim and oppressor through an inexorable aural continuity. Their vulnerability is further reinforced by a dramatic series of subjective helicopter sequences, where we are placed just behind the pilot and observer, looking down through the perspex on the helpless victims as if we were complicit accessories in this most brutal of blood sports. While Losey’s spectacular mise-en-scène is the film’s obvious strength,

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most of the critical animosity against the film was reserved for Shaw’s hurriedly constructed script, which crudely polarizes Ansell and MacConnachie into complementary halves of an average contemporary Everyman, who ultimately unite to form an uneasy alliance. Shaw’s MacConnachie is instinctual ‘natural man’, a pragmatic, hard-headed realist who responds only to the needs of the moment. He knows how to measure and exploit the vagaries of nature, to see it as both enemy and potential ally. He is also a completely perceptive being: ‘He trusted his eyes, as he trusted every part of his physical mechanism, not to let him 42 down. They were the adjuncts of his instinct; he had no need to think.’ Indeed, he thinks so little of his head that after the helicopter pilot taunts him, he flies off into a fantasy about being decapitated so that he could kick his own head at the chopper: ‘could have scored a goal with it’, in fact. On the other hand, he is also simple-minded, brutish and sentimental, prone to impulsive acts of great inanity – as when he shoots the helicopter observer instead of the gas tank, risking the entire mission for a momentary act of bravado. Ansell, in contrast, comes from a privileged urban background and a smart grammar-school education – a variation on Tony’s ‘third generation Harrods’ in The Servant43 – and is clearly out of his depth in the brutalized realm of hand-to-hand combat. As Barry England describes Ansell in the novel, ‘Try as he might, he could not feel that he yearned for freedom as MacConnachie did, with his entire body. To him it was 44 an idea, however desirable; to MacConnachie, a palpable animal need.’ Ansell is infinitely more rational than his comrade, capable of both forethought and constructing longer-range plans: ‘to think ahead, that 45 was the trick. Not to feel, to think.’ Thus he remembers to bring his can opener after leaving the village, prefers to lie low instead of challenging the helicopter like that idiot MacConnachie, but can also choose the right opportunity to show himself, as in his plan to distract the pilot while Mac shoots out the petrol tank. This mind–body split between the two men is both reinforced and at the same time subverted on class lines. Again, we have the familiar Losey inversion of the master–servant relationship, in which the proletarian military ‘lifer’ takes the role of the master, giving orders to the more genteel, middle-class recruit. In addition, Losey also uses class difference to comment on a common reversal of ideological expectations. Judging from his sentimental reminiscences of courting his wife, MacConnachie clearly married above his station in life, and is thereby all the more protective of inherited family values. He is quaintly Victorian in moral outlook, and although he tolerates Ansell’s paeans to birth control, he is outraged by the young stud’s idle boasts of seducing

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sexually liberated girls at Fortnum and Mason’s: ‘I’m not having you 46 mess about with any of my daughters’, threatens Mac, only half-joking. As in Boom! (and the far more politically astute The Assassination of Trotsky (1972)) this dialectic is stalled by Losey’s predilection for contrasting the impulsive needs of somatic drives with the more ‘civilizing’ role of textuality. Like Sissy, who conquers her horror of death by translating it into the controlled language of the dictated text, Ansell and MacConnachie sublimate their own fears by a resort to idle chatter and storytelling. Mac’s reminiscences of his wife are thus more than attempts to wile away the time: they are important mechanisms for harnessing the comforts of the knowable past to help confront an unforgiving and fatally compromised future. Similarly, although Ansell’s sex fantasies outrage MacConnachie, at the same time this verbal debate over sexual mores acts as a distracting veneer that helps both men to overcome the extreme conditions of war, where both are forced to acknowledge far more impulsive instincts than simply their raging libidos. In this sense, MacConnachie’s gratuitous killing of the goatherd is the film’s crucial scene. Significantly, as he kills the innocent shepherd (who is presented as a real enemy in Barry England’s book, and therefore more morally expendable), Losey keeps the gruesome action off screen. Instead, the camera makes a 180° half-circle around a shocked and appalled Ansell, ‘expressing a world of shifting moral boundaries in which he too will learn to kill’.47 Our only indication that the killing is taking place is the heightened, agitated sound of the goats’ jingling bells and the scuffling of Mac’s kicking feet. In contrast, with the second killing, as Ansell cuts the sentry’s throat, Losey cuts to a rare mediumto-close shot in order to make the gory details and Ansell’s horror more explicit. This is the active reality of murder that Ansell has been forced to learn as part of everyday survival. While one killing is non-visual but aural, the other is silent but highly graphic. Ansell has thus metaphorically ‘opened his eyes’ but ‘closed his ears’ to the call of his own moral conscience. England confirms this shifting position in the book: ‘To think too much, Ansell decided, is to undo yourself. You scheme, you worry, you try to take everything into account, and you become inhibited. You fail to act. Action is the key to survival. Emulate MacConnachie.’48 This dramatic turn into becoming-animal is what fuses the two men in an unseverable bond, but which also haunts the morally ‘softer’ Ansell during his emotional breakdown in the mountains, where he equates irresponsible killing with a form of moral death. It is also what defines the two men’s very different actions at the frontier and their varying ontological response to the question of borders in general. In

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the book, Ansell and MacConnachie’s odyssey ends in the mountains where, hopelessly trapped by the encroaching forces, the two men cement their newfound mutual respect by forging a suicide pact. MacConnachie shoots Ansell through the mouth in a shocking act of compassion similar to Hargreaves’s coup de grace at the end of King and Country, before going out in a blaze of glory. In the film, the conventional reading is that MacConnachie, blindly reminiscing about past freedom and winning his wife’s heart just as the Second World War was coming to an end, ‘fails to see the future freedom offered by the frontier post and turns back in an irrational attempt to master the enemy, while Ansell goes on to freedom’.49 This would be yet another example of Losey’s predilection for Janus-faced endings: ‘One has his life before him, the other one has his life behind him.’50 This is also, of course, a convenient reinforcement of prevailing binary oppositions, typical of Manichaean fable structures, in which reason triumphs over instinct, a sense of moral (as well as physical) boundaries prevails over a Nietzschean lack of clear distinction between good and evil. On the other hand, this reading only holds good if Ansell is indeed walking to freedom. However, a close viewing of the film’s logistics gives every indication that he isn’t, and moreover that MacConnachie knows he isn’t. As they approach the frontier, for example, Ansell points out the guard post: Ansell: ‘Do you see it?’ MacConnachie: ‘Yes.’ Ansell: ‘I never believed it.’ MacConnachie: ‘Whose is it?’ Ansell: ‘What do you mean?’ MacConnachie: ‘Don’t know whose it is. Never did know.’ Ansell: ‘Well it’s not theirs. Come on.’

Ansell has a touching faith in the powers of negative difference, marked by strict demarcation lines. If it’s not this, it must be that. If it’s not here, it must be there. Mac knows better, that the border between life and death, between freedom and slavery, is a constantly shifting line that can only be represented as a ghostly mirage. Ansell leads the way forward to ‘freedom’, but the ominous dissonance of the music is telling another story. Intuitive, instinctive MacConnachie knows with his gut, with his body, not with his rational mind. That’s why he’s still reminiscing about the last war, still looking to the remembered past, full of life and love, not to the ‘dead’ immediate future that lies across the border. If there were any lingering doubt, Losey cuts to a closer shot of the border guards: with their snow goggles and berets they look disturbingly

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like the helicopter pilot and observer, who were also masked like giant insects. Final proof is provided by the film’s closing shot. After MacConnachie is killed, Losey cuts to a point-of-view shot looking down from the helicopter, whose shadow passes over Mac’s lifeless body. We then soar up and away from the snowfield, looking down on the frontier post. However, instead of flying back whence he came, his mission accomplished, the helicopter pilot flies instead across the invisible border and into the neighbouring country’s airspace – without challenge. If the two nations were unfriendly, or at least observing international protocol, he would at least have received a warning shot to steer clear. Instead, because the border is effectively dissolved, it’s obvious that the two countries are allies and that Ansell has been captured by the enemy. This forces us to radically revise our reading of both MacConnachie’s death and the film’s response to borders as such. Viewed with hindsight, Mac’s futile one-on-one with the helicopter is less a stubborn act of macho than the only honourable way to go out – to die fighting albeit in futile action rather than capitulate to certain imprisonment like Ansell. The latter’s position is of course perfectly understandable: he has many years ahead of him and, although he may understand Mac’s action, he wants no part of it because he wants to live. Losey confirms this reading in both words and deeds: I wanted to say in the film, that it’s no use trying to run away because in the present condition of the world there is no place to run to. If you run away from one kind of oppression you simply find yourself in the hands of another kind of oppression. So you have to stay and fight, one way or another. In this sense it’s a fable, an allegory … I also wanted to show that very ordinary people can both come together in a situation of survival 51 and at the same time become beasts.

That Losey is with MacConnachie and not with Ansell in this ‘life and death’ decision is also clear in his choice of images: as MacConnachie dies Losey cuts to the first extreme close-up of the film – itself a significant accent – so that Shaw is depicted slightly out of focus as he keels over in delirious slow motion, spitting blood. The effect is dreamlike, almost surreal, as if death had come as a welcome sexual orgasm, erotically transcending the banal immediacy of fixed time and place. The comparison to Johnnie Bannion’s frightful death at the end of The Criminal is both telling and obvious. Both men die violent deaths in the snow. Both are left in a vast wasteland as the camera soars skyward, only this time Losey has the resources to pull off the technical feat that he had originally wanted in the Stanley Baker film: to zoom back sufficiently far away from the ground so that the fleshly body is reduced to a tiny speck engulfed by an infinite whiteness. Many commentators have

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noted that this shot is as enclosed and claustrophobic as any image in Losey’s interior sequences. This is partly correct, for Mac’s intuition that what lies beyond the artificial demarcation of the border is merely ‘more of the same’ suggests that ‘evil is always there. There is no triumph, just 52 a progress toward a tenuous freedom.’ However, there is a clear distinction to be made here. Even without Johnny Bannion’s desperate prayers and lapsed Catholic faith, MacConnachie dies in a complete state of grace because he has recognized the antinomy at the heart of life’s relationship to death. As Mike Wallington points out, ‘the movement towards awareness and integration is the fabric of the film; and the establishment of truth, which is at the same time the moment of 53 dissolution, is the end of the film’. In dying, MacConnachie discovers that freedom can only exist in the struggle itself, so that the truth of his ‘passage’ is the dissolution of borders as such. In this way, he affirms the stuff of life in the very act of death, just as Ansell’s capitulative ‘freedom’ turns out to be nothing more than a death-in-life. In this sense, MacConnachie dies ‘properly’ in an existential sense, for as Derrida affirms, ‘This “properly dying” belongs to the proper and authentic being-able of Dasein, that is, to that to which one must testify and attest.’54

Notes 1 Derrida, Aporias, p. 22. 2 See Walker, Hollywood, England, p. 345. 3 See Caute, Joseph Losey, pp. 233–4. For Shaw’s account, see Ann Guerin and Henry Grossman, ‘Running Figure in a Landscape’, Show, Vol. 1, No. 1, January 1970, p. 90. 4 Richard Chase, The American Novel and its Tradition (Garden City, NY, Doubleday Anchor, 1957), p. 11. 5 Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 205. 6 Losey, in Gow, ‘Weapons’, p. 37. 7 Jean-Pierre Coursodon, with Pierre Sauvage, ‘Joseph Losey’, in American Directors: Volume II (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1983), p. 205. 8 Losey, cited in Michel Fabre and Pierre Rissient, ‘Entretien avec Joseph Losey’, Cahiers du Cinéma, Vol. 19, No. 111, September 1960, p. 5. 9 Ciment, in an interview in Télémoustique, February 1980, cited in Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 467. 10 Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 285. 11 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘La Mort et le temps’, cited in Derrida, Aporias, p. 39. 12 Derrida, ibid., p. 38. 13 Marco Denevi, Secret Ceremony, trans. Harriet de Onis, in Prize Stories from Latin America (Garden City, NY, Doubleday, 1963), p. 6. 14 Freud calls this desire to appropriate the father’s penis a ‘masculinity complex’. As part of her denial of genital difference, the girl ‘consoles herself with the expectation that later on, when she grows older, she will acquire just as big an appendage as the boy’s’. Freud, ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’, trans. Joan

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Riviere, in On Sexuality, p. 320. 15 Freud, ‘A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Disease’, trans. E. Glover, in On Psychopathology, p. 155. 16 Michael Dempsey, ‘The Secrets of Secret Ceremony’, Film Heritage, Vol. 5, No. 4, Summer 1970, pp. 4–5. 17 Freud, ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (The ‘Wolf Man’)’, trans. Alix and James Strachey, in Case Histories II, p. 287. 18 See Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 293. 19 Freud, ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes’, trans. James Strachey, in On Sexuality, p. 340. 20 Tom Milne, ‘Secret Ceremony’, Monthly Film Bulletin, Vol. 36, No. 426, July 1969, p. 143. 21 Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 293. 22 Freud, ‘Totem and Taboo’, trans. James Strachey, in The Origins of Religion, The Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 13 (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985), pp. 128–9. 23 Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 289. 24 Ciment, ibid. 25 Philip Strick, ‘Mice in the Milk’, Sight and Sound, Vol. 38, No. 2, Spring 1969, p. 78. 26 Tennessee Williams, ‘The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore’, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Volume 5 (New York, New Directions, 1976), p. 3. 27 Losey, in Eason and Rayns, ‘A Cinema Interview: Joseph Losey’, p. 20. 28 Hirsch, Joseph Losey, p. 159. 29 See Jan Dawson, ‘Boom!’, Monthly Film Bulletin, Vol. 36, No. 421, February 1969, p. 24. 30 Hirsch, Joseph Losey, p. 160. 31 Losey, in Eason and Rayns, ‘A Cinema Interview: Joseph Losey’, p. 21. 32 Cited in Andrew Sarris, ‘A Movie That Might Have Been Merely Ridiculous … And the Man Who Made It’, New York Times, 17 November 1968, p. D23. 33 Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 279. 34 Ibid., p. 280. 35 Penelope Houston, ‘Plantagenets Please’, Spectator, Vol. 222, No. 7333, 10 January 1969, p. 51. 36 Hirsch, Joseph Losey, p. 163. 37 Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 325. 38 Cited in ibid., p. 220. 39 Losey, in Eason and Rayns, ‘A Cinema Interview: Joseph Losey’, p. 21. 40 Williams, ‘The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore’, pp. 115–16. 41 Victoria Radin, ‘Figures in a Landscape’, Monthly Film Bulletin, Vol. 38, No. 445, February 1971, p. 23. 42 Barry England, Figures in a Landscape (London, Jonathan Cape, 1968), p. 14. 43 Radin, ‘Figures in a Landscape’, p. 23. 44 England, Figures in a Landscape, p. 8. 45 Ibid., p. 72. 46 This is in marked contrast to the book, where Ansell – a child of the 1960s – is an unlikely virgin and MacConnachie’s only sexual contact is with prostitutes. 47 Radin, ‘Figures in a Landscape’, p. 23. 48 England, Figures in a Landscape, p. 77. 49 Radin, ‘Figures in a Landscape’, p. 23. 50 Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 301. 51 Ibid., p. 300. 52 Myron Meisel, ‘Figures in a Landscape’, Focus, No. 6, Spring 1970, p. 48. 53 Mike Wallington, ‘Figures in a Landscape’, Sight and Sound, Vol. 40, No. 1, Winter 1970–71, p. 49. 54 Derrida, Aporias, p. 30.

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Bertolt Brecht and Galileo (1974)

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Brecht understood that living is ‘becoming’. (Joseph Losey)1 For verily, my brothers, the spirit is a stomach. (Friedrich Nietzsche)2

In 1960 Losey published ‘The Individual Eye’, an autobiographical document in which he acknowledged Bertolt Brecht’s crucial importance to his film and theatre career. Given Losey’s collaboration with the German playwright on the 1947 Hollywood and New York productions of the latter’s Galileo, as well as his subsequent film version of the play for Ely Landau’s American Film Theatre series in 1974, most scholars have understandably focused on Brechtian influences throughout Losey’s oeuvre. These include the didactic and dialectical narrative structures of Brecht’s Lehrstucke or ‘teaching plays’ of the early 1930s; his commitment to expressing the body’s social gestus in acting style; and the use of alienation effects or Verfremdungseffekts in mise-en-scène.3 In each case, the director bares the mechanics and artifice of the theatrical device in order to distance the audience from the usual transparency of psychological realism. These observations are very valid and play an important part in any analysis of Losey’s films, but they have led to a mistaken tendency to see Losey as a purely Brechtian disciple. This is particularly evident in discussions of the Living Newspaper productions, for they are the closest that Losey came to directly employing so-called 4 Epic Theatre techniques. This reading is not completely accurate. Losey’s seminal influence was not Brecht but the Soviet agit-prop experiments that he discovered during his educational trip to the USSR between March and August of 1935, and which culminated in his theatre-in-the-round Moscow production of Clifford Odets’s pro-union drama, Waiting for Lefty. The key theoretical figures here are Vsevolod Meyerhold and Nikolai Pavlovich Okhlopkov. In his study of the Soviet influence on American drama, John Fuegi confirms that ‘it would be fairer historically, as Losey

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himself indirectly indicates, to speak of the style of the Living Newspapers as being Okhlopkovian or Meyerholdian theatre, for it was these two men who had the largest verifiable influence on the style of these 5 magnificent creations of the American stage’. Along with Erwin Piscator, these are the same influences that Brecht also acknowledged, suggesting that he and Losey were simultaneously tapping into identical sources, laying a common foundation for their own collaboration twelve years later. If Losey was fully steeped in Epic Theatre techniques long before staging Galileo, what did he learn directly from Brecht that he hadn’t already discovered during his Moscow sojourn? The answer, paradoxical as it might seem, is that he learned to break away from a predominantly dialectical causality and think instead through bodily affect. Rather than a clear political resolution of narrative contradictions, Brecht showed Losey that you could eschew synthesis in favour of impasse. In other words, Losey discovered through Brecht the very impulsive, baroque currents that came to define his own cinema. This seems an odd assertion given the conventional dialectical reading of Epic Theatre, but Galileo is not a conventional Epic play. It is less radical in form than Brecht’s earlier work, with markedly reduced use of V-Effekt and distancing devices compared to a didactic play such as Die Massnahme (The Measures Taken, 1930). As Ernst Shumacher has argued, ‘Brecht regarded Galileo as a play with “restricted” alienation effects’,6 preferring instead to stress the narrative double bind of dialectics at a standstill, where the contradictory forces in Galileo’s life – public/ private, passive/active, cerebral ideas/physical passions, slyness/boldness, intellectual courage/physical cowardice – forge a complex braid of irresolvable double binds. This is obviously not Jean-Luc Godard’s Russian Formalist reading of Brecht (epitomized by Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle, 1966), but one that lies much closer to Losey’s impulsive and crystalline tendencies. Obviously there is a large chronological gap between Losey’s first American staging of Galileo with Charles Laughton in 1947 and the release of his filmed version starring Chaim Topol in 1974, reflecting almost thirty years of frustration on Losey’s part, in terms of both finding financial backing for the picture and obtaining English-language rights from Brecht’s widow.7 The original play was produced in Hollywood at the dawn of the nuclear age under the dark cloud of HUAC and the Cold War, and was directed by a 38 year-old American veteran of the Stalinist Old Left with little or no film experience. This was adapted into a British-made film that reflected the legacy of Vietnam, Watergate and the Trotskyist/Maoist New Left, directed by a

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65-year-old exiled film veteran with a recent Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or under his belt. This long delay between play and film means that the latter is exactly contemporary with The Assassination of Trotsky (1972) and Losey’s adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1973). Significantly, all three films deal with characters forced to renounce or suppress their creative and impulsive instincts while detained under a restrictive and claustrophobic form of house arrest. Indeed, Richard Combs sees Galileo and The Assassination of Trotsky as variations on the same theme, each constituting a historical subject about a man of ideas who for a while stood at what might have been the beginning of the Brechtian concept of a ‘New Age’, an event forestalled on both occasions – in the case of Trotsky, by a series of historical accidents that consigned him to exile and the circumscribed world of his disciples, and in the case of Galileo, by the personal hesitations and final self-renunciation that condemned him to a similar fate and a more lingering kind of parole.8

One might add the similar circumstances of the politically impotent Jean Larrea in Les Routes du sud (1978). Suffice to say that Losey’s tendency toward a cyclical temporality, where subjects and themes constantly re-emerge, defies clear-cut, linear analysis. The play itself also underwent considerable revision as Brecht’s conception of its meaning changed in relation to ongoing historical events, particularly the shifting parameters of political commitment and the ethical responsibilities of the scientist. Just prior to his death, for example, Brecht began rehearsals for a 1956 Berliner Ensemble production of the play (published in 1955) with Ernst Busch as Galileo which included a number of textual revisions that generate a greater degree of empathy for Galileo. For the film, Losey and his screenwriter, Barbara Bray,9 produced what amounts to a fusion of three different sources: the 1947 Brecht–Laughton text, the changes from Brecht’s final German version, and Brecht’s intentions distilled from the Ralph Manheim and John Willett edition of his plays. Despite Brecht’s tinkering, Galileo consistently evokes a major theme that crops up in many of his early plays and poems, as well as the dramatist’s theoretical writings of the 1940s. This motif is the dialectical impasse between instinct and reason, the central motif of Brecht’s first play, Baal (1918), an uncompromising portrait of a poet ruled by sexual and bodily appetite. Baal is an intuitive animal at the mercy of uncontrollable impulse, a man who sees being as a recurring circuit of birth and decay, with human consciousness powerless to break the cycle. ‘Don’t overrate the head’, warns Baal. ‘You need a backside too

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bertolt brecht and galileo and all that goes with it.’ condition is the privy:

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For Baal, the true symbol of the human

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The place which he liked best to look upon In this wide world of ours was the john. It is a place where you rejoice to know That there are stars above and dung below … And there you find out what you are indeed: A fellow who sits on the john to – feed!11

Baal reflects Brecht’s ongoing ambivalence between losing yourself in the ecstasy of immanent oblivion with nature and the necessity for conceptual distance. Like Losey, Brecht tended to vacillate back and forth between the extremes of this dialectic with little or no attempt at synthesis or overcoming. In contrast, Brecht’s more mature works attempt to counterbalance instinct with excessive self-control, channelling the impulsive spirit into the mechanism of the automaton. Brecht of the late 1920s and 1930s tended to over-compensate against impulse by being excessively tough, cynical and cerebral, as well as politically uncompromising. As Martin Esslin points out, there is little or no sex, sensuality or love scenes in the more didactic plays of this period, for ‘while the heroes of the early, soft plays drift to their death as casually as they sinned, the young comrade of The Measures Taken [1930] is deliberately put to death as a punishment for having been unable to resist his emotional impulse’.12 In A Man’s A Man (Mann ist Mann, 1926), the political clown Galy Gay, a humble Irish porter in Kiplingesque India, is transformed into the replacement soldier Jeraiah Jip, literally a human fighting machine. The play boasts that, ‘Mr Bertolt Brecht will prove that one can/Do whatever one wants to do with a man:/A man will be reassembled like a motor-car tonight in front of you/And afterwards will be as good as 13 new.’ While ‘man-becoming-machine’ is Brecht’s favourite trope of conceptual self-discipline, ‘man-becoming-animal’ is its dialectical counterpart. During the 1947 Hollywood production of Galileo, for example, Brecht wrote a short-story outline, From Circus Life, for the pantomimist Lotte Goslar, the play’s choreographer. This piece describes a ‘terrible scene’ in a circus when a clown inadvertently finds himself trapped in a lion’s cage. The clown attempts to frighten the lion, but something curious happens – the lion hypnotizes him with its gaze and gradually induces him to perform the very tricks the trained lion had once done. The transformation of man into beast is so complete that when the lion turns its gaze from the clown for a moment, the clown

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springs on it. Disregarding attempts by attendants to divert him with pistol shots and iron hooks, he proceeds to bite the lion to death.14

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This parable expresses one of Brecht’s favourite political themes, that if one fights a tiger (i.e. capitalism, or the master in a master–slave relationship) one becomes a tiger. Man takes on the characteristics of his oppressors. However, we can also interpret Brecht’s becoming-animal as an attack on individual agency. Deleuze and Guattari, when discussing their notion of becoming-animal in terms of becoming-wolf, stress the fact that the wolf cannot be individuated as a subject, but exists only as part of a pack or multiplicity: ‘In becoming-wolf, the important thing is the position of the mass, and above all the position of the subject itself in relation to the pack or wolf-multiplicity: how the subject joins or does not join the pack, how far away it stays, how it does or does not hold to the multiplicity.’15 ‘A becoming-animal always involves a pack, a band, a 16 population, a peopling, in short, a multiplicity.’ Brecht’s art is thus caught between two incompatible multiplicities, between the quantitative, spatial multiplicity of becoming-machine, epitomized by A Man’s A Man, and the qualitative temporal multiplicity of becoming-animal (From Circus Life), in exactly the same way that Losey is caught between immanence and contradiction. It seems apt that the two should collaborate on the one project where Brecht brings the two parallel tendencies together, for Galileo is a direct expression of the irresolvable antinomy between the two positions. Brecht’s first 1938 version of the play was written in exile in Denmark with the help of Margarete Steffin and takes the form of fifteen tableaux covering twenty-eight years of the scientist’s life. It opens in the Republic of Venice in 1609 with the 45-year-old Galileo (1564–1642) living with his daughter Virginia, his housekeeper, Mrs Sarti, and her small son Andrea, who is already showing great promise as student of astronomy. Galileo earns a subsistence salary as Professor of Mathematics at the University of Padua, but this does little to subsidize either his tremendous hunger for knowledge or his voluminous appetite for food and wine. He turns to unscrupulous methods, plagiarizing the plans for a new Dutch invention, the telescope, and then selling it to the unsuspecting Venetian bourgeoisie as his own. His ruse is quickly discovered and, after his request for a grant is denied, he accepts an invitation from the Grand Duke of Florence (the 9-year-old Cosimo de Medici) to pursue his astronomical researches there. Galileo ignores the advice of his friend Sagredo, who, smelling the ominous possibility of burning flesh (Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake only ten years earlier for making many of the same claims as Galileo)

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warns him that Florence lacks Venice’s religious and intellectual tolerance: ‘It’s ruled by monks.’ Undaunted, Galileo goes on to prove that Copernicus was right: the earth is not the centre of the universe – it moves, just like all the other heavenly bodies. However, although even the pope’s own astronomer, Christopher Clavius, confirms Galileo’s findings, the Inquisition forbids him to publish them. For the next eight years, from 1616 to 1623, Galileo is silent, focusing his attention on Aristotle and the properties of floating bodies. When the enlightened mathematician Cardinal Barberini is elected Pope Urban VIII in 1623, Galileo is convinced that the new astronomy will receive official sanction. With the help of his pupils (the now-adult Andrea, Fulganzio – ‘The Little Monk’ – and Federzoni, the lens grinder), Galileo enthusiastically renews his investigations into sunspots, much to the alarm of the pious Virginia and Mrs Sarti. Rejecting the support of the local bourgeoisie in the form of the iron founder Matti (Vanni in later versions), Galileo foolishly puts his faith in the clerical establishment. Unfortunately, the grand inquisitor persuades the new pope that Galileo’s discoveries will undermine the basis of the church’s authority. Reluctantly, the pope agrees that Galileo must be shown the instruments of torture. On 22 June 1633, as Virginia prays for her father’s abjuration, the tolling of the big bell of St Marcus solemnly announces his recantation. Galileo enters, a broken man, to Andrea’s eternal disgust: ‘Pity the country that has no heroes!’ cries the boy. ‘No. Pity the country that needs heroes’, replies Galileo. Four years later, Galileo lives under house arrest in a country villa near Florence, a prisoner of the Inquisition. Virginia, whose landowner fiancé Ludovico had broken off their marriage because of Galileo’s views, is now an old maid, encouraging her almost blind father to collaborate with church doctrine. Andrea pays a final visit to his former mentor just before leaving for intellectual exile in Holland. He restates his abhorrence for Galileo’s cowardice, but when the cunning scientist hands him the secretly completed manuscript to the Discorsi, Andrea is suddenly full of admiration. He now sees Galileo’s recantation as a deliberate ploy to gain precious time to complete his great work. The play ends as Andrea triumphantly smuggles the Discorsi across the frontier. In this early version, Galileo is a complex, contradictory figure, both a criminal betrayer of science, but also a cunning tactician of subterfuge, the man who outsmarted the Inquisition by smuggling out the Discorsi. This is an optimistic, Popular Front Galileo, Eric Bentley’s ‘winning rogue’, racked by compromise but ultimately vindicated by disseminating the people’s lasting legacy. This ‘Schweikian’ philosophy

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of enlightened self-interest, that survival and long-term success are more important than striking heroic attitudes, is typical of Brecht’s own 17 pragmatic dealings with Nazis and the witch hunt. Like Losey, he saw 18 Galileo as a kindred spirit, averring that ‘We must proceed cunningly.’ Brecht thus sets up a dialectic of cowardice v. cunning, in which the final synthesis is not the rightness or wrongness of the disgraced author, but the veracity of the text itself, which must now stand on its own two feet. The 1938 Galileo can thus be read as a paean to creative thinking, to the right and liberty to write and teach. The 1947 version is quite different, the result of a three-and-a-halfyear collaboration between Brecht and Laughton, who had met in March 1944. Losey’s film incorporates most of their subsequent changes, especially the expanded role of bodily instinct (which Topol plays with relish) and Brecht’s now profoundly different attitude toward the ethical responsibilities of the scientist. Brecht saw Galileo’s character as itself a stalled dialectic between impulse and reason, for ‘on the one hand we have the gooseliver, which [Galileo] insists that he must have, on the other hand is science, on which he also insists. So he sits between his two great vices: science and gluttony.’19 Or to put it another way, on one side we have the primordial, immanent movement of material bodies and forces – whether they be planets, communities or individuals – which potentially give rise to further creative powers. On the other we have the libido, Galileo’s profuse appetite, which gives rise to his thought but also betrays it. In either case, these potentially radical affects are curtailed and suppressed by the reactionary forces of the play’s milieu – a Florence caught in the interregnum between the death rattle of the ancien régime and the rise of the bourgeoisie. Significantly, both ‘vices’ are characterized in terms of time and movement. Science takes the form of the quantitative multiplicity: i.e. Galileo’s drive towards a machinic movement. After all, the essence of Galileo’s discoveries is that the earth moves, the repercussions of which are devastating for the old order. Instead of a static, vertical chain of being that passes from God, through the pope and his bishops to the true believer, the new age takes the form of a decentred multiplicity, for as Brecht puts it, ‘the universe lost its centre overnight, and in the morning it had a countless number of centres. So that now each one can be regarded as a centre and none can. For there is a lot of room suddenly.’20 Eschewing such wordy explication in favour of a simple exercise in show and tell, Losey’s film has Topol demonstrate this new movement of bodies by sitting young Andrea (Iain Travers) in a chair (Earth) and putting him in orbit around an iron washstand (Sun). Galileo is thereby immediately associated with an advocacy of

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Descartes’ new clockwork universe, in which the microcosm of human bodies and macrocosm of planets, stars and galaxies are all part of one interlocking, interactive mechanism, like the movement of a timepiece or automaton. However, unlike Descartes, who separated the thinking mind and spirit from the realm of mechanical bodies, Galileo is himself part of this mechanism, driven to continue his revolutionary thought not only in the face of official opposition from the church, but more importantly at the expense of affect, of paternal love for his daughter Virginia (Mary Larkin). It is her future happiness, in the form of marriage to Ludovico (Tim Woodward), which is destroyed by her father’s scientific obsession. In Scene 9, for example, Galileo’s assistants mock Ludovico’s aristocratic pretensions with a strong dose of working-class solidarity. They advocate the egalitarian and popular benefits of the new science against the religious superstition of the upper class, which, they argue, serves as a convenient alibi for the landowners’ oppression of the lower orders. Ludovico leaves with an ominous warning to Galileo to give up his heretical researches. Instead, as if to underline the importance not only of the physics of moving bodies but its inextricable link to the process of intellectual discovery itself, Losey has Galileo turn and address the camera directly in close-up: ‘My intention is not to prove that I was right’, says Galileo, ‘but to find out whether I was right.’ Losey’s use of V-Effekt bares the theatrical device to punctuate what Brecht saw as the most important sentence in the play.21 Science as a mechanism is not about the creation of static absolutes, but an ongoing movement of multiplicities that can be measured, catalogued and weighed only by a process of empirical enquiry. For Galileo himself, this enquiry can only happen in opposition to his love for his daughter, whose piety symbolizes everything he is trying to overturn. After he tells his assistants to turn the sunspot apparatus toward the sun, Virginia appears in her wedding dress to discover that her fiancé has broken their engagement. Blaming her father, she runs toward the front door and collapses on the steps. Galileo is physically moved (Topol plays this scene ‘softly’ – his body gives a faint quiver, but then stiffens, creating successive gests of personal emotion and social necessity), but then turns away from his fallen daughter and concentrates on his contraption. His driven compulsion is expressed both by his utterance – ‘I’ve got to know’ – and also Losey’s mise-en-scène, which encloses Galileo’s head (the mechanism of thought) amid a tangle of diagonal and vertical lines, as he literally becomes part of the optical apparatus. The head of Federzoni the lens grinder (John McEnery) juts in from the bottom left of the frame, creating a strong contiguity between the image of the scientist-become-machine and Brecht’s symbol

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of the working class. Losey thereby makes it very clear that the new science represents a material and intellectual breakthrough, overthrowing the superstition and backwardness of the ancien régime. Physics is a social and political phenomenon, its transformative potential directly associated with the future of the working class as a revolutionary embodiment of the Marxian dialectic. Still, there are always two sides to the dialectic, and Galileo also represents the second, qualitative multiplicity as a creature of bodily appetite: the scientist as becoming-animal. In Brecht, according to Martin Esslin, ‘the most rational side of human endeavour, science itself, is shown as merely another of man’s basic, instinctive urges, just as deeply rooted in the irrational as the instinct for procreation’.22 As Brecht cautioned in his directorial notes: It’s important that you shouldn’t idealize Galileo: You know the kind of thing – the stargazer, the pallid intellectualised idealist … My Galileo is a powerful physicist with a tummy on him, a face like Socrates, a vociferous, full-blooded man with a sense of humour, the new type of physicist, earthy, a great talker. Favourite attitude: stomach thrust forward, both hands on the buttocks, head back, using one meaty hand all the time to gesticulate with, but with precision.23

Galileo must eat and drink to think – his thinking springs out of his appetite – but he must also think and create to make money – so that he can eat. As the pope (Michel Lonsdale) comments, while defending Galileo’s appetite to the cardinal inquisitor (Edward Fox), ‘He likes eating, drinking and thinking more than any man I ever knew. He gets pleasure out of everything. Even his thinking is sensual. He indulges in thinking bouts.’ To illustrate this point, Darko Suvin has noted that ‘almost the whole of Scene 9 is a counterpoint of Galileo’s delight in Sicilian wine and in the possibility of sunspot investigation opened up by the dying of the old Pope … Heavenly and earthly food are here in a feedback loop: each helps the other.’24 Moreover, Galileo’s enjoyment of wine has class implications, for with each sip he shows increasing disdain for Ludovico’s wealth and privilege, while his pupils excitedly dance their paean to the new science, heartily singing, ‘… and yet it moves’. Here is a direct contiguity between wine and scientific progressiveness, between bodily and mental indulgence, between the drunken spirit of Dionysus and the creativity of material productivity. As Galileo puts it, ‘What we need for our new ideas are people who work with their hands. Who else wants to know the causes of everything? People who never see bread except from their tables don’t want to know how it’s baked. The bastards

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[points at Ludovico] would rather thank God than the baker.’ This attack on transcendentalism in favour of creative, affective bodies is the essence of an immanent ontology, marking Brecht and Losey’s Galileo as a sensualist and materialist from the start. By adding class to the equation, Galileo emphasizes even more profoundly the traitorous implications of the scientist’s future betrayal. However, the dialectic of thought and appetite, of reason and impulse, inevitably takes place within a socio-economic context that values certain skills and products over others. We should not be surprised, then, by Scene 2, when Galileo demonstrates the plagiarized telescope for profit before the great Arsenal of Venice. As the recurring chorus of three boys sing to open the scene, ‘No one’s virtue is complete: Great Galileo liked to eat. You will not resent, we hope, the truth about his telescope.’ Yet, at the very same time that he is selling the purloined invention with an opportunistically self-serving speech stressing the telescope’s militaristic advantages, he has already forgotten the money. His intellectual appetite taking over, in an aside to his old friend Sagredo (Michael Gough) he speaks only of the telescope’s astronomical significance. The dialectic is not clear-cut then, for the appetite–intellect impasse produces no distinct victories, but rather an endless skidding, where one betrays yet also feeds the other. As Brecht suggests, ‘perhaps, looked at in this way, his charlatanry does not mean much, but it still shows how determined this man is to take the easy course, and to apply his reason in a base as well as a noble manner. A more significant test awaits him, and does not every capitulation bring the next one nearer?’25 Although not as corpulent as Laughton, Topol was still physically imposing enough to wring the maximum gestic resonance from such a capitulation to the appetites. Moreover, like Laughton, he has the ability to act in the Brechtian manner, distancing himself from the character so that he plays a double role, simultaneously Galileo and Topol. ‘To achieve the V-effect the actor must give up his complete conversion into a stage character’, asserted Brecht. ‘He shows the character, he quotes his 26 lines, he repeats a real-life incident.’ Deleuze reads this style of acting as a manifestation of the temporal (perfectly apt given the content and context of Galileo), a mirror image of Henri Bergson’s distinction between virtual and actual, past and present. As Bergson describes it, uncannily echoing Brecht’s description of Epic acting, our actual existence, whilst it is unrolled in time, duplicates itself along with a virtual existence, a mirror-image. Every moment of our life presents the two aspects, it is actual and virtual, perception on the one side and recollection on the other … Whoever becomes conscious of the continual

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duplicating of his present into perception and recollection … will compare himself to an actor playing his part automatically, listening to himself and beholding himself playing.27

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Topol’s gestic performance thus inscribed the scientist’s body, with its antinomy between impulse and intellect, with the precise characteristics of crystalline time. If Galileo himself is the living embodiment of the impasse between two multiplicities, it would be misleading to define this combination of becoming-machine and becoming-animal solely in terms of an individual subject, as an exiled ‘lone-wolf’ fighting and then capitulating to the religious authorities. Galileo must also be seen as part of a pack, and Brecht and Losey make it clear that the scientist has a popular and social role to play, as the manifestation of a collective, libidinal multiplicity. It is significant that there is very little physical sex in Galileo. The scientist deliberately eschews the courtesans offered to him by Cardinal Barberini, suggesting that appetite for Galileo is the specific domain of the brain and the stomach rather than the phallus. Instead, sexuality in Galileo is limited exclusively to the activities of the potentially revolutionary working class. This is explicitly expressed in Scene 10, the Carnival celebration of 1632, where the workers’ guilds take the new astronomy as the theme for their All Fool’s Day procession, showing the far-reaching effects of Galileo’s teachings in the marketplace. Losey’s mise-en-scène was inspired by the paintings of Brueghel the Elder, in terms of not only their baroque depth of field and rich earth tones, but also their Rabelaisian celebration of unbridled sex and bodily excretions. Losey shot the Carnival as a nocturnal scene, so that the flickering light of bonfires and torches create a dynamic, distorting chiaroscuro across the people’s faces and masks. Against a backdrop of a large effigy of Galileo as the sad, silenced scientist, and crude mock-ups of the Sun and Earth, pamphleteers and ballad singers disseminate the new ideas generated by Galileo’s discoveries, while townsfolk brandish anti-clerical placards. For the musical accompaniment to Brecht’s satirical ballads, Richard Hartley reconstructed Hanns Eisler’s lost original 1947 score, adding woodwinds and percussion in place of middle strings to create a brittle, busy effect, evoking a combination of unrest, disquiet and imminent change. Putting all these elements together, ‘the common folk, in their long night of slavery, are given a brief glimpse of a possible dawn, and Brecht is able to convey this, not discursively, but in direct, poeticdramatic vision’.28 While the individual Galileo is unable to reconcile his own conflict between science and sensuality, Losey’s idealist message here is that left

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to their own devices the common people will transform one into the other, a view expressed by the ribald antics of the ballad singer (Clive Revill) and his wife (Georgia Brown). Throughout the sequence, the Singer eggs on the riotous crowd, imbuing almost every word with sexual innuendo:

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Good people, what will come to pass if Galileo’s teachings spread? No altar boy will serve the Mass, no servant girl will make the bed. Now that is grave, my friends, it is no matter small: For independent spirit spreads like foul diseases! Yet life is sweet and man is weak and after all – How nice it is, for a change, to do just as one pleases!

As if taking its revolutionary cue, the camera also liberates itself for the first time, moving drunkenly through the packed throng. Losey’s montage is extremely disjunctive here, creating contiguity between the kinetic, disruptive jumps of the affective image – Reville’s and Brown’s bodies and faces exude uncouth erotic energy – with the parallel disintegration of the social and political status quo. In contrast, the young aristocrat and his wife who view the spectacle from an upstairs balcony are positively demure. As the crowd’s libido heats up, the rich couple are dragged over to the bonfire in the centre of the marketplace, where the aristocrat’s hat is knocked off, a woman steals his knife, while another man urinates on him. After the aristocrats are driven from the square, all hell breaks loose. The ballad singer feels up a townswoman, while, not to be outdone, his wife copulates with another man, causing the singer to shout in mock jealousy: ‘No, no, stop, Galileo, stop … an independent spirit spreads as do diseases’, directly associating liberated thought with the spread of a libertine-like sexual contagion. The scene ends with the procession, as Galileo and his celestial spheres are taken up as symbols of an embryonic mass movement. The stress here is on embryonic, however, because it is clear that Brecht and Losey believed that the Copernican revolution actually did very little to disturb the status quo – only mass revolution can accomplish that. Thus the Carnival scene should be read more as an idealized hope than historical fact. Indeed, in the play’s last scene (cut from the film), as the departing Andrea stands outside the frontier customs house, the Discorsi are shown to be ineffectual unless tied to the materialist self-emancipation of the superstitious masses. This suggests that far from relying on the great men of science for their salvation, the proletariat will have to save themselves, for as Walter Benjamin correctly pointed out, in Galileo, ‘the hero is the people’. This makes Galileo’s abjuration all the more criminal, because it not

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only sets back his own individual researches but also reinforces the authority of the church against the possibility of wider social change. It is significant that in both the 1947 production and the Losey film, the original 1938 ending is changed. Instead of Andrea (Tom Conti) celebrating Galileo’s cunning and smuggling the Discorsi out of Italy, the play ends with a vehement self-denunciation by Galileo. He rejects Andrea’s reading of the recantation as a brilliant ruse of cunning, arguing instead: ‘There is no scientific work that only one man can write.’ Galileo didn’t recant because of some elaborate plan to outwit the Inquisition but because he was a coward: he was simply afraid of physical pain. Brecht called what follows the ‘Pelican Scene’, for ‘the pelican is fabled to feed his young with his own blood by wounding his breast with his beak. So Galileo exposed his very guts to his pupil in order to give him a final demonstration in thinking.’29 Far from accepting Andrea’s generous assessment of his contribution to science, Galileo describes himself as a criminal who betrayed his calling and whose cowardice set a precedent for centuries to come: ‘Welcome to my gutter, brother scientist and fellow traitor. I sold out. You’re a buyer. The first sight of the book, the mouth waters, the curses are drowned. Hallowed be our bargaining, white-washing, death-fearing community.’ Because of his abjuration, he has made science the servant of authority rather than freeing it to transform the world for the benefit of all mankind: The sole aim of science to my mind is to lighten the toil of human existence. If you give way to coercion your progress must be progress away from humanity. The gulf between you and humanity might grow so wide that the result of your exaltation at some new achievement could be a universal howl of horror. As a scientist I had a unique opportunity. In my day, astronomy emerged into the marketplace. At that particular time, if one man had put up a fight it might have had vast repercussions. I’ve come to the conclusion, Sarti, that I was never in real danger.

Topol plays this scene with relish, uttering his self-hatred with uncommon appetite. Then, with a final gesture he looks directly into the camera (mirroring the earlier V-Effekt when he made his initial statement of empirical purpose) and declares his own guilt: ‘I betrayed my calling. No man who does what I have done can be tolerated in the ranks of science.’ The ‘Pelican Scene’ delineates the play’s and film’s moral double bind in a nutshell. Galileo can only be a scientist because of the urgings of his somatic sensuality, but this same body is also responsible for his cowardice, which betrays his intellect. Both Brecht and Losey see this as a socio-political as well as ethical problem. Under class and theological

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society, Galileo can’t have both the body (the ingestive pleasure of eating), and soul (the outgoing pleasure of seeing/knowing) in equal measure. He is forced by the Inquisition to choose. Unfortunately, he can’t because one appetite feeds the other: to choose only the body is to betray the mind, and vice versa, so that he is caught in the apparition of their mutual haunting. Ironically, at play’s end, he has written the Discorsi at the expense of visual pleasure – his eyesight – forcing him to rely on his Quisling daughter Virginia, while both facets of his appetite are rigidly controlled: ‘the brain has to deliver to the archbishop recurrent commentaries on the church’s ideological saws, the stomach is delivered only poor food vetted by the church’.30 Like all of Losey’s antinomies, Galileo’s impasse doesn’t exist in a political vacuum but rests on the impossibility of detaching oneself from the mechanisms of the dominant society, particularly its resistance to the dawning of a new age and the dependency of the scientist and artist on its patronage. Instead of making life for the people easier, science is appropriated by self-serving authorities and turned into ‘pure’ or specialized knowledge (the liberal view of truth as an end in itself) that completely disregards the dialectical materialist’s concern with both the pursuit of happiness and the future security of humanity. This is the root source of Brecht’s fear, that the gulf between the scientist and humanity might grow so wide that the response to a new achievement would be ‘a universal howl of horror’. But what possible scientific development could have provoked Brecht to such a rabid denunciation of the scientist’s abdication of moral responsibility? Brecht gives his answer in a rhyming couplet: ‘If you won’t learn from Galileo’s experience/The Bomb will put in a personal appearance.’31 The atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945. Brecht wanted to exploit it as the motivating force of a new Galileo: ‘The “atomic” age made its debut at Hiroshima in the middle of our work. Overnight the biography of the 32 founder of the new system of physics read differently.’ Galileo’s crime is now the ‘original sin’ of modern natural science and Brecht reframes him as the forerunner of J. Robert Oppenheimer, because ‘the atom bomb is, both as a technical and as a social phenomenon, the classical 33 end-product of his contribution to science and his failure to society’. Given this new context, audience distanciation was vital for the selfcritical message to be topically effective. Indeed, Brecht made it clear that ‘on no account should the actor make use of his self-analysis to endear the hero to the audience by his self-reproaches’.34 Losey’s film plays up Galileo’s self-condemnation – the scientist’s true achievement – as a belated act of commitment to individual responsibility, developing

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the theme of his first feature, The Boy With Green Hair (1948). As Losey argued, ‘the emphasis for me falls just that way, that in the end Galileo condemns himself as a physical coward and devalues the importance of 35 his book as against the importance of his failure to resist’. Topol doesn’t exactly play it that way, creating an ambiguous balance between self-criticism, where he disgusts the audience with Galileo’s cowardice, and moral honesty, for which he earns a measure of our respect. Andrea plays the role of affirmative foil, refusing to believe that such savage selfanalysis could be the last word. As he leaves, the young man offers his hand, but Galileo refuses it: ‘You’re teaching now yourself. Can you afford to take such a hand as mine?’ Like Andrea, we want to be conciliatory with Galileo, so that Brecht’s objective is undermined by Topol’s innate decency and sensitivity. Yet this is not entirely alien to Brecht’s intentions. In a diary note from 1940 he admitted that, ‘a V-effect can be achieved strictly through the moderate use of emotion’.36 Moreover, in the 1948 Short Organum he makes the less-than-Epic statement that he couldn’t imagine an ‘epic theatre lacking in artistic fantasy, without humour, or the gift of sympathy’.37 Fuegi argues that Brecht applied these principles directly to the 1956 Berliner Ensemble production of Galileo, for ‘not only did Brecht’s final work on the text bring out ever more sharply what he himself called “‘the conservative nature of the play”, but also his work in rehearsals stressed its enormous emotional power. Brecht wanted that 38 emotion there and stressed it again and again.’ The idea was not to eradicate emotional or realist identification with the character but to exploit the mutual contradictions and alienations between antinomous pleasures and sympathies. This is exactly what Losey expresses in his stylistic tension between the introverted, illusionistic acting of the very English Mary Larkin as Virginia, and Topol’s resonant, Israeli-accented voice and gestic mannerisms. More importantly, Losey’s film also creates a strong dialectic between Topol and the mise-en-scène, undercutting the sympathy generated by his actor with a visual indictment. After Andrea’s final exit, Galileo returns to indulge his appetite in the form of a glass of wine, but his movements are now laboriously slow and deliberate, as if sagging under an enormous moral weight. ‘How’s the night?’ he asks Virginia. She looks out of the window: ‘Clear.’ Losey squeezes Galileo into a tightly reduced frame, shooting him from outside the window with his back to the camera and surrounded by dark shadow, while his daughter dominates the central foreground. Galileo is thus visually imprisoned, cut off from the outside world (the people) and caught between darkness (hell) and Virginia’s piety (the church), an untenable objective

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correlative that visually doubles his own very real blindness and enslaved dependence on his daughter. There could be no clearer condemnation of the man than this imagistic vortex that reduces his former somatic and intellectual dynamism to a mere marking of stalled time. If the beginning of the 1947 play suggests an immanent struggle between machinic and animalistic multiplicities, by the end of the 1974 Losey film we are in no doubt that beneath the dialectical surface of ethical and political responsibility lies the immanence of nuclear destruction itself. We have passed from a creative affirmation of interacting bodies in motion to the primordiality of the split atom, in effect to potential cataclysm. Losey equates this ‘road to perdition’ with both time and space, expressed through sound and depth of field. As we saw in Eve, the tolling church bell is a favourite Losey device for expressing the immanence of ineffable time. It runs throughout Galileo as a leitmotif signalling the crystalline nature of the scientist’s twin multiplicities. Its most symbolic moment occurs when it punctuates the occasion of Galileo’s recantation, in effect a death knell for free thought and moral responsibility. But it also crops up at the very beginning of the film in Venice, as Galileo gazes out of his window through the telescope lenses that Andrea has bought for him. Along with his pupil, he is squeezed tightly within the confined foreground space of the window frame, in much the same way that he will be hemmed in by Virginia and the background space of his window in Florence at the end of the film. Both bell and mise-en-scène thus mark an early premonition of his future abjuration and isolation at the very moment when his appetite for experimentation (and cunning) is at its height. In contrast, the second instance of the tolling bell occurs just as Galileo is persuading Sagredo of his belief in man and the powers of reason: ‘The seduction of proof is too strong. In the long run no one can resist it.’ Time as ‘the long run’ is here given a Nietzschean inflection, affirming Man as inherently exceptional, not because of a position created by an Other (God), but due to his/her own intrinsic creative and transformative qualities, of which Galileo is a prime example. Alas, this contiguity between the bell and creativity fails to return as an unqualified affirmation, because Galileo ultimately betrays Man’s greatness. As if to confirm the heinousness of his crime, the bell tolls once more during the ‘Pelican Scene’, just as he tells Andrea of his life under house arrest: ‘Thanks to the depths of my repentance, I live in comparative comfort and am allowed certain scientific pursuits. It’s all under clerical supervision.’ The chimes continue as Andrea replies, ‘Yes, we understand the church is more than pleased with you. Your complete

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submission has had its effect. Not one single paper expounding a new thesis has been published in Italy since.’ However, it would be a mistake to delimit the motif to any one symbolic reading, for the crystalline is not a value judgement favouring one course of action over another. Thus we hear the bell one last time as Andrea and Galileo stand in front of the fire, their backs to the camera, as Galileo announces that he has finished the Discorsi. In this case the bell marks a form of ‘secret’ time, the cunning qualitative multiplicity that produced the great book, in parallel to the quantitative one that reaps the rewards of abjuration. As the bell echoes back and forth across the virtual and actual time frame of the film as a whole, we come to feel the import of both its positive and negative associations, as a direct expression of the ambivalent qualities of Galileo’s twin nature. Losey produces a less ambiguous effect, however, from his use of depth of field. After his first run-in with the church authorities, Galileo is invariably framed against an architectural vortex, which threatens to suck him into the image’s vanishing point. Throughout Galileo, this void conjures up an immanence of negation/disavowal that not only frames Galileo spatially and temporally, but also threatens to annihilate him. Thus, in the opening to the scene where the cardinal inquisitor slyly pressures Virginia to keep a watchful (read: informing) eye on her father, the three chorus boys are framed symmetrically in the doorway to Cardinal Bellarmin’s house as they sing the scene’s opening verses in Latin. After concluding their song, they walk away to reveal two guards, standing symmetrically in the background, directly equating depth with oppressive authority. This shot is repeated at the beginning of Scene 11, framing the boys in front of an arched doorway to an antechamber at the Medici Palace in Florence. This time, officers stand guard in the background behind them, but perfectly visible during the entire song, as if, given the import of Galileo’s discoveries, immanent power can no longer remain hidden. At the scene’s end, after Cosimo de Medici has refused to accept Galileo’s latest manuscript, the crimson-clad figure of the cardinal inquisitor enters from this same depth of field, and passes Galileo without returning his bow. Then, a high official appears to inform Galileo that, ‘the Florentine court can no longer oppose the request of the Holy Inquisition to interrogate you in Rome’. After taking Galileo’s book, he leads father and daughter through the door into the vortex of the palace’s vanishing point, into the dark annihilating abyss.

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Notes

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1 Joseph Losey, ‘The Individual Eye,’ Encore, Vol. 8, No. 2, March–April 1961, p. 13. The essay was first published in French as ‘L’oeil du maitre’, in Cahiers du Cinéma, Vol. 19, No. 114, December 1960, pp. 21–32. All citations that follow are from the English version. 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1954), p. 318. 3 Gestisch, derived from Gestus, ‘means both gist and gesture; an attitude or a single aspect of an attitude, expressible in words or actions’. John Willett, in Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theater: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (New York, Hill & Wang, 1964), p. 42. 4 Losey acknowledged that the Living Newspaper was ‘a real breaking down and rebuilding’ of conventional theatre language. ‘This was Brechtian Theatre but I didn’t know it.’ Losey, ‘The Individual Eye’, p. 11. 5 John Fuegi, ‘Russian “Epic Theatre” Experiments and the American Stage’, Minnesota Review, New Series 1, Autumn 1973, p. 108. 6 Ernst Shumacher, ‘The Dialectics of Galileo’, in E. Munk, ed., Brecht (New York, Bantam, 1972), p. 214. 7 For a detailed account of Losey’s frustrated attempts to realize Galileo as a film see Caute, Joseph Losey, ch. 19, pp. 165–81. 8 Richard Combs, ‘The Country of the Past Revisited: Losey, Galileo and The Romantic Englishwoman’, Sight and Sound, Vol. 44, No. 3, Summer 1975, p. 142. 9 A distinguished literary scholar and playwright, Bray had been a script editor for BBC Radio. 10 Bertolt Brecht, Baal, trans. Eric Bentley and Martin Esslin, in Three Plays: Baal, A Man’s a Man, The Elephant Calf (New York, Grove Press, 1964), p. 32. 11 Ibid. 12 Martin Esslin, Brecht: The Man and His Work (New York, W. W. Norton, 1974), p. 258. 13 Brecht, ‘Mann ist Mann’, cited in ibid., p. 261. 14 James K. Lyon, Bertolt Brecht in America (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 195. 15 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 29. 16 Ibid., p. 239. 17 Jaroslav Has“ek’s Good Soldier Schweik, the eponymous hero of which defeats authority not through opposition but by eagerly carrying out its commands to the letter, had been produced by Piscator in 1928. Brecht wrote his own homage, Schweik in the Second World War, from 1941 to 1944. 18 Bertolt Brecht, ‘Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties’, trans. Richard Winston, in Galileo, ed. Eric Bentley, English version by Charles Laughton (New York, Grove Press, 1966), p. 150. 19 Brecht, cited in Esslin, Brecht: The Man and His Work, p. 251. 20 Cited in Bentley, ‘The Science Fiction of Bertolt Brecht’, in Brecht, Galileo, p. 33. 21 Cited in the ‘Introduction’ to Bertolt Brecht, Collected Plays, Volume 5, eds John Willett and Ralph Manheim (New York, Pantheon, 1972), p. xx. 22 Esslin, Brecht: The Man and His Work, p. 267. 23 Brecht, ‘Three Notes on the Character of Galileo’, in Collected Plays, Volume 5, p. 218. 24 Darko Suvin, ‘Heavenly Food Denied: Life of Galileo’, in Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Brecht (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 147. 25 Brecht, Brecht on Theater, pp. 199–200.

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26 Brecht, ‘The Messingkauf Dialogues’, p. 104, cited in Peter Brooker, ‘Key Words in Brecht’s Theory and Practice of Theatre’, in The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, p. 197. 27 Henri Bergson, Mind–Energy, trans. H. Wildon Carr (London, Macmillan, 1920), pp. 135–8, cited in Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Roberta Galeta (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 79. 28 Bentley, ‘The Science Fiction of Bertolt Brecht’, p. 31. 29 Losey, ‘The Individual Eye’, p. 9. 30 Suvin, ‘Heavenly Food Denied: Life of Galileo’, p. 148. 31 Brecht, ‘Prologue to the American Production’, in Collected Plays, Volume 5, p. 226. 32 Brecht, ‘Unvarnished Picture of a New Age: Preamble to the American Version’, in ibid., p. 224. 33 Brecht, ‘Praise or Condemnation of Galileo?’ in ibid., p. 225. 34 Brecht, ‘Notes on Individual Scenes’, in ibid., p. 229. 35 Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 339. 36 Cited in John Fuegi, Bertolt Brecht: Chaos, According to Plan (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 184. 37 Cited in ibid., p. 183. 38 Fuegi, ibid., p. 177.

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Gender matters: A Doll’s House (1973), The Romantic Englishwoman (1975) and Steaming (1985)

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After all, the film is about women, a subject of perplexity for Joe. (Patricia Losey)1

After four marriages and a history of combative relations with several of his leading ladies, Losey could hardly be called a ‘woman’s director’ or an artist concerned specifically with women’s issues. Indeed, it’s almost a truism to say that Losey’s personal and filmic treatment of women is one of the most controversial subjects of his career. Much of this ‘received’ wisdom derives from his well-publicized run-in with Jane Fonda and Delphine Seyrig during the 1972 filming of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, a time, admittedly, when both actresses were at their most polemical and doctrinaire. In a letter to Losey dated 27 July 1973, for example, Fonda accused the director of making irresponsible antifeminist remarks in the press, adding that ‘your inability to deal with, to countenance, strong women has done … irreparable harm to the film … I was never able to penetrate your paranoia and snobbery while we were working together.’2 Fonda’s view is supported by Nicole Stéphane, the producer of Losey’s abortive Proust Project, who strongly resented the director’s chauvinistic lack of respect for her professionalism: ‘He was 3 more than a misogynist – for him women didn’t exist.’ Whatever the merits of these accusations with regard to Losey’s personal relations with women, the films themselves offer a far more complex view. Deleuze, for one, argues that Losey’s scenarios find their moral and aesthetic salvation in women. While destructive impulses seal up the men in hermetic homosexual games from which they rarely escape, women largely avoid the pitfalls of Losey’s ensnaring naturalism: ‘Often women in Losey seem in advance of the milieu, in revolt against it and outside the originary world of the men – of which they will only be the victim, or the user. It is they who trace a line of exit, and who win a freedom which is creative, artistic, or simply practical: they have neither shame, nor guilt, nor static violence which would reverse itself against

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them.’ If men represent the sad passions, women celebrate the joyful ones, agents of a practical philosophy of creative action: ‘They leave naturalism to reach lyrical abstraction. These advanced women are 5 rather similar to Thomas Hardy’s, with analogous functions.’ This is a valid reading as far as it goes – one thinks of Margit Saad’s Suzanne in The Criminal or Freya in The Damned – but sexual relations are invariably in a state of ‘Cold War’ in Losey because desire is invariably seen as incompatible with respect and affection. Eros is denied in favour of a more primordial sexual drive, usually in league with violence, duplicity and inversion. In the extreme case of Secret Ceremony, for example, sex is variously associated with madness (Cenci), perverse licentiousness (Albert) or a prostitute’s atonement for her daughter’s death (Leonora). Losey’s ‘battle of the sexes’ tends to manifest itself in two clearly delineated ways. Firstly, women are presented as wilful predators, alluring, ensnaring and ultimately destroying their male victims. Jeanne Moreau’s Eve Olivier is the obvious paradigm here, but other examples include Evelyn’s cynical careerist manipulation of Reggie in The Intimate Stranger, Belle’s emotional and economic enslavement of Deverill in The Gypsy and the Gentleman and Lady Fenton’s devious framing of Jan for murder in Blind Date. For Gilles Jacob, this gender binary once again reiterates Losey’s predilection for the Manichaeist fable: Losey here reveals a touch of puritanism, which carries over into his somewhat biblical and rather simplified conception of the role of women as the root of all evil: it is soon apparent that she has no place in this world of delicately balanced equilibrium, if indeed she is not excluded a priori. The duplicity of woman, resulting almost vindictively in death, recurs so often as a theme that one begins to suspect some settling of old personal scores behind it all.6

As Jeanne Moreau noted in our discussion of Eve, Losey loved femininity in women, but at the same time failed to understand it except as sexual power over men. This view is supported by Losey himself, who openly acknowledged his resentment of women as objects of desire because they created dependency, like that of a child’s longing for his parents: I think people who are searching for parents are also searching for a very particular kind of love in any sexual, heterosexual or homosexual relationship. And this is necessarily a love–hate relationship because whenever such a person enters into a relationship it is always with the expectation of being betrayed, and the hope that they won’t be. Therefore, before you can be betrayed, you aggress and you test the person that you are attaching your affection to by humiliation and cruelty and 7 brutality.

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This need to construct an emotional defence mechanism through an aggressive, pre-emptive strike helps to explain (if not condone) Losey’s second approach to the ‘female problem’: his habitual humiliation of women by making them the passive adjuncts or victims of impulsive men. Caute traces this tendency to Losey’s ambivalent relationship to his own parents, Ina (née Higbee) and Joseph Jr.: ‘Losey associated his mother with the predatory claims of beauty (sex) on wealth and blue blood (good breeding). Throughout his life he was haunted by his father’s failure to be rich enough to command his wife’s respect; [he] responded to his father’s defeat by populating his films with aggressive men prepared to treat women with casual contempt or ruthless exploitation.’8 Although we can cite numerous examples to support this claim – Robert Stanford’s brutal treatment of his wife Honor in Time Without Pity, Stanley Baker’s callous rejection of Jill Bennett’s Maggie in The Criminal, Virna Lisi’s Francesca in Eve and his wife Laura in Accident – this conventional psychological profile is itself somewhat limiting, for strict gender divisions are further complicated by issues of class and race, which in turn become grist for Losey’s more equalizing naturalist mill. Thus Tony in The Servant and Deverill in The Gypsy and the Gentleman lose both their class and sexual identity at the usurping hands of the ‘servile’ underclass, effectively reducing gender and hierarchical difference to a common welter of impulsive drives. Losey also opts for a more nomadic notion of difference in which the dialectical ‘subalternas-other’ is replaced by a fluid and constructive sense of alterity, particularly through Losey’s embrace of the artist’s imaginary. The sculptress Freya, for example, has more in common with Jan and his evocative paintings of Dutch miners in Blind Date, or the poetic effusions of Boom!’s Chris Flanders than she does with the overtly sadistic Mrs Fothergill in Modesty Blaise, or acquisitive women such as Lady Fenton and Mrs Maudsley, who are more appropriately aligned with ruling-class genealogies of title, wealth and inheritance. Finally, although Losey’s world is often inhospitable to women, this doesn’t necessarily mean that his films condone this hostility. Whether through Brechtian V-Effekt or more subtle shifts in focalization and mise-en-scène, most of his work directly explores and addresses the ideological interpellation of women by analysing the cultural assumptions that both construct and perpetuate it. This is specifically true of the three films discussed in this chapter – A Doll’s House (1973), The Romantic Englishwoman (1975) and Steaming (1985) – late works that explore and celebrate women’s will-to-power but also its inevitable, almost fateful circumscription by the ideological forces of patriarchal capitalism. More seriously, in the case of The Romantic Englishwoman

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and Steaming, these forces recruit the creative medium of art itself, foreclosing Losey’s usual Nietzschean escape hatch by co-opting the imaginary into the dominant discursive formation. In this respect, A Doll’s House represents an ideological template for the films that follow. Co-produced by John Heyman’s World Film Services and Les Films de la Boétie (Paris), Henrik Ibsen’s classic drama was made entirely on location for the extremely low sum of $912,850, with the entire cast and crew receiving equal salary and billing. The play was adapted by David Mercer, a talented painter and playwright who had cut his teeth in television before breaking into features with highly acclaimed screenplays for Karel Reisz’s Morgan (1965) and Ken Loach’s Family Life (1971). Although it was considered extremely daring in its day, to the point of causing a critical uproar at the time of its publication in 1879, Ibsen’s proto-feminist tale of a closeted young woman who leaves her husband and children in search of personal self-fulfilment must have seemed rather naive and dated by 1970s standards. As a result Losey and Mercer made two significant changes in the play’s original narrative focus. Firstly, by shifting attention away from the hermetic confines of the Helmer household to the broader context of nineteenth-century capitalism as a whole, Losey transforms a somewhat contrived and simplistic plea for the emancipation of women into a more insightful, albeit more pessimistic, examination of bourgeois hegemony itself. Nora thus passes from selfwilled heroine to an unwitting dupe of ideological inoculation, in which she internalizes the power of patriarchy at the very moment she seemingly breaks free from its clutches. Secondly, by casting ‘Hanoi Jane’ Fonda as Nora, Losey tried to inject the material with some early 1970s topicality, not only to stress the germ of militant feminism in the character’s sexual and political awakening, but also to draw parallels with Fonda’s own personal metamorphosis from the sexy nymphet of Roger Vadim’s Barbarella (1968) to serious political activist. The results are mixed at best. From her mannered vocal inflections to her sexually assertive body language, Fonda is never other than a modern American actress slotted anachronistically into the role of a nineteenth-century Norwegian woman. While this has obvious potential as V-Effekt, many critics found the uneasy historical and ideological fit disturbing. Indeed, Alexander Walker, writing in the London Evening Standard, was venomous in his dislike of Fonda, remarking that, ‘the cheer-leader for Women’s Lib would need a step ladder to get within reaching distance of Ibsen’s liberated woman … [R]oles of Nora’s complexity are not mastered on the battlefields of Vietnam.’9 The New York Times’s Nora Sayre was far more positive, noting that Fonda’s

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performance ‘achieved the ringing gaiety and the energy that the role demands … Gradually and subtly, we are given a portrait of a political 10 prisoner – one who hasn’t ever tasted the air outside the walls.’ One shouldn’t infer from Losey’s and Mercer’s revisions that Ibsen ends up eviscerated, however, for there are a number of themes in the original play that seem tailor-made to fit the director’s overall oeuvre. As Tony Rayns noted at the time of the film’s release, ‘Here is another “foreign country” where they do things differently; another painfully sympathetic and melancholy examination of the destructiveness inherent in most relationships; another episode in Losey’s continuing exploration of the family unit, begun in Secret Ceremony and continued in The 11 Go-Between.’ Rayns might have gone even further, for like Eve and Modesty Blaise the play’s power relations are also rooted in Marx’s spectral economy of exchange value, more specifically paper representations of money such as legal contracts, bills of exchange, sureties, IOUs and, most importantly, that frightful apparition called credit. In his 1844 notes on James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy, the young Marx wrote – in appropriately ghostly metaphors – that ‘in the credit system man replaces metal or paper as the mediator of exchange. However, he does this not as a man but as the incarnation of capital and interest … [M]an is himself transformed into money, or, in other words, money is incarnate in him.’12 For Marx, money, wage-labour, banking and credit are all forms of human alienation. In the capitalist system of exchange, social intercourse lies not between men and/or women per se, but between men and women as things of value. By specifically tying the pitfalls of financial credit to the health and happiness of the human body, Ibsen seems to have taken Marx’s dire forebodings to heart. Indeed, we see the effects of this paper economy at work throughout A Doll’s House. Almost ten years prior to the immediate action of the play, Nora (Fonda) bids fond farewell to her childhood friend Kristine (Seyrig) and leaves their Norwegian village for the big town further up the fjord to marry an up-and-coming young lawyer, Torvald Helmer (David Warner). Torvald has already shown his mettle by skilfully extricating Nora’s extravagant father from acute financial embarrassment. At the same time, Kristine breaks off her engagement to Nils Krogstad (Edward Fox), a lawyer with some real prospects but no money, in order to marry a wealthy suitor so that she can support her widowed mother and two young brothers. Thus, while Nora marries for both love and money, Kristine is forced to exchange one for the other so that the family unit can survive intact. Two years later, however, we find that the shoe is firmly on the other foot. Nora is married and pregnant with her first child when she

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receives a double blow: her father dies just as Torvald falls seriously ill. The Helmers’ family friend, Dr Rank (Trevor Howard), prescribes a year in Italy to restore Torvald’s deteriorating health. Unbeknownst to her irascible husband – he sees the convalescence more as a sentence than a cure – Nora finances the trip not, as she claims, from her father’s legacy (he actually died penniless) but by secretly borrowing the money from Krogstad, who has also moved to town to improve his prospects. Fatefully, because of her father’s untimely death, Nora is forced to forge his signature on the promissory note that guarantees the loan. This illegal act is further compounded by the fact that under Norwegian law a wife cannot borrow money without her husband’s consent. Nora is thus caught in a gender trap laid by the unyielding patriarchal laws of exchange value. She is forced to mortgage Torvald’s future – his fleshand-blood bodily existence as well as his social worth and status – against the invisible spectre of Krogstad’s credit. One Christmas, seven years later, this revenant reappears unexpectedly out of the past to haunt the unprepared Nora. Still the girlish, selfindulgent spendthrift of her youth, she is now the mother of three beautiful children, while Torvald, fully recovered from his illness, is about to become manager of the local bank. While fortune has clearly smiled on the Helmers, the same cannot be said for the unfortunate Krogstad. His career ruined by a scandal in which, like Nora, he also forged a financial document, he is now a social pariah, an impoverished single father forced to support two small children by working as a lowly clerk in Torvald’s bank. Learning of the latter’s appointment, Krogstad decides to exploit their old schoolboy friendship by opportunistically asking the new manager for a long-overdue promotion. Unfortunately, the legacy of the earlier scandal, as well as his brash, tactless manner, earns Krogstad his dismissal – on Christmas Day, no less. Ironically, at Nora’s urging, Torvald offers Krogstad’s job to Kristine (now a childless widow) who has recently moved to town seeking work. Continuing the narrative’s endless coincidence of exchange, Krogstad is thus doubly victimized by both Kristine and the Helmers. The former rewards his love by passing him up for a richer man in order to support her family, and then returns childless to (unwittingly) take away his job. The latter repays his life-saving loan by depriving him of his own equally valid right to feed his children. Fuelled by desperation and revenge, Krogstad fights back with sordid blackmail, threatening to expose Nora’s forgery (and thereby ruin Torvald’s otherwise spotless reputation) if she doesn’t speak to her husband on his behalf. Although he has the letter of the law on his side, Nora naively appeals to its moral spirit:

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Nora: ‘My father was dying. My husband’s life was in danger. Surely the law takes account of such things.’ Krogstad: ‘The law does not take account of motives in such matters.’ ‘Then the law is wrong.’ ‘The law will have its way.’

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Shaken to the core, a frightened Nora confides first in Kristine, who advises her friend to come clean and tell Torvald the truth. Convinced that her husband would never forgive her, she instead begs to have Krogstad reinstated. Torvald dismisses her request with sexist disdain: ‘The very fact that you’re pleading his cause makes it impossible for me to keep him. If the rumour should get about that the new manager had allowed his wife to persuade him to change his mind …’ Following this rebuff, Nora turns to Dr Rank, who has just learned by telegram (paper once again) that his hereditary spinal syphilis is fatal. When the ailing doctor confesses his long-standing love for Nora, she is unable to ask for his help, once again reinforcing the drama’s recurring antinomy between love and the laws of contract. Admitting her failure to Krogstad, Nora discovers that he has already written a letter to Torvald outlining the whole scandalous story. This missive – which sits tantalizingly unopened in the Helmers’ mailbox – now becomes the dramatic catalyst and affective currency for what follows. After failing to pick the mail-box lock with a hairpin – symbolizing that the world of letters and contracts is closed to the ‘wiles’ of women – Nora begs Kristine to intercede with Krogstad on her behalf, while she in turn will buy time by distracting Torvald from reading the letter. Kristine agrees, on condition that Nora put an end to years of lies and subterfuge by telling Torvald the whole story. While Nora dances a gypsy tarantella at their neighbours’ Boxing Day party – arousing the usually frigid Torvald in the process – Kristine goes to work on Krogstad. Losey uses cross-cutting to good effect here, presenting the two events (one, the frenzied movement of the deadly tarantella, the other, a studied, life-affirming calm) in separate but linked spaces, as if they constituted the two parallel strains of the prologue’s original temporal fork. After some tentative sparring, the once-estranged couple quickly realize that they are still in love and Kristine offers to be a devoted wife and mother to Krogstad and his two children. Kristine thus turns out to be the calm at the centre of the storm, what Caute calls ‘the embodiment of womanly common-sense and self-sacrifice, as well as the energetic do-gooder who decides that everyone will benefit if the truth is told’.13 Although her intervention hastens Nora’s eventual epiphany, she is also one of those meddling idealists that Ibsen always distrusted.

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Inspired by Kristine’s unconditional faith in his more noble qualities, Krogstad agrees to put an end to his blackmail and writes another letter, withdrawing his earlier charge. Nora, meanwhile, has made other, more fatalistic plans. Anticipating a ‘miracle’, in which Torvald would forgive and accept the burden of her crime, Nora would instead commit suicide, thereby releasing her husband from all ethical and financial responsibility. Alas, when Torvald reads Krogstad’s original blackmail letter, the ‘miracle’ fails to materialize. Bursting with moral indignation, Torvald attacks Nora as an unfit wife and mother: ‘For eight whole years, you, my pride and joy, a liar, a hypocrite. Is this the way you will reward me for love and trust? … You’ve destroyed my whole future. Krogstad has me in his power. He has no scruples, and I dare not disobey him!’ After depriving Nora of the right to see her children, he at the same time insists that they maintain the outward pretence of marriage. When Krogstad’s second letter arrives, withdrawing the charges and returning the forged promissory note, Torvald is overjoyed. His career and reputation saved, he offers Nora complete forgiveness, while in the same breath reasserting his rights to patriarchal ownership: ‘When a husband forgives his wife, unreservedly from the bottom of his heart, do you know what it means? It means that she has become his in a double sense. His wife and his child.’ But this dramatic turn of events has opened Nora’s eyes for the first time. Realizing that her value and honour as a woman have been compromised, first by a schoolgirlish devotion to the received wisdom of her father, and secondly by a decade of loyal subservience to a man she does not love, she renounces her joint role of wife and mother and walks out forever, leaving a shocked and nonplussed Torvald devastated and alone. The circle of difference is thus complete: just as Kristine and Krogstad finally pick up the broken pieces of their youthful ardour and commit to a future built on mutual love and respect, Nora discovers the sham of her own romantic teenage fantasies and exchanges the security of a loveless marriage for the more vulnerable adventure of self-discovery and free will. For film critic Jan Dawson, ‘Ibsen’s Nora was a human bird in a gilded prison, a weary dancer turning in a fixed circle on a mechanical music-box to which her husband held the key.’14 Unfortunately, much the same could be said of Ibsen’s plotting, for although the play may seem quite modern in its subject matter, it still betrays its mechanical melodramatic origins. In contrast to the set-bound Galileo, which deliberately accentuated Brecht’s theatrical artifice as a form of didactic V-Effekt, Losey and Mercer wisely opted to open up the play and extend its exegetical time frame, so that instead of waiting passively at home to

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confide in every caller who comes to the house, Nora is now able to actively rush about town for her various rendezvous. Both interior and exterior scenes were shot in Norway’s picturesque town of Røros, utilizing the actual townspeople as extras. This not only produced greater authenticity, but allowed Losey to cross-cut between different locations – Dr Rank’s apartment, Torvald’s office at the bank, Kristine’s furnished rooms, Krogstad’s house – for dramatic emphasis, as well as expand the drama from the play’s single set to include all the rooms of the Helmer household, stressing both physical comforts and their deadly insularity. In addition, events that are alluded to in expositional dialogue in the play – the pre-marriage friendship of Nora and Kristine, the latter’s break with Krogstad, the death of Nora’s father and Torvald’s illness – are now given their own separate scenes in an extensive prologue, while the health-giving effects of the Italian interlude are neatly condensed into a single, sepia-tinted family snapshot placed on the Helmers’ piano. This roots the causes of Nora’s final break with Torvald in more tangible and psychologically grounded events ranging over a greater period of narrative as well as immanent time. In this way her rejection of bourgeois marriage plays less like an ideological deus ex machina than a Proustian sense of lost time regained, a return to the partial freedoms – but also traps – of her carefree youth. Far from relieving the play’s inherent sense of confinement, however, this opening up actually heightens it, for as Losey argues, ‘it is still an enclosed and claustrophobic picture in the sense that the village itself … is a more terrifying claustrophobia than just one room. You have the feeling that nobody can ever get out of this village, and when Nora leaves, she really has no place to go.’15 The characters – both men and women – are thus caught in a larger trap, incorporating provincial society as a whole: ‘the whole village was a collection of doll’s houses, and many of the dolls living in them were male.’16 Moreover, as Hirsch points out, ‘Nora’s “imprisonment” is psychological, not physical. She is free to come and go as she pleases, but she is never free of her mask as a flirtatious, childlike wife. Helmer’s tyranny does not extend to keeping Nora at home; quite the opposite, he is proud to take her out, to show 17 her off.’ This paradox of spatial ‘freedom’ and contractual ‘slavery’ is ominously foretold in the very opening scene of the prologue, which roots Nora’s future dilemma in the vicissitudes of time itself. The film begins with a long shot of the idyllic, snow-covered Norwegian countryside, before we pan right to reveal the picturesque scene of a horsedrawn sleigh in the foreground and a group of ice-skaters in the

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distance. This innocent Eden, which evokes nostalgic memories of a carefree childhood without parental or wifely responsibilities, is reinforced by Michel Legrand’s bright, horn-dominated neo-classical score, whose darting, Pulcinella-like rhythms generate an exhilarating sense of limitless energy and movement. Losey then shifts from the general to the specific by zooming in toward the frozen village pond, where we discover the boisterous young Nora and Kristine skating, before collapsing breathlessly on the teahouse steps to rest. ‘Ooh, it’s like flying … it’s like birds’, gasps the lovesick Nora, clearly floating on air at the prospect of her forthcoming marriage to Torvald. However, as one might expect with Losey, this winter wonderland also has its darker underbelly, for it holds within it the more immanent, crystalline time of Nora’s future ‘enslavement’ by both Torvald and Krogstad. The bird metaphor is particularly ironic: far from feeling ‘as free as a bird’, within two years Nora will become Torvald’s tamed ‘little skylark’, as he condescendingly calls her. In addition, just as we see Nora and Kristine skidding excitedly across the surface of the pond, we also spot a static, black-coated figure lurking ominously outside the teahouse in the exact centre of the shot (i.e. at the spatial vanishing point). This turns out to be Krogstad, steeling himself for his fateful rejection by Kristine. The sweet purity of youth is thus already tainted by the acrid taste of the social outcast – the future man of vengeance – and the source of Nora’s own financial enslavement. Losey reinforces this link spatially, for while Nora and Kristine animatedly discuss their future plans over macaroons and hot chocolate in the snug interior of the tea house, Losey uses deep focus and long takes to present the scene as a succession of double images, showing both the glacial, Brueghel-like winter scene outside the window, with its endless movement of skaters, and the cosy, static, predominantly brown and ochre environment inside. The ambivalent figure who straddles the dividing line between these two worlds (but effectively inhabits neither), is of course Krogstad, who hovers like a leprous outcast at the tea-house window, just as he will later return as a social pariah to blackmail Nora at the Helmers’ comfortable town house. This parallelism suggests that the film will unfold against multiple fields of action as well as multiple folds of time: the wintry background will return to haunt the seemingly insulated interiors of the succession of present moments to come, thereby deconstructing the clear-cut division between past and present, inside and outside, through the annihilating agency of exchange value. Nora’s psychological and economic entrapment within this spatiotemporal matrix is expressed through Losey’s increasingly claustrophobic mise-en-scène. Thus the snow-covered streets of the town, far from

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offering an escape from the inhibiting confines of Torvald’s house, are equally confining, an objective correlative of Nora’s enslavement to the past as well as to the social mores of patriarchal capitalism as a whole. This expressive use of location isn’t clear-cut, however, for as Durgnat accurately observes:

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Losey, like Antonioni, makes extensive use of the film equation: setting = feeling, and of its complement, setting = environment, the two equations sometimes harmonising, sometimes conflicting, sometimes creating ‘indecisions’ which are also part of the film’s content. Inner and outer world are projected into the background, and interpenetrate with each 18 other … so as to express the private and the social force of the drama.

These ‘indecisions’ are seen in the film’s ambivalent attitude toward Nora’s youthful past, which is both the site of virginal innocence and the breeding ground of later impulsive behaviour and its manipulative pathologies. In this respect, the protagonists’ relationship to both childhood and children becomes the index of a linked chain of displacements and self-deceptions. Thus when Krogstad first approaches Nora with his threat of blackmail, she is playing hide and seek with her children in the dining room, directly linking his vengeful passion with the innocence of childhood games. In fact, we first see him at floor level from Nora’s hiding place under the table, so that he is wedged in the doorway in deep space, in much the same way that we first saw him ten years earlier from inside the village tea-house. Thus, while Nora ‘regresses’ to childhood through these playful fun and games with her own children, she comes face-to-face with the Janus face of both her immature past and her compromised future in the form of its singular primordial being: Krogstad himself. These links – or more accurately, ‘shackles’ – between Nora and Krogstad are reinforced in a subsequent scene, shot on a bridge spanning the town’s frozen river, where the blackmailer lays out his demands. Although Losey frames both figures against the virgin white of the snow, they are also caught within a complex network of wooden support beams, enveloping Nora within a spatial trap of her own making, as well as expressing both parties’ unwitting enslavement to the laws of contract. In contrast, the snow-covered terrain of the town is also the site of youthful fun, whether sleigh rides, tobogganing or snowball fights, activities enjoyed by Nora and Krogstad’s children alike. This not only connects the present to Nora’s own happy-go-lucky youth, but also links the two antagonists through the common responsibility of parenthood. This association is important because it helps to humanize Krogstad and make his eventual rehabilitation sympathetic and credible, while at

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the same time serving as an index of the two characters’ reversal of fortune. At one point, for example, Nora tries to placate Krogstad by appealing to his parental sympathies: ‘Oh, show me some heart. Think of my children.’ ‘Have you and your husband ever thought of my children?’ he responds, bitterly. The shifting moral boundaries inherent in this exchange are borne out by the film’s conclusion: as Krogstad rejuvenates himself by reuniting with the childless Kristine and consequently rebuilding their lives on the strength of the nuclear family, Nora shatters her own family unit by deserting her children for an unknown future. Just as one brood gains a mother, another loses one. Indeed, Nora’s rejection of her children is a necessary corollary to her striving for self-identity: Nora: ‘This house is like a playroom. My children have been my dolls.’ Torvald: ‘Do you forget your most sacred duties? Your husband? Your children? Your position as mother and wife?’ Nora: ‘I have another duty. Equally sacred, if that is the word. My duty to myself.’ Torvald: ‘You’re first and foremost a wife and mother!’ Nora: ‘I can’t believe that anymore. I believe that first and foremost I am a human being like you, or must become one … I don’t want to see the children. As I am now, I can be nothing to them.’

This sense of identity as a becoming is crucial, for it suggests that Nora’s draconian decision entails a willed reconstruction of herself as a future projection, predicated on a re-education outside the rubric of Torvald’s patriarchal domain and the repressive laws of the Victorian marriage contract. At the same time, however, Nora’s unknown future also entails a partial return to her own childhood past, for as she tells Torvald, ‘Tomorrow I shall go home, to where I was born. It will be easier for me to get a job there.’ Nora thus gives up her maternal responsibility to her children as the first step to appropriating her own lost childhood, as if she were returning ‘home’ for moral sustenance in order to rebuild her identity from scratch, stripped of her earlier idealized notions of romantic marriage. Losey refuses to condone this move unconditionally, however, for the film’s final two shots are clearly ambivalent. The penultimate set-up is a tight hallway view of the Helmers’ front door as Nora exits the house for the last time. The main door is closed, as if Nora has turned her back on Torvald’s world forever. On the other hand, the mailbox door is open, suggesting the possibility of a further, double reading. Firstly, we have the sense that Torvald’s ‘little skylark’ has flown the coop, that Nora’s liberation from her past contract with Krogstad – distilled in the symbol of her forged promissory note – has finally freed her from the shackles

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of credit and paper transactions. Secondly, the open mailbox door also evokes a come-hither lure of invitation, suggesting that the world outside is also a seductive world of credit and exchange, that far from exorcising the ghost of paper and contracts, Nora is in fact walking straight into its clutches. Losey underscores this reading with the film’s final image, a gloomy establishing shot of the snow-covered, fog-bound town as a single primordial image of glacial impulse, much like the devastating snowbound denouements of The Criminal and Figures in a Landscape. As in Galileo, the church bell tolls, not as a death knell – Nora is in a sense undergoing a re-birth – but as an evocation of immanent time: the world Nora is entering is fraught with as much peril as the one she has just left. Moreover, the shot is significantly devoid of human life, suggesting that although Nora may think she has freed herself from prevailing prejudice, she is entering the outside world with few allies – Kristine and Krogstad are, in effect, wage slaves – and no alternative community to embrace her. Nora thus steps out of Torvald’s libidinal icebox into Røros’s unforgiving socio-economic deep-freeze with little hope of survival. What A Doll’s House lacks is a Nietzschean, affirmative life force that can break the shackles of this sexual economy by affirming the luck of the dice throw over the business contract. In other words, the film lacks a truly creative artist. In this respect The Romantic Englishwoman, Thomas Wiseman’s self-reflexive ‘feminist’ novel, should have been a far more fruitful vehicle for exploring gender difference. With its narrative focus on a middle-aged woman’s attempts to reconstruct her sexual identity through the liberating power of the creative imagination, it represents a return to the more familiar aesthetic discourse of Blind Date. ‘What interested me most about it’, recalled Losey, ‘were the various points of view – the fantasy of the husband about his wife, the fantasy of the wife about herself, plus the catalyst of the poet, who says very little but is the only one who really has an articulate philosophy.’19 Alas, the film turns out to be less a celebration of difference than a cautionary warning: the woman ends up caught in the twin jaws of a patriarchal and psychological trap. The ‘Romantic Englishwoman’ in this case is Elisabeth Fielding (Glenda Jackson), a forty-ish wife and mother who, as the film opens, arrives at Baden Baden for a short vacation at the luxurious Brenner’s Park Hotel. Travelling on the same train is a handsome German, Thomas Hursa (Helmut Berger), sometime ‘poet’ and gigolo, who is carrying a substantial cache of illegal drugs. As they check into the same hotel, Thomas spots his drug buyer being arrested by the police.

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Thinking quickly, he climbs onto the roof and conceals his stash in a sluice pipe. Meanwhile, back home in suburban Weybridge, Elisabeth’s novelist husband Lewis (Michael Caine) is meeting with his friend Herman (Rene Kolldehof), a German film producer. Herman is trying to interest the writer in developing his latest idea for a film script. It’s a psychological story about Caroline, a discontented ‘new woman’ who goes on a voyage of self-discovery. Lewis reluctantly takes the assignment, and immediately starts conflating Caroline’s fictional odyssey with his wife’s real-life vacation in Baden Baden. After a late night at the local casino – where she has already made eye contact with Thomas – Elisabeth returns to the hotel to discover that Lewis has left a message. Returning his call from the lobby, she asks after their son, David, but abruptly cuts off the conversation when she hears the arrival of the hotel lift. Meanwhile, Thomas has also returned to the hotel and they ride up together to the wrong floor, where the gigolo poet introduces himself for the first time. ‘Why have you come to Baden Baden?’ asks Thomas. ‘I came for the waters’, fibs Elisabeth, a cute homage to Bogart’s similar line in Casablanca, but also some clever dissimulation. We never find out what drove this bored housewife to Germany’s chic spa in the first place. Although their conversation has been perfectly ‘innocent’, centring largely on Thomas’s dual ‘profession’, Lewis’s imagination is working overtime. Fuelled by Herman’s suggestive scenario, he fantasizes his wife making love with an unidentified man in a similar lift, a scene that will ultimately end up in his Caroline scenario. Losey shoots the scene without sound in dark shadow, so that we only catch a glimpse of a man’s hand caressing Elizabeth’s ecstatic face as the lift ascends, followed by a pan down her white evening dress to reveal a flash of bared thigh. Having spurred himself into a minor fit of jealousy, Lewis calls back but gets no answer from Elisabeth’s room. When she finally picks up – she apparently fell asleep in the bath – she reassures him that she will be returning to Weybridge the next day. Ignoring Elisabeth’s perfectly reasonable explanation, Lewis reprises his sexual fantasy. This folding together of the fictional Caroline’s sexual exploits with Lewis’s own insecurities about Elisabeth’s fidelity becomes the driving libidinal and creative force of what follows. After a missed connection, the couple finally reunite the following evening. Succumbing to a fit of passion, they engage in impromptu sex on the back lawn, only to be interrupted by their stiff-upper-lip neighbour (Tom Chatto), who is either completely oblivious or too decorous to acknowledge what is going on. As if to underscore the bourgeois propriety of the Fieldings’ surburban existence, Losey immediately follows this comical coitus

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interruptus with a dramatic shift in narrative tone. As the gigolo Thomas checks out of the Baden Baden hotel with his latest wealthy ‘meal ticket’ (Lillian Walker), he spots Swan, the leader of the drug cartel (a dapper, white-suited Michel Lonsdale), who has presumably come to collect his delayed delivery. Dashing up to the roof, Thomas discovers that the entire stash has been washed away in the rain. Rather than face the music with Swan, he decides to make a hurried getaway. Desperately in need of a secluded place to hide out, Thomas writes a letter of introduction to Lewis, mentioning his meeting with Elisabeth and citing his credentials as a poet. Confusing Lewis with Henry Fielding, he also claims to be an ardent admirer of the novelist’s works, especially Tom Jones. Lewis’s increasingly paranoid suspicions of his wife’s infidelity – which are already being played out fictionally via Caroline, and exacerbated by the gossipy innuendo of Elisabeth’s journalist friend, Isabel (Kate Nelligan) – are seemingly confirmed when, on hearing about the poet’s letter, Elisabeth admits that she met Thomas in the hotel lift. Lewis’s earlier fantasy suddenly has a real, factual basis, and a potential face to go with it. By writing Thomas into his script, Lewis hopes to provoke Elisabeth into admitting what he fears most – her adulterous desire for independence – but what he also controls, in part, via the construction of its fictional representation. Lewis thus appears to hold all the strings to the imaginary’s means of production by manipulating both Elisabeth’s and Thomas’s role within it. By a strange, twisted irony, the more Lewis has to lose as a cuckolded husband, the more he hopes to gain as a purveyor of fictions. What he doesn’t know is that he is already a pawn in a much larger scenario – a drug game with far higher stakes – authored by Thomas and Swan. As Palmer and Riley point out, ‘the viewer therefore realizes long before either of the Fieldings that Thomas has his own reasons to seek an out-of-the-way refuge. That his motives for following up on his acquaintance with Elisabeth should coincide with Lewis’s rampant jealousy is not the least of the film’s ironies.’20 When Thomas suddenly turns up on the Fieldings’ doorstep for afternoon tea, reality starts to overtake fiction. Despite Elisabeth’s protests at Thomas’s ‘sheer bloody cheek’, Lewis rises to the challenge by inviting him to stay on as his paid secretary. In this way the novelist can more effectually manipulate the increasingly inseparable threads – fictional and actual – of the developing scenario. However, Thomas proceeds to usurp Lewis’s sovereign place within the household, starting with his inevitable seduction of Catherine, the Fieldings’ French au pair (Béatrice Romand). Matters come to a head when

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Elisabeth discovers young David (Marcus Richardson) sitting precariously on the window ledge of an upstairs window while Thomas gives an English lesson to the neglectful Catherine in an adjacent bedroom. The au pair’s subsequent dismissal is the turning point in the film, not only because it brings home to Elisabeth the sheer stress and drudgery of her maternal responsibilities, but also because it gives Lewis a golden opportunity to test her wifely loyalty. When, for lack of a babysitter, the Fieldings are unable to attend an invitation-only film screening, Lewis volunteers to stay at home with David while Thomas accompanies Elisabeth. Seizing the moment, Elisabeth throws the invitation out of the car window and proposes to Thomas a ‘romantic’ dinner instead. However, at the restaurant they run into an equally adulterous Isabel accompanied by ‘George’ (David De Keyser), one of Swan’s underworld associates. With his cover blown, Thomas decides to leave England at once. Returning home, Elisabeth finally turns her husband’s cuckold fantasy into reality by making love to Thomas in the Fieldings’ gazebo. Discovered by an incensed Lewis, Elisabeth makes a snap decision to leave with Thomas. Until now, The Romantic Englishwoman has played fast and loose in its affectionate homage to different filmic genres. Losey shifts playfully between Herman’s idea of a contemporary women’s film (which more closely resembles an old Bette Davis vehicle, such as Now Voyager);21 the policier or série noire (Thomas’s drug trafficking); the light romantic thriller with echoes of Last Year at Marienbad (Thomas and Elisabeth at Baden Baden: did they or didn’t they make love in the lift?); and a Pinteresque domestic comedy of manners (the sexual triangle at Weybridge). For Palmer and Riley, a self-conscious commentary on its own narrative strategies is as much a deliberate theme of the film as those that arise from its story … From beginning to end, the film ‘talks’ about itself as a story about stories, about its characters as types, and about its various genre legacies even as it trades shamelessly and wittily in the currency of these very genres and types.22

As we cut from the nocturnal claustrophobia of Weybridge to a sunlit view of Elisabeth’s yellow Austin Mini speeding along the French Riviera, the film finally settles down into a singular, coherent voice as we see the re-emergence of the semi-parodic travelogue style that has lain dormant since Baden Baden. At the same time, it is all too evident that Elisabeth and Thomas have run away for quite different purposes, each ruled by a different narrative genre. While Thomas has been discovered by Swan’s associate and is once again on the run, Elisabeth is

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merely living out Lewis’s masochistic fantasy that Thomas will become her lover. This conflict of personal and genre interests produces immediate narrative problems. Blinded by the sheer adventurousness of her naive, romantic illusions, Elisabeth has run away from home with absolutely no money. As the world’s quintessential sponger, Thomas is no immediate help. He is therefore forced to resume his career as a drug trafficker and refine his undiminished talents as a gigolo, while rationing Elisabeth to occasional bouts of steamy hotel-room sex. Sensing that the innately bourgeois Elisabeth is not only out of her depth but also about to bleed him dry – ‘The Englishwoman was the most romantic’, says Thomas of his various liaisons, ‘all she wanted was everything’ – Thomas telephones Lewis with news of their whereabouts, and tells him to come and retrieve his wife. As a result, even Elisabeth’s ‘escape’ is narratively circumscribed. Thomas may be alluringly anarchic but he also shows a great deal of patriarchal responsibility by returning her to the care of her husband. Lewis dutifully drives to the south of France in his Rolls Royce, but is tailed by Swan and his associates. He thereby inadvertently leads them straight to Thomas, who is led away to an almost certain death. Elisabeth and Lewis return home to Weybridge, where they find a previously arranged party already in progress in their house. Like Nora Helmer, they have become veritable strangers in their own home. Produced by Daniel Angel (King and Country), and adapted by Tom Stoppard, The Romantic Englishwoman is arguably one of Losey’s lesser efforts, a derivative retread of themes that were far fresher when served up in their original packaging. Although Losey’s own verdict – ‘I have no reason to be ashamed of it as a craftsman, although I think it is a piece of junk’23 – is a gross exaggeration, the familiar use of the amoral intruder to skewer the complacent sexual and cultural values of the bourgeoisie has all the hallmarks of a sub-Pinter rehash. Indeed, the Fieldings’ Weybridge home, with its plethora of baroque mirrors (including a distorted convex piece over the dining-room table) setting up circuits of shifting sovereignty throughout the household, has many of the trappings of Tony’s house in The Servant, accenting a similar sense of denial and unreality. Also, as Losey admitted to Ciment, ‘It deals with an impossible domestic situation in which a bourgeois life encases people and they don’t get out of it and to that extent it’s The Prowler, Accident, Eve.’24 However, given its concerns with the construction of gender and difference, the film has several points of interest. Most obviously, Elisabeth’s seemingly subjective movement toward sexual and ideological self-determination is foreclosed by her entrapment between two

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equally corrupted male Imaginaries: between the pseudo-anarchism of a gigolo poet, and the self-glorifying romantic platitudes of a hack novelist who, like a literary vampire, sucks other people dry in order to make his half-baked characters more ‘real’. Force-fed such received male wisdom, it’s hardly surprising that Elisabeth is unable either to pursue real emotional love or express the full potential of her bodily drives. Instead, she naively opts for passive self-abandonment in the company of the phoney Thomas, resulting in a humiliating return to the ‘penny dreadful’ outpourings of her sexually manipulating husband. Stoppard is particularly effective here, for his narrative strength has always been his ability to produce complex cross-references between life and literature, fiction and reality, as in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967), his pseudo-mimetic reworking of the marginalia of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, or the melodramatic parody of The Real Inspector Hound (1968). Compared to Wiseman’s original, where one is always aware that Lewis is the narrative’s controlling mechanism, Stoppard makes it much harder to distinguish between what really happened in Baden Baden and what Lewis imagined back in Weybridge. He also strips away much of the controlling focalization of the writer, locking him into the same analytical and critical context as the other characters. The danger with this approach – and one that the film never convincingly overcomes – is that the irony of Lewis’s fictional work spills over into the filmic discourse itself, so that it never develops the courage of its own didactic convictions. It becomes, in effect, the merger of two hacks: Lewis/Losey. As Jonathan Rosenbaum argues, ‘What remains is a perfectly adequate and watchable (if romantically routine) expression of the very milieu and sensibility that the film professes to expose and despise.’25 In the film, Lewis is writing a screenplay that gives him the creative power to re-create his wife’s trip to Baden Baden less as a manifestation of her own independent search for self than as part of his own fears and jealousies. This is then expanded into Lewis’s active construction of Elisabeth’s sex life by inviting Thomas to move in, as if he were playing the role of controlling pimp to his wife’s whorish fantasies. The question then becomes: Can Elisabeth refashion her own (fluid) identity and free herself from the pre-scripted roles that Lewis has scripted for her (or that Thomas will also circumscribe through his own entrapment in a drug-running, adventurist con-game)? The film’s central concern is whether Elisabeth can be allowed to have ‘her’ story, as opposed to the one already stage-managed by the men. For his part, Lewis’s main objective is to assert his own fantasy over Elisabeth’s by contesting and ultimately refuting his wife’s contention that nothing happened in

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Baden Baden. Lewis thereby doubles as the seducer in Resnais’s Marienbad, while Elisabeth stands in for Delphine Seyrig’s denying ‘lover’. In either case, fantasy is the main recourse of both protagonists, and it seems to be used far more as a vehicle of restriction – everything must be held firmly in its allotted libidinal place – than as a true line of flight. Much of Lewis’s (as well as the film’s) narrative control lies in its innate temporality, in particular its dependence on the linguistic conditional, what Lewis calls his philosophy of ‘What if …?’ Early in the film Herman throws an expensive dinner party (ironically, at the very same restaurant where Elisabeth and Thomas will later run into Isabel and ‘George’) that includes the Fieldings as well as a Sorbonne professor of philosophy named Miranda (Nathalie Delon). Much the worse for drink, Lewis takes this opportunity to pontificate on his favourite hypothetical subject: ‘The inescapable question: What if …? The realm of possibility is a terrible country. What if such and such were the case? What if the person you love is a liar? Did you ever ask yourself that?’ This question is particularly troubling to the novelist, because the narrative art raises endless questions without limit, pushing the realm of possibilities into a spectrum that can range from tragedy to the absurd. ‘What if …?’ is also a question that terrifies Elisabeth, whose ongoing concern for the burden of property – in particular David’s safety and uncertain future – demands an inordinate amount of self-imposed structure and stability to mitigate the risks of chance. This safety-first approach has become so ingrained that it has ended up defining who she is, which makes her all the more defensive. As she tells Lewis, Perhaps I am who you think I am. So what the hell. David’s fine. Your book sells ten thousand hard and a hundred thousand soft. The roof doesn’t leak, the house is painted, the deep freeze is full to overflowing, and there is fruit on the sideboard. I have twenty eight pairs of shoes in my wardrobe, eleven long dresses, and no knickers. I haven’t been on a bus since 1959. I have an account at Harrods, a standing order to Oxfam. So what the bloody hell!

Throughout this diatribe, Elisabeth has been busy with a magic marker defacing several black and white photographs of her own face, each one part of a series that Lewis has used to cover his study walls. The pictures are symptomatic of his objectification of his wife into a fragment or fetish, as well as an overdetermination of her position as a mere signifier for Lewis’s spiteful manipulation. By drawing spectacles, wrinkles, devils’ horns and moustaches on the photos, Elisabeth attempts to retrieve her fetishized image and reproduce it back into the realm of a

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more liberating sense of ‘What if …’ Unfortunately, Thomas is hardly a panacea for this more creative reworking of gender possibilities, because just as Lewis and Elisabeth are defined by what they possess, the nomadic poet is limited in turn by what he lacks (an obvious parallel to the Freudian economy of having and not having the penis). Elisabeth would therefore be attracted to an essentially ‘feminized’ figure, in effect the mirror image of herself. These are the twin jaws of same trap, the result of reducing complex issues of identity (which is innately a becoming, a multiplicity) to the limited parameters of a society that measures what you are by the benchmark of property. Lewis’s solution to the fearful potential of ‘What if …?’ is to shackle both his life and his art to the safe realm of conceptual or fictional conjecture, so that the unthinkable or the impossible are always accounted for within the controlled conditions of the linguistic text. As he says in Wiseman’s book, ‘Perhaps writing novels also serves some such end: to rehearse what one fears most, the enactment of it in words – a kind of reckless tempting of fate.’26 Thus, in terms of Thomas and Elisabeth, ‘It was not as if Lewis Fielding could not foresee the consequences. On the contrary, he foresaw them only too vividly. He could see that such a story must inevitably have a tragic outcome, a calamity must occur. The form demanded it. As an author one is quite helpless in these matters.’27 There is strong evidence that this aesthetically manipulated realm of future possibilities extends to Losey’s whole scenario, as if Lewis were the controlling hand behind every image. The film’s opening credits, for example, are shown over a window view of the fir-lined, snow-covered Schwarzwald shot from inside a moving train, as if we were journeying into an unknown and timeless originary world.28 Our first glimpse of Elisabeth is not as a real body but as a virtual image reflected in the window, which alternately appears and disappears depending on whether the scene outside the window is light or dark. The film’s spectral economy is thereby established from the beginning: movement and time determine what is there/not there, expressed through a fugitive image of reflection/multiplicity. What we have, in short, is a ‘real’ that has already been filtered through someone else’s Imaginary. That this someone else is Lewis is borne out by subsequent events – he always claimed to know Elisabeth better than she knows herself – but also by the film’s self-reflexive sense of parody, which is more a reflection of Lewis’s low-brow, pulp-fiction sensibility than the omniscient voice of the filmmaker. Thus Richard Hartley’s romantic score, with its scurrying woodwinds over ominous bass strings, is a standard, almost clichéd musical shorthand for evoking a sense of mystery, while the

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single oboe leitmotif, representing Elisabeth’s plaintive yearning for adventure and self-discovery, is equally trite. Similarly, when Thomas retrieves his drugs from their hiding place in the train bathroom, we hear vaguely Middle Eastern strings, evoking sinister connections to exotic places like Istanbul, as if Lewis were already working out the thriller, ‘Orient Express’ espionage dimension to his story. Later, when Elisabeth takes a fiacre from the station to her hotel – the dull, steady drizzle is another indication that Lewis’s sensibility is at work, filtering romantic Baden Baden through the prism of typical Weybridge weather – she passes Thomas on two different occasions at the side of the road, only to ultimately discover that he’s already checking in at the reception desk when she arrives at the hotel. These glaring spatio-temporal discrepancies in narrative continuity are clearly deliberate, suggesting that Lewis, rather than Losey, is working out a number of possible scenarios to resolve an obvious problem: where should Elisabeth and Thomas first meet? This reading is substantiated in Wiseman’s book, for Lewis is always talking about how he can state or present points of view that are not necessarily his, for this allows him to try out different strategies and possibilities of ‘what if …?’ We see this strategy at work once again the following morning as Thomas and his ‘meal ticket’ approach the hotel through the park-like grounds. Losey cuts to a reverse angle on Elisabeth looking out of the hotel window, suggesting that the previous shot represented her point of view. We then cut back to the exact same shot of the couple as they come closer, but the camera suddenly tracks back and pans left to reveal Elisabeth watching from the neighbouring window, indicating that the camera and Elisabeth’s point of view are not synonymous, that another vision is also at work – that of Lewis. The full ramifications of this parallel voice are seen at film’s end, where the ubiquitous window motif returns. Indeed, Thomas’s and Elisabeth’s entire adventure has been framed by the reflective, spectral properties of glass – the train window on the ride into Baden-Baden; the second-floor window at the Weybridge house that threatens David with death; the window looking down on the garden from Lewis’s attic study, whose reflected interior light is superimposed on the gazebo, site of Elisabeth’s adultery – as if it represented Lewis’s controlling fictional frame. It’s significant that every time someone throws something out of a window, it’s an object associated with Lewis-the-narrator, as if his characters were rebelling against the hegemony of his enunciation. Thus Thomas throws a paperback copy of one of Lewis’s novels, Cloud Cover, from the train window as he travels down to Weybridge and Elisabeth tosses pages from his Caroline script out of his study window

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and later jettisons the invitation to the screening from the front window of her car. However, the film’s final shot reasserts the unyielding confines of the frame as Lewis and Elisabeth – much like Old Leo at the end of The Go-Between – are locked together, peering through their car window toward their occupied house, as if the film’s denouement had formed a circuit with its opening, ensnaring Elisabeth within an eternal return of Lewis’s imaginary. Elisabeth’s drawn face tells it all: disappointment, loss, heartbreak, but above all, resignation: ‘Things always came out the way he wanted them to – in the end. He had wanted this, he had wanted the poet dead. Had perhaps killed him, or arranged for him to be killed by the crazy gang. Oh yes, without doubt Lewis wanted this – to teach me a lesson, that I can never get away from him.’29 If The Romantic Englishwoman marks the inevitable triumph of interpellation over freedom of choice, Steaming, Losey’s final film, appears to make full restitution.30 Indeed, even the usually sceptical Caute gets warm and fuzzy over this sentimental paean to women’s self-representation: ‘Not since King and Country had Losey so warmly embraced the human condition. In that film, of course, no woman is seen; in Steaming, no 31 man.’ Adapted by Losey’s wife Patricia, the film derives from the successful stage play by Nell Dunn, which opened on 1 July 1981 at the Theatre Royal, Stratford, before transferring to London’s Comedy Theatre where it ran for over 700 performances. Although Steaming was her first play, Dunn was already well known as the author of gritty workingclass dramas such as Up the Junction (Peter Collinson, 1967) and Ken Loach’s directorial début, Poor Cow (1967). Steaming unfolds over a period of several weeks in the ‘Women Only’ section of a run-down Turkish baths in London’s East End. Built in 1909 as a charitable attempt to spread a little of the luxury of Britain’s exotic colonial grandeur to the local working class (who often lacked basic amenities such as hot and cold running water), the baths’ steam and massage rooms are now a meeting place for women of all social and economic backgrounds. Therein lies the rub (if you’ll pardon the pun), for Dunn reduces what should be a complex cultural eclecticism to a series of one-dimensional class and gender stereotypes. As Richard Combs argued at the time of the film’s release, ‘In this context, where theatrical obviousness is treated as if it were proof of something real, it is not surprising that the issues the play raises seem so woefully arch … and that they are relayed through issue-speak characters who rehearse both their class conflicts and their women’s grievances with the brio and snappiness of a lively bridge party.’32 Thus the baths’ proprietor and overall ‘den mother’ is the bleach-

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blonde Violet (Diana Dors, in her last film before succumbing to cancer), a happily married mother of four grown children who is equal parts maintenance woman to the baths’ decrepit plumbing and daynurse-cum-psychiatrist to her rag-tag band of regular customers. The latter are fairly evenly divided on strict class lines. Representing the proletariat is the perpetually unemployed and debt-ridden Josie (Patti Love), a foul-mouthed exhibitionist in her mid-thirties who, when she isn’t being beaten up by her sadistic German boyfriend – which is often – is engaged in marathon sessions of unbridled sex. Josie comes to the baths not to soak – ‘I’m frightened of water. I’ve never learnt to swim’ – but to lie naked in the steam in order to spawn elaborate sexual fantasies which she relates in explicit, X-rated detail to anyone who will listen. The baths are also the sole luxury and chief social outlet for Mrs Meadow (Brenda Bruce), a neurotic, fearful widow in her late sixties whose Puritan over-protectiveness (combined with prescription drugs, euphemistically referred to as the ‘tablets’) has turned her overweight teenage daughter Dawn (Felicity Dean) into a dependent, semi-retarded child with a serious eating disorder. An obsolete holdover from the wartime hardships of the nightly Blitz, food rationing, limited hot water and constantly leaky roofs, Mrs Meadow is the model of unquestioning social conservatism. In all matters of opinion, she is forever held hostage by the authority of others, whether the received wisdom and sexual indifference of her late husband or the influence of her meddling sister, Bernice. The neurotic symptoms of this familial dictatorship have been handed down to her more rebellious daughter Dawn, whose repressed libido has been displaced into exhibitionist Oedipal fantasies of being watched and molested by the local police. Unlike Josie, who displays her naked body with proud, sensual abandon, Mrs Meadows and Dawn are covered head to foot in protective waterproof plastics lest, heaven forbid, their bodies should actually get wet. Having reduced the female working class to their pre-assigned roles of victimized, unemployed sexpot and oppressed dimwit, Dunn and Losey then turn their attention to the bourgeoisie. Enter Nancy (Vanessa Redgrave), a middle-aged affluent housewife, who is making her first visit to the baths at the invitation of her old school friend and steamroom regular, the beautiful Sarah Constable (Sarah Miles).33 Nancy and Sarah are presented as two sides of the same patriarchal coin. The former is the model stay-at-home wife and mother who sacrificed her own identity and potential career for the sake of her businessman husband William, who repaid her selfless commitment by running off with a younger woman. Constantly represented by the expectations and actions of others – marriage consisted of being the sort of woman who

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always had to do everything right – Nancy found herself unable to articulate or satisfy her own needs, either in the kitchen or the bedroom. While Josie’s exhibitionism is an intrinsic means of giving herself pleasure by exploring the limits of her own desire through fantasy, Nancy’s libido was stage managed exclusively by and for her husband: ‘When we first got married, William made me walk about naked. He said I had the most beautiful body he’d ever seen. He refused to let me be shy. Took hundreds of photographs. It’s funny really. Now I look at my face and I see this intense woman with blue eyes. An unfamiliar face.’ Nancy’s self-image is only recognizable through its representation by her husband. It is not yet re-presented by (or as) her true self. Alienated from her own body, untrained and ill-equipped for the job market and – now that her children are growing up and leaving for college – saddled with a gigantic suburban house too large for her needs, Nancy is stuck in an identity crisis of major proportions. The childless Sarah, in contrast, seems to have exploited all of Nancy’s suburban advantages while cleverly avoiding the drawbacks. Children, for example, ‘always seem to be a mistake. When you don’t want them, there they are. And when you get rid of them, you want them again.’ Likewise, marriage: having grown weary of the anonymous hotel rooms, endlessly changing time-zones and adulterous affairs of her husband’s jet-set lifestyle, Sarah decided to sue for divorce and go back to school. After years of diligent study, she is now a high-powered attorney who can afford to stay in shape, play the field and fly off to New York on a moment’s notice for the occasional consultation at £200 per hour. Losey constructs the first half of the film as a straightforward dialectic between these different social and economic backgrounds, all the better to underline their impact on the women’s interpellated values and sense of self-worth. This generates a modicum of class conflict that can be resolved and overcome through collective female action in the final act. These oppositions range from simple, satirical jabs at middleclass myopia to very real differences in life experience, distilled according to the characters’ specific individual relationships to economies of exchange. For example, while Josie complains to Violet about the horrors of being in constant debt, Nancy discusses her own ‘life and death’ problems with Sarah in a neighbouring cubicle: ‘The most ghastly thing’s happened. The washing machine’s broken. The man promised to come yesterday. And I waited for him all day … And to top it all, as I was leaving on my way to come over here, poor Nina [her dog] was sick all over the bedroom carpet. Poor thing. She’s 15 years old.’ This profound gulf between the two classes’ different perceptions of what constitutes a ‘crisis’ also extends to the women’s relationship to

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their bodies. This time it’s Sarah who is caught up in hedonistic selfindulgence, rhapsodizing about a fabulous new shampoo she’s just brought back from Paris. When Nancy declines to wash her hair in the showers, Sarah is righteously indignant: ‘But that’s part of it … You’ve got to surrender to all the sensations that water can give you … The scrubbing and the lathering, and the hot and cold water being thrown all over you. The icy shock of the plunge. How can you possibly leave out your hair?’ A few moments later, we cut to the massage room, where Mrs Meadow is scrubbing Dawn’s hair with a bar of soap. ‘I never use shampoo,’ she states. ‘It’s a waste of money.’ While all the women, with the exception of the happily married Violet, have problematic relations with men, the nature of these relationships and their options for resolving them are also determined on class lines. Josie’s ex-husband, for example, is doing time for a jewellery robbery and his negative influence has obviously rubbed off on their son, who has been in reform school since he was 15. In contrast, Nancy’s offspring have clearly benefited from William’s social standing (not to mention his connections): her eldest son is about to go to university, while her youngest is enrolled in a private boarding school. Similarly, if Josie’s economic woes give her few options for extracting herself from her abusive relationship with her German boyfriend, the more affluent women always have recourse to the power of legal contract through an economically advantageous divorce. Josie’s class conditioning has also led her to believe that she needs a man in her life at any cost – a contributing cause of her blatant exhibitionism and ravenous sexual hunger – which in turn exacerbates the vicious cycle of dependency and abuse. In contrast, Nancy and Sarah have reached a point where they can exist comfortably without the constant presence of men, so that being single or celibate is far more a question of choice than a life-shattering existential dilemma. On the other hand, this choice is only truly enabled by their economic independence. This important point is brought home when Josie, seeking a job at a topless bar, quickly discovers that the age-old patriarchal laws of the casting couch are a necessary precondition for employment: Josie: ‘God, I get so fed up with poverty.’ Nancy: ‘Life’s difficult for everyone at times.’ Josie, angry: ‘Well my life is just survival. I even had to wank the feller off to get the club job in the first place.’ Sarah: ‘You didn’t have to, Josie. You chose to.’

Josie is furious at this presumptive conflation of choice with economic privilege: ‘It’s all very well for women like you! At 15 I was

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doing early morning cleaning with me mum! At 16 I was having a baby! You were still at school. What d’you know about it, anyway?!’ Nancy responds with the classic liberal party line: ‘I know you have to pay for self-respect.’ While Nancy and Sarah see the foregoing of sexual pleasure as a necessary price for economic security, Josie sees the desire for one (sex) as the necessary antidote for the unequal opportunity inherent in the other (economic security): ‘D’you know why us workingclass girls have a little bit on the side? Why we spend money on clothes, make-up and shoes? When we don’t – as you say – strictly need them? Because we’ve been brought up to do the shit work!! And we can’t expect to do anything but the shit work!! Unless we find a man with a bit of money and we hang onto him!!’ These acute class differences reach an artificially induced crisis point when Violet (who has actually known since the opening scene of the film) suddenly announces that the management is planning to close the baths in order to build a multi-million dollar leisure centre and car park. The former refuge has now become a beleaguered fortress, placing Steaming in direct line with The Prowler, The Servant, Boom!, Secret Ceremony, Galileo and A Doll’s House. We also have another intruder, in the collective form of the bath’s management, who are property speculators hiding behind the popularly elected facade of a London borough council. As in Figures in a Landscape, the real enemy is once again faceless and absent. Violet’s news has a cathartic effect, bringing to a head the patrons’ personal and class-induced conflicts, while at the same time bringing them together in a collective endeavour to save the baths. Nancy’s earlier run-in with Josie, for example, has opened her eyes to her repressive self-abnegation during her marriage and its defining impact on her selfidentity. As she confesses to Sarah, ‘You know how Josie’s always talking about sexual desire and sexual experience and melting? And I feel so pinched and cold and jealous? I’ve put myself out into the cold like an Eskimo grandmother.’ She decides to put her house up for sale and live her own life on her own terms. On the other hand, this doesn’t mean that she will become sexually promiscuous. She is still a creature constructed by learned, familiar habit: ‘Perhaps I would like to change, but I can’t see what I could change into. Home. Children. I’m a one-man woman.’ Sarah, by turns, has now come to see her own true desires mirrored in those of her friend. ‘If I have been promiscuous’, she admits, ‘it’s because I’ve been looking, searching … trying to find my mate. Somebody who wanted what I wanted.’ Nancy knows immediately what Sarah’s dream requires: ‘Children.’ Sarah’s subsequent emotional outburst has all the pathos of Leonora’s confessional in Secret Ceremony:

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And then you see I have this panic. I haven’t had a child, and time is running short. And who do I have a child with? Hmm? Where do I find the father for this child? Oh, I’ve thought and thought about getting pregnant and not telling the man. Playing the heroic single parent and all that. How can you do that to a child? How can you do that to a man? Even if I could have my career and bring up the children, perfectly … That’s what my dreams were about.

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Josie, for her part, manages to resolve this schizophrenic split between worthwhile labour and sexual pleasure by fusing the two together: she will actively lead the fight to save the baths, which is itself the necessary catalyst for her sexual fantasies. The film concludes with Dunn’s ‘Andy Hardy’ version of local borough politics: the women transcend their class differences and put on a ‘show’ – complete with banners, balloons and t-shirts – to save the bath house, while at the same time overcoming their individual inhibitions. Nancy gets to revive her old schoolgirl talents as a creative artist by designing the posters, Sarah puts her professional connections to good use by researching their legal rights, while Josie will finally channel her ‘gift for the gab’ into being their eloquent spokeswoman at the local council meeting. Josie’s strategy is apt: blind the council with numbers so that it seems more profitable to save the baths than to build the leisure centre. Even Dawn, caught up in the excitement of events, stops taking her ‘tablets’ and suddenly realizes that she enjoys being rebellious and cheeky. Quickly shedding her inhibitions, she finally strips off her plastics and paints her naked body with poster paint. In Dunn’s original play, the campaign fails and the council votes to close the baths. Instead, the women manage to salvage their newly found sense of collective power by organizing a popular sit-in. For the film, a nervous John Heyman wanted a happy ending, so Losey reluctantly agreed to have the council offer a reprieve: an immediate £5,000 for urgent repairs, with a further six months to get the baths’ attendance up. The no longer needed sit-in now becomes a form of theatrical agit prop designed to attract public attention to the ‘Save Our Baths’ campaign, and the film concludes with a communal naked jump into the plunge pool (including Josie, who overcomes her fear of water) where the bathers are joined by a rejuvenated, uninhibited Nancy. Losey’s last film appears to close the circle neatly on his first, as if Peter Frye’s grandiose belief in his individual ability to bring about world peace had been reconfigured on the more pragmatic level of collective local politics. Thomas Elsaesser, for one, finds this contrived and unconvincing: ‘For connoisseurs of Losey’s darker side, the optimism will seem superficial, the issue too slight to bear the allegorical

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weight, the commitment to the cause (of women? of public services in the Welfare State? of endangered civic architecture?) too external and 34 distanced.’ Moreover, as Caute reminds us, Losey always drew a clear distinction between different types of optimist: the kind who felt everything was bound to turn out for the best (the message of Steaming) and the kind who felt life was good only if you actively made it so (Losey’s usual dystopic constructivism). Losey seems to have had some embarrassed doubts about the film’s unbridled optimism, for he insisted that a line be added to the script, to be spoken by Violet: ‘My daughter says, “Happy endings are old fashioned.”’ By reading this verdict back into the politics of the film as a whole, Losey introduces a necessary, if slight, V-Effekt and, like the underlying sense of irony and pastiche that runs throughout The Romantic Englishwoman, attempts to call the ideological efficacy of the whole film into question. Losey employs a similar strategy in his highly critical use of mise-enscène. Although Patricia Losey’s screenplay replaces Dunn’s single set with a variety of settings within the split-level baths (the lobby, adjacent office and changing cubicles upstairs, the steam and massage rooms and plunge pool downstairs), as in King and Country, Losey makes no attempt to open up the play or disguise its inherent staginess: In my experience, cinema can be used in many ways: one of them is to increase enclosure rather than the Hollywood cliché of ‘opening up.’ This film, like King & Country, attempts that … There is no outside world, excepting the weather … The observer is the camera and me … I wish the film to look beautiful and however shabby, the place to be elegant, in a 35 sense, nostalgic.

Art Director Michael Pickwoad’s overall architectural schema, with its exotic combination of neo-classical columns, pink marble, white tile, azure bathing pools and Byzantine accents, is deliberately grandiose, accentuating the historical fact that the baths were built by an Empirerich society as an anachronistic luxury for the poor. This is offset by the baths’ more intimate, domestic areas (designed by Josie Macavin), where the ruby red curtains of the changing cubicles and deep wood panelling of the relaxation area create a womb-like sense of insulation from the outside world. However, it’s this very combination of palatial ostentation and claustrophobic confinement that generates a sense of unease in the audience. We seem to have been in this kind of environment before in Losey, a space invariably associated with entrapment and self-delusion. The most obvious connection is with Secret Ceremony, for the overall aquatic ambience and split level of the baths bears a striking resemblance

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to the entrance hall of the Engelhard mansion, the site of Cenci’s suicide. Moreover, at the end of Steaming, when the women parade in a candle-lit procession down the huge central staircase to the plunge pool below, Losey employs the same establishing crane shot that he used for the Hotel Danieli lobby in Eve, a set-up associated with the contiguity of sexual impulse and commercial exchange. Although this architectural throwback to earlier films may of course be a simple case of pragmatics – the simplest means of ensuring spatiotemporal continuity in a tightly confined set without resorting to cuts – there is evidence to suggest that Losey deliberately used mise-en-scène to undercut the pollyanna political message of the play. Although, according to Losey, the composition of the women’s nude bodies was inspired by Renoir and Modigliani, there is absolutely no trace of these painterly influences in the film. Instead, while we see clear shades of David and Ingres’s neoclassicism, the most dominant visual trope belongs to JeanLéon Gérôme’s more insidious brand of Orientalism, evoking his familiar images of North African slave markets and Turkish baths, where female flesh was displayed for the consumption and delight of voyeuristic men within the depicted tableau, as well as for the bourgeois clientèle of the painted image itself.36 Thus in the case of Steaming, the men who are noticeable for their absence within the diegesis instead control its pictorial space from without – as spectators (the cinema audience as well as Losey’s enunciating camera). In addition, Orientalist paintings suggest that this exotic world is a world without change, a world of timeless customs and rituals, untouched by the historical processes that were drastically altering Western societies at the time. This is particularly relevant to the film because the baths are used as a cause celèbre to stave off the advance of capitalist progress (the proposed leisure centre) by holding on to an increasingly obsolescent signifier of pleasure and camaraderie rooted in an outmoded colonial past. This isn’t to suggest that Losey is deliberately painting his characters as ‘backward’ or ‘culturally inferior’, or indeed denigrating the political value of their collective endeavour, but simply that his choice of a pictorial style associated with the most objectifying of colonial and patriarchal values implies a more complex critique of the play’s ideological premisses. It suggests that Losey is attempting to draw out another, more secret agenda within the film, through which the radical reconstruction of its ostensible Other is undercut by turning the women’s hard-won self-determination into yet another oppressive representation. This raises a pertinent question: who is the implied ‘other’ of this empowered Other, in effect, the subaltern of subalterns? We catch a glimpse of Losey’s didactic intentions during the long, drawn-out

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argument in which Josie attacks Nancy and Sarah over the question of economic choice. The verbal altercation ends up in the massage room:

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Josie: ‘What’s real money to you? Come on. How much do you earn? It’s a lot, isn’t it? Go on, tell me. How much?’ Sarah: ‘I get enough.’ Nancy: ‘It’s private.’ Josie: ‘Oh, it’s always enough when it’s private. Well my financial situation is so simple you could write it on the back of a bus ticket. When I was married, I was a skiv, a drudge. I still would be if I was with him now. It’s the same thing, day in and day out. Do this, do that. That’s security.’

During the course of this dialogue we become gradually aware of the presence of another person in the background of the shot by the massage tables. This is Celia (Sally Sagoe), Violet’s black assistant who up until now has been a silent presence in the drama, relegated to distributing towels or giving rubdowns to the predominantly white clientèle. While the subaltern defined exclusively in terms of gender and class gets to speak (and speak … !), the equally important racial voice remains silent. Celia is clearly well-to-do – at one point Josie affirms that she’s from a good family – so she seems quite anomalous as a working girl in a local baths, as if perhaps she were working her way through college. Losey thus supplements the simplistic class dialectic of the dialogue by adding a visual dialogue between race, class and gender that significantly muddies our reading of the subaltern per se. When Celia does get to speak towards the end of the film – she is the treasurer of the ‘Save Our Baths’ campaign – it is merely to act as an accountant to Sarah’s altogether more active legal role. This is mere lip service to racial unity: Celia gets her one scene to show that she too has something productive to contribute to the campaign. Celia is not designated as black in the play, so Losey’s choice of Sally Sagoe seems deliberately designed to play up her relative marginalization within the newly formed collective, all the better to disclose difference as something more than a simple class or gender binary. This antinomy becomes even more problematic as Josie extends her tirade on to the subject of sex: ‘I may be broke but I can do whatever I feel like doing. If I want to stay in bed in the morning, I stay there. If I want to get drunk, I get drunk.’ Then just as she says ‘And if I want to fuck, I fuck’, Josie steps forward to block out Celia, as if the enunciation of a white woman’s sexual independence must necessarily disavow the visual representation of its threatening, racial Other. As Thomas Elsaesser rightly argues:

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the confrontations over class, over career v. children, education v. Streetwise experience, over sex or self-respect are endlessly circular oppositions, which do not lead to ‘identity’, either individual or collective, but to the insight that whatever one’s position, the logic of the mutually exclusive will always manifest itself. In the mirror of the Other which the women hold up to one another, only the same divided self can ever appear.37

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The characters thus end the film as the same stereotypes as they began it. If there is to be a way out of this impasse, suggests Losey, it must come from a reconstruction of identity onto more fluid lines, as a multiplicity. He hints at this possibility through the visual framing of the scene that follows. After the three women have made peace following their argument, they sit on the steps leading down to the plunge pool where the discussion ultimately leads to Sarah’s admission of her desire to have children. Losey begins the sequence with a slow zoom out from Nancy, wrapped in a blue towel, to eventually reveal an Orientalist establishing shot of Nancy to the left, Sarah dead centre in a turban/ towel, and a semi-nude Josie, stage right. All three are positioned symmetrically in front of a proscenium-like entrance leading to the massage rooms beyond. This combination of classical symmetry and vanishing point perspective (identified exclusively with the white women, thereby shackling their potential empowerment to a stultifying pictorial stasis) is broken only by the glass-roofed cupola ceiling in the room behind them, which establishes the possibility of a baroque, upward thrust out of the confines of the frame toward a more transient space beyond. Under this cupola stands Celia, suggesting that this otherwise anomalous supplement to the play’s central human dynamic is the subjective catalyst for this movement, that recognition of the transformative reality of race, as well as class and gender, is woman’s only viable way out of Losey’s occupied country.

Notes 1 Patricia Losey, ‘Afterword’ to Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 386. 2 Cited in Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 301. For Fonda and Seyrig’s version of events, see ibid., pp. 300–1, as well as Fonda’s interview with Molly Haskell in the Village Voice, 7 November 1974. For Losey’s side of the story, see Ciment, Conversations with Losey, pp. 329–32. 3 Cited in Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 340. 4 Deleuze, Cinema 1, pp. 138–9. 5 Ibid., p. 139. 6 Jacob, ‘Joseph Losey, or the Camera Calls’, p. 67. 7 Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 123.

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Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 310. 18 May 1973. Cited in Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 301. 2 October 1973. Ibid., p. 302. Tony Rayns, ‘A Doll’s House’, Monthly Film Bulletin, Vol. 40, No. 475, August 1973, p. 166. Karl Marx, ‘Excerpts from James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy’, in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (New York, Vintage, 1975), p. 264. Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 513. Jan Dawson, ‘A Doll’s House’, Sight and Sound, Vol. 42, No. 4, Autumn 1973, p. 235. Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 330. de Rham, Joseph Losey, p. 235. Hirsch, Joseph Losey, p. 201. Durgnat, ‘Losey: Puritan Maids’, p. 32. Losey, in Combs, ‘The Country of the Past Revisited’, p. 140. Palmer and Riley, The Films of Joseph Losey, p. 126. Ibid., p. 124. Ibid., p. 117. Cited in Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 375. Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 341. Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘The Romantic Englishwoman’, Monthly Film Bulletin, Vol. 42, No. 501, October 1975, p. 225. Thomas Wiseman, The Romantic Englishwoman (London, Jonathan Cape, 1971), p. 63. Ibid., p. 135. Lorenzo Codelli has noted the similarity to the train sequences in Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence. See Codelli, ‘What if …? Une Anglaise romantique’, Positif, Nos. 171/172, July/August 1975, p. 93. Wiseman, The Romantic Englishwoman, p. 314. Joseph Losey died on 22 June 1984 at the age of 75. Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 459. Richard Combs, ‘Steaming’, Monthly Film Bulletin, Vol. 52, No. 617, June 1985, p. 171. The character of Sarah is named Jane in the play, where she was played by Patti Love. Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Joseph Losey: Time Lost and Found’, Monthly Film Bulletin, Vol. 52, No. 617, June 1985, p. 173. Losey in ‘Afterword by Patricia Losey’, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, pp. 387–8. The Slave Market (early 1860s) and Moorish Bath (1880s) are among the more notorious examples of this blatant objectification of the subaltern body. Elsaesser, ‘Joseph Losey: Time Lost and Found’, p. 173.

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A second exile: Losey in Europe

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We need history, but not the way a spoiled loafer in the garden of knowledge needs it. (Friedrich Nietzsche)1

With the single exception of Steaming, which was released the year following his death in 1984, The Romantic Englishwoman was Losey’s last film produced in England, effectively bringing down the curtain on a distinguished twenty-one-year career in British cinema dating back to the The Sleeping Tiger, his first propitious collaboration with Dirk Bogarde and long-time production designer, Richard Macdonald. In fact, of Losey’s last nine features, six films – The Assassination of Trotsky (1972), A Doll’s House (1973), Mr. Klein (1976), Les Routes du Sud (1978), Don Giovanni (1979) and La Truite (1982) – were international co-productions made outside Britain. Three were shot in French, while the filmed version of Mozart’s opera preserves Lorenzo da Ponte’s Italian libretto. Although these films are technically outside the scope of a series on British filmmakers, it behoves us to pay them some attention as they give us considerable insight into the evolution of Losey’s ideological make-up in the wake of May 1968 and his ongoing negotiation with the rupture of both personal and cultural history. The catalyst for this sudden move from Britain to the continent was both personal and professional. Although he was critically regarded as one of the most important directors in Europe, by 1975 Losey’s personal finances were in a state of disarray. According to Caute, Losey’s need to work under the table during the blacklist period of the mid- to late 1950s led to some creative bookkeeping by his accountants. Although his last US tax return was filed in 1953, for British tax purposes he was considered ‘resident but not domiciled in the UK,’ entitling him to a reduced tax liability – 50 per cent of the highest rate for which a British citizen was liable. As a result, from 1952 to 1964 it appears that Losey paid very little tax at all.2 Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s he set up a series of offshore financial accounts to further minimize his tax

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liability, but in March 1974 the labour government’s new Finance Act significantly modified the old immunity for foreign residents who had resided in the UK for nine of the past ten years. They were now required to pay a maximum rate of tax on their earnings of 62.25 per cent. ‘All this suddenly descended on me,’ complained Losey at the time. ‘There 3 is no way I can make enough money to pay my English taxes.’ Despite his professed Marxism, Losey had grown too attached to the good life to take a drastic cut in lifestyle. Consequently, he and his fourth wife Patricia decided to uproot themselves from the high-rent comforts of Chelsea’s Royal Avenue and move their base of operations to the rue du Dragon in Paris. In April 1975 they officially became tax exiles. Losey also rationalized the move in career terms: ‘There wasn’t much film industry left in Britain and even though I set up more than 20 films that were English-based, using English technicians and bringing in capital and using labour, most of those films took me outside of England. So I was living fifty or seventy-five percent of the time outside England anyway and it was ridiculous to go on paying punitive taxes.’4 The move to France also made perfect sense in terms of Losey’s longterm commitment to film Pinter’s The Proust Screenplay at Proust’s original locations. Indeed, the project had entered the preliminary planning stages with producer Nicole Stéphane as early as 1971, and from 1974 Losey was working on securing the official blessing of President Giscard d’Estaing. Unfortunately most potential backers considered the self-exiled director to be too great a financial risk: Losey was never again to be entrusted with the extravagant budgets of his commercial heyday. Despite the critical and box-office success of The Go-Between (it won the coveted Palme d’Or at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival) Losey’s career had lurched and sputtered through countless difficulties in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Boom!, Secret Ceremony and Figures in a Landscape were box-office disasters. A Doll’s House (1973) and The Romantic Englishwoman (1975) did little to stem the negative critical tide – Pauline Kael’s New Yorker review of the latter was eviscerating – and the negative professional fall-out from these comparative failures was considerable. To be fair, this economic and critical malaise was not limited to Losey; by the late 1960s it was endemic to the British film industry as a whole. As Walker notes in Hollywood, England, The central weakness of the British film industry was the fact that the home market simply would not support a film industry. It was not big enough to give producers the reassurance of seeing their money back with a profit, unless they were exceptionally cautious or lucky. And with the current return on a film inside Britain down to an average £100,000

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– if the film does well – small wonder that British film-makers could rarely muster the reserve of nerve or capital that came naturally to American distributors well entrenched throughout the world markets.5

This problem was compounded by an ongoing fall in cinema admissions (down from 900 million per year in 1961 to under 215 million in 1969) and a concomitant decline in the number of cinemas (2,711 to 1,581 over the same period). Given that London bankers had no traditional ties to the film industry, the only viable investment source was from the American studios, and Losey had already ridden that gravy train with Boom! and Secret Ceremony, with disastrous results. It’s possible that Losey was mindful of this creative and economic rut, as well as his own advancing years and declining health – he was now in his mid-sixties and severely debilitated from a combination of alcohol and asthma – when in 1972 and again in 1978 he conducted his own Proustian search for lost time, revisiting the site of his youthful Marxism in two films that addressed his enduring political bogeys from the 1930s: Trotsky and Franco. The Assassination of Trotsky (1972) and Jorge Semprún’s semi-autobiographical Les Routes du Sud (1978) recycle an ideological circuit that had begun with Losey’s political and artistic involvement with Paul Bowles in the 1936 Theatre Committee for Republican Spain, and culminated in his heroic work for Russian War Relief in the early 1940s. Far from being a dead political issue, the question of Trotsky’s ‘traitorous revisionism’ – particularly his ‘sabotage’ of the Republican cause in Spain – was still a burning subject for the ever-loyal Stalinist as late as 1972. ‘In the first place, it would never have occurred to me to make Trotsky’, Losey recalled to Michel Ciment. I was a Communist in the days of Stalin worship and before the exposure of Stalin. So I was bred to a generation who believed that Trotsky was a monster and Stalin a hero … At first I totally rejected the idea of doing the film, without thinking; and then … I suddenly realized that the whole Stalinist era of my life had shut me off from certain other knowledge and experience because my assumption then was that anything even vaguely Trotskyist was necessarily false, which is obviously one of the terrible aspects of Stalinism or of any kind of dogma or doctrine.6

The project turned out to be a significant re-apprenticeship, not only because it led to Losey’s radical reappraisal of Trotsky’s role in the Fourth International, but also because it ‘meant a whole confrontation with a large section of my life and my past, and the ways in which I and others had accepted a certain position … I was fascinated by the idea that Stalin and the Soviet Union (to which I had dedicated a fair share of my 7 life) were capable of being involved in a conspiracy as sordid as this.’

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Similarly, for Losey’s generation and the so-called ‘old left’ in general, Franco’s Spain was an equally powerful paradigm: ‘The Spanish war was a turning point in all our lives and we lived our mature lives during the forty years of Franco’s regime. So there was a beginning and there was an end. Somehow, everything political, artistic, personal 8 stemmed from that day in July 1936.’ Given such emotional sentiments one would expect The Assassination of Trotsky and Les Routes du Sud to have struck some kind of ideological chord with the political climate of the 1970s, whether through a sense of historical legacy and continuity, or a forging of common ground between the old and new left. Instead, if anything, the two films widen the generation gap, illustrating Losey’s reluctance to leave behind the political shibboleths of the past as well as the debilitating rupture between his earlier activism and contemporary impotence. Both films eschew the then-vital, revolutionary impetus of May 1968 for a form of historical and narrative retrenchment, firmly rooted in cinematic convention and the box-office allure of bankable stars such as Richard Burton and Yves Montand.9 In this case the two political exiles, Trotsky (walled up in his Mexico City compound) and Jean Larrea, Semprún’s French-based Spanish loyalist, are reduced to mere shadows of their former selves, more closely tied to the fate of Brecht’s Galileo (filmed directly between the two projects) than the vital political activists of filmmakers such as Costa-Gavras, Gillo Pontecorvo or even Resnais. Both Trotsky and Larrea led hermetic lives of purely textual production, one pathetically cut off from past glories, the other Oedipally alienated by the younger generation’s political apathy and unfocused rage. Much of this dearth of topical relevance is rooted in Losey’s own exile, in particular his lack of active political affiliation with the British left, as well as his estrangement from working-class culture as a whole. We see this most clearly in his willy-nilly, almost desperate-to-please choice of potential filmic subjects, as well as in his preference for stylistically conservative, overtly literary collaborators. Losey always preferred the middlebrow, vaguely Fabian vernacular of a Pinter or a Nicholas Mosley to the grass-roots, proletarian sensibilities of the British cultural left. As Caute points out in his lucid analysis of Losey’s political and aesthetic marginalization throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Joe was still stuck in the creative rut of studio system formulas (the industry was in his blood, despite his ongoing horror stories dealing with the blacklist and studio hacks), while the new socialist literature and theatre emerged from naturalistic, vernacular and regional contexts.10 Thus, with the notable exception of Alun Owen’s hard-hitting, idiomatic script for The Criminal (1960), Losey sought his material

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within the international circuit of professional scriptwriters and established playwrights such as Tennessee Williams, George Tabori and Tom Stoppard, while the Angry Young Men and their ‘unwashed’ disciples – Joe Orton, for example – proved anathema. Part of the problem lay with Losey’s preference for allegory and fable – obvious holdovers from the left’s circumspect negotiation with the paranoid red baiting of the Cold War era – over the stark social realism favoured by working-class writers and critics alike, a position that led to inevitable accusations of escapism or baroque hedonism. Which isn’t to say that allegory needn’t be political and socially significant, or indeed Marxist, as Walter Benjamin’s brilliant reformulation of the baroque Trauerspiel has made clear.11 Nonetheless, this reduction of political agency to metaphor helps to explain Losey’s obvious insecurity toward his Marxist roots, specifically his concern with the lost political innocence of youth (and by extension, the ‘missing’ blacklist years of his creative maturity), which resembles a Proustian obsession with regaining irretrievably lost time. Caute, for one, sees Losey’s consistent loyalty to Stalin as a displaced form of loyalty to himself and his own equally compromised political past. The director candidly acknowledged this problem in a 1964 interview: How not to betray, or seem to betray … what one believed and did in extreme youth – whether in the 1930s or during the war or in the postwar period … Because those attitudes or those points of view – no matter how limited they might have been or whatever caused them at the time – they are what one has developed from. They are part of what one is. And if you deny them, you do yourself and everyone else a great disservice, 12 because then you obscure instead of clarifying.

For Losey, the precarious balance between protecting oneself ideologically and laying oneself open to more dislocating patterns of change is the key problem of the committed individual. He went on to admit, ‘I’m probably a Marxist’, but denied the relevance of such an ideological ‘godhead’ in his current artistic practice. Instead, Losey comes closer to the Althusserian position of recognizing the artist’s need to challenge the shibboleths of received wisdom by opening up ideological issues to a felt, more gut-level immanent response. ‘I suppose that is one of the reasons why I find it increasingly less valuable, in theatre and films, to make a direct statement’, he continued. ‘All you can do is expose a problem, to lay something open, to invite inspection, to present an experience’ (my italics).13 Losey’s ongoing problem throughout the 1960s and 1970s was his failure to understand that the fundamental nature of this experience –

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specifically its shifting generational context – had changed. Losey the old guard Stalinist was so out of touch with the more Maoist and Trotskyist sympathies of the new left that he could dismiss the entire student movement (and self-consciously theoretical leaders such as Rudi Dutschke, Tariq Ali and Danny Cohn-Bendit) as inextricably cut off from his own political legacy, ‘because they don’t really know what that fight was about, they don’t really know what the hopes of the Thirties were, and there are now no organisations that are organs of protest. So the young are forming their own organisations to protest, but they are without theory and without orientation because they are essentially anarchistic.’14 To his credit, Losey later reversed himself. Appearing on French television in 1968 he praised the May movement and criticized the French Communist Party and its reactionary tradeunion vehicle, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), for their failure to support the student movement. Nonetheless, Caute dismisses this timely appropriation of new-left rhetoric as the platitudes of a political tourist rather than a committed insider. For example, Losey made pro-Mao noises in France, arguing that China is ‘the only country where democratic centralism fulfilled its promises’,15 and egalitarian declarations that ‘class is the major national problem’ on British television, while dutifully sending his son off to public school. By 1976 Losey had settled into the non-activist niche of ‘personalized politics’. He admitted that his youthful need for the ideological safety net of a rigid political organization had been replaced by a more fluid political contingency: It seems to me that the only ethic that remains to anybody now is a highly personal one … There is no social ethic any more, and you have to make your decision each time. You can’t make it in general. You can’t say ‘I am a Communist, or I am a Socialist or I am anti-French or anti-German or anti-American or anti-Russian.’ You have to make it each time: ‘I am for this and against that now.’ That’s the only way.16

Coming some four years after The Assassination of Trotsky, this statement reflects Losey’s reluctant shift from his earlier defensive Stalinism to a more critically aware pragmatism. It seems likely that this combination of political and personal self-questioning – which is itself a crucial component of Jean Larrea’s character in Les Routes du Sud and the catalyst for his rapprochement with his estranged son – was a direct result of Losey’s research for the Trotsky film, for it forced him to challenge the received wisdom of the Soviet party line for the first time. Although they are less didactically political, in several respects Mr. Klein (1976) and Don Giovanni (1979) constitute Losey’s artistic testa-

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ment. Both films synthesize many of the key themes from the director’s long career (thirty-one features in thirty-seven years) but at the same time defy easy categorization because of their sheer semantic and imagistic excess. Each takes the form of a teleological fable, realigning Losey’s early Manichaeism with Hegelian historicism through a more mature, transformative acceptance of death. At the same time, they are also disseminators of a proliferating and ruptured temporality. Mr. Klein, for example, locates Evil historically in the French public’s passive indifference to anti-semitism during the Nazi occupation of World World II (another Losey interregnum). At the same time, the film deliberately triggers associations with the subsequent betrayals of the McCarthy blacklist and its more extreme counterpart in the contemporary economy of state terror, what Losey calls ‘torture as policy’. With this broader political agenda in mind, Mr. Klein was conceived by scenarist Franco Solinas as ‘a fable acting as a warning’.17 In addition, Robert Klein himself symbolizes Losey’s own psychological fracture and historical displacement in the form of Alain Delon’s sophisticated Parisian art dealer. A politically non-committed aesthete who exploits fleeing Jews by buying up their art treasures at rock-bottom prices, Klein encounters and pursues his own namesake in the form of an activist Jewish member of the French resistance. This asymmetrical mirror image – analogous to Losey’s ambivalent relationship to his own activist past – comes to haunt the art dealer to the point of obsession. Ironically, Klein and his double finally meet during the infamous Grande Rafle of 16 July 1942, when the Parisian Jews were rounded up by the German and French authorities before being shipped out to Auschwitz. The two Kleins – Jew and gentile – are thus united in a common fate, but in this case Nietzsche’s affirmative eternal return takes the form of an inevitable death. As in all of Losey’s films, Mr. Klein’s historical, psychological and metaphysical narrative can only be ultimately resolved through the immanent folds of a formal impasse in which time itself takes centre stage, a time through which history is annihilated but also ultimately restored – by the passion and affirmation of Losey’s cinematic art. Mozart’s Don Giovanni provides an apt coda to our survey, with its mixture of theatricality and realism, its recapitulation of the master– servant relationship, the subtext of repressed homosexuality, as well as its ontological framing of a profusive, Dionysian desire as equal parts contagious impulse, transgressive hedonism and affirmation of death.18 In this case, the primordial force descends from above, in the form of the declining aristocracy, rather than emerging from Losey’s usual milieu of the ingratiating working class. As Ciment rightly asserts,

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It seems that you could not be offered an opera more suited to [Losey’s] preoccupations. Of all Mozart’s operas it is the most ambiguous in the sense that Don Giovanni can be seen from a negative point of view, as belonging to a class that is going to die very soon but at the same time he offers positive values: he rejects society, he enjoys every moment of life, he upholds individualism.19

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Moreover, as the quote from Gramsci’s ‘State and Civil Society’ that opens the film also avers: ‘The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appears.’ It is within this spatio-temporal gap ‘between’ established sovereignties that Losey does his most compelling work, for the stalling of the dialectic allows libidinal desires to bubble to the surface and overflow both society’s (and the film’s) structural boundaries. Far from renewing his own declining class, or giving birth to a rejuvenating bourgeois class sovereignty, the commendatore’s Messianic intervention against Don Giovanni (Ruggero Raimondi) ultimately fails because it cannot be reincarnated in an affective (or effective) body. While the real body of the Don becomes, in death, an apparition, there is no concomitant reincarnation or transformation of the commendatore. He remains a phantom, an empty shell inside a statue’s body, so that the opera ends, in effect, with the mutual haunting of a pair of ghosts. However, while Don Giovanni fails as a dialectical tract – this is clearly not a Marxist reading of the opera as many critics have suggested – it succeeds triumphantly as a Nietzschean affirmation, whereby Don Giovanni takes on the mantle of a nomadic libidinal force that transforms and heals the rupture of historical time and space. This is symbolized in the film’s closing sequence, which takes the form of a long shot of the surviving protagonists floating on the Venetian waters in separate barges (water is associated with Don Giovanni throughout). They sing the opera’s presto finale, a Manichaean paean to Christian guilt and patriarchal order: ‘Sinners end as they begin. All who scorn the life eternal their eternal death shall win.’20 These are hollow words, of course, for the Don cannot repent because he has no guilt – he is an abundant Dionysian force that precludes the Christian pieties of selfabnegation and remorse. This reading is reinforced by Losey’s mise-enscène, for by being separated onto isolated boats, statically resisting the laterally flowing waters with seemingly nowhere to go, the characters become manifestations of a stalled dialectic, hovering impotently, separated from themselves and from a wider community. In many ways, Don Giovanni is already a modernist work, eating and destroying itself through its own excess of form. Debilitated by the disappearance of its charismatic protagonist at the end, the opera is

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effectively spent and exhausted, like the interregnum itself. By showing the group’s aimless futures, the final sextet undercuts closure and symmetry, and indeed representation as a whole, for the film ends not with an image of water, but with its sound. As Don Giovanni’s valet closes the doors on the action for one last time, the closing credits roll over the same sound of lapping water that we heard before the film’s initial overture, bringing us full circle to Don Giovanni’s life-affirming enveloping presence. However, it is important to close our analysis with the warning that there is no place for transcendence in Losey. Don Giovanni ends, just like his other films, with a reassertion of a material immanence, as concrete as the plastic qualities of the film we have just viewed and the brilliant sounds we have just heard. What remains is in and of the world, produced and fashioned by material powers. It is the stuff of the world that moves in duration, which makes life move on and create anew, which fashions it into art. ‘There is no more time’, utters the commendatore as he sends the Don into the flames, suggesting not only that the libertine’s personal and historical time is up, but also that time has slowed to a standstill, that the measurement and segmenting of quantifiable time has been replaced by a more immanent, qualitative duration: the chronosign, where time ceases to be subordinate to movement and appears for itself. We see the appearance of this time in what actually moves in Losey’s final image: the water. The Don’s immanent motif that quenches the commendatore’s flames continues, like Heraclitus’s river, to flow forth, just as the surviving characters remain static. By killing Don Giovanni, the commendatore has resurrected him not as a transcendent being but as élan vital – the life force itself. Impulse and time have become sovereign in and of themselves, as flow and becoming. Once again, Losey has transformed history’s dialectical rupture into a liberating dystopia.

Notes 1 Nietzsche, cited in Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London, Fontana/Collins, 1973), p. 262. 2 See Caute, Joseph Losey, pp. 384–8 for a detailed discussion. 3 Ibid., p. 388. 4 Cited in de Rham, Joseph Losey, p. 246. 5 Walker, Hollywood, England, pp. 455–6. 6 Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 317. 7 Losey, in Tony Rayns, ‘Losey & Trotsky’, Take One, Vol. 3, No. 8, November– December 1971, p. 13. 8 Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 360.

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9 In contrast, May ’68 was a political watershed for directors like Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, who quickly renounced commercial cinema for the agitprop production aesthetic of the Dziga Vertov group. 10 Caute, Joseph Losey, specifically chapter 28, pp. 279–87. 11 See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London, Verso, 1977). 12 Joseph Losey, ‘Speak, Think, Stand Up’, Film Culture, Nos 50–51, Autumn and Winter 1970, p. 60. 13 Ibid. 14 Losey, in Milne, Losey on Losey, p. 92. 15 Losey, cited in Caute, Joseph Losey, pp. 283–4. 16 Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 86. 17 Ibid., p. 356. 18 See Colin Gardner, ‘The Eternal Return of Immanence: Becoming-toward-Death in Joseph Losey’s Don Giovanni’, Critical Secret (Paris) No. 6, 2001. www. criticalsecret. com/n6 19 Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 373. 20 Lorenzo da Ponte, Don Giovanni, trans. N. Platt and Laura Sarti (London, John Calder, 1983), p. 106.

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Conclusion

Die Warheit ist konkrete [Truth is concrete] (G.F.W. Hegel)

At a pivotal point in The Servant, Barrett sits in the private bar of the Queens Elm pub in Fulham. It has been several weeks since his disgrace and dismissal by his master. Whether by chance or prior arrangement, Tony suddenly wanders into the adjacent saloon bar, orders a whisky and sits down next to the partition – a concise metonym for class division – that separates the more public space of the saloon from Barrett. Thus from Barrett’s position in the private bar – significantly, he is already occupying the traditional space of the more ‘select’ customers – we see Tony behind the partition to the left, while Barrett sits in slightly more foregrounded space in front of the partition to the right. Suddenly, the camera makes a rapid pan to the left and moves in tightly on … Barrett and Tony. Except that they have now switched places, with Barrett in extreme close-up to the left, Tony in medium shot to the right. The initial establishing shot is dramatically revealed as a mirror reflection. An uncomfortable silence ensues before Barrett offers to buy Tony a drink. The latter then sits expressionless as Barrett begins a long monologue in which he apologizes profusely for all the trouble he has caused, blaming his behaviour on being led astray by the calculating Vera. ‘She never intended to marry me’, he bemoans, ‘and d’you know what she’s done now? Gone off with my money … [S]he’s living with a bookie in Wandsworth.’ Barrett’s indignation at unfashionable Wandsworth is an amusing signifier of his own sense of class: he might be a servant, but he is a gentleman’s gentleman. Wandsworth? He would never sink that low. Barrett feigns contrition, but he’s also obsequiously full of excuses, placing the real blame for his actions on a working-class ‘vixen’, thereby appealing to Tony’s latent misogyny. In this way, Barrett puts himself ingratiatingly at his master’s mercy.

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It is a variation on a scene that Losey has shot many times in different class contexts, from The Sleeping Tiger and Eve to Accident and The Go-Between. But, as in those films, Losey refused to reduce the scene to a simple dialectic of class antagonism and power. As Barrett ends his monologue, and before Tony can reply, we cut once more to the opening mirror image of the scene, reorienting us back to the original spatial reversal. In the context of the film as a whole, this reversal is highly significant, for the ensnaring, circuitous nature of mirrors has been associated exclusively with Barrett. The scene is thus book-ended by the stylistic image of the servant’s domain. While the dialogue speaks of Barrett’s subservience, the film’s crystalline form speaks of his renewed will-to-power. Tony is literally and spatially being ‘set up’, sucked once again into Barrett’s primordial space, proving the scene to be a condensed microcosm of the film as a whole. This sequence is a perfect example of Losey’s expressive genius with discordant space as an objective correlative of shifting identities and class relations. As Roger Greenspun noted in relation to Secret Ceremony, ‘among filmmakers Losey is the greatest poet of mirrors, greater even than Cocteau, because he knows they are environments in their own right, accepting, changing, and never quite giving back the world they reflect’.1 This facility for creating complex spatial depth helps explain the MacMahon critics’ lionization of Losey less as a true auteur than as a metteur-en-scène. According to the original dictates of the politique des auteurs, the work of an auteur can only be deciphered through the close study of several films in order to discern a coherent and continuing semantic and syntactical structure that forges them into a concrete signature. In contrast, the skills of metteurs-en-scène lie in their performative qualities, their ability to transpose a pre-existing script, book or play into specifically cinematic codes. Thus the MacMahonists tended to focus exclusively on Losey’s baroque mise-en-scène (specifically the long takes and deep focus that punctuate films as narratively wideranging as Time Without Pity and Blind Date), for it is these stylistic characteristics which transform the raw material of the studio- or producer-imposed text into something approaching a personal (and by extension, ideological) statement through purely visual means. The upshot is that Losey the modernist European auteur of Eve, Accident and The Go-Between is far less interesting to these critics than Losey the radical American metteur-en-scène of The Lawless, The Prowler, M and The Big Night. Thus, while Robert Beyoun could dismiss Eve as ‘the apotheosis of the chichi’, Pierre Rissient was at the same time lauding The Lawless as ‘the greatest Western and the only Western ever made’, and argued that Losey’s extravagant urban mise-en-scène in his remake of

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M ensured that, ‘for the first time a city exists on the screen. It’s this expansion of the action in the world which allows us to call Joseph Losey 2 a cosmic director.’ While often insightful, this initial reductive approach to Losey’s oeuvre has tended to unfairly colour the reception and analysis of his subsequent British filmic legacy because it reduces the director to a baroque visual stylist rather than – as we have argued throughout this study – a radical transformer of narrative and genre form. It conveniently overlooks, for example, Losey’s innovative use of disjunctive montage and temporal slippage in the Pinter-scripted films, where the immanent gaps between shots are often more psychologically and ideologically probing than the discrete filmic images themselves. The trauma of Losey’s exile forced him to eschew the safety net of realist depth models, where cinematic ‘truth’ is rooted in the precise relations within and between shots (Brecht’s form of concrete realism) in favour of a shallow, more Cubistic space, where greater attention is placed on the narrative discontinuity between cuts instead of smoothing the transition between them. As Deleuze states, in Losey’s modernist period, there are no longer any rational cuts, but only irrational ones. There is thus no longer association through metaphor or metonymy, but relinkage on the literal image; there is no longer linkage of associated images, but only relinkages of independent images. Instead of one image after the other, there is one image plus another, and each shot is deframed in relation to the framing of the following shot … this time-image puts thought into contact with an unthought, the unsummonable, the inexplicable, the undecidable, the incommensurable. The outside or the obverse of the images has replaced the whole, at the same time as the interstice or the cut has replaced association.3

This ‘multiplicity of attractions’ (to paraphrase Eisenstein) can be extended to Losey’s playful deconstruction of genre, which may turn out to be his greatest contribution to British cinema. He was instrumental – along with Stanley Kubrick, Powell and Pressburger, and the Free Cinema movement – in freeing the industry from its post-war parochialism by opening it up to more modernist trends, particularly the narrative experimentation of Antonioni and the French New Wave. This tendency began, as we noted in Chapter 1, with Losey’s allegorical exploitation of film noir and the crime film in order to sustain a critique of repressive social roles during the witch-hunt era. During the 1950s and early 1960s, Losey extended this strategy to a wide range of genres, wilfully dismantling the prevailing tropes of melodrama (The Sleeping Tiger, Time Without Pity), the Gainsborough costume drama (The Gypsy and the Gentleman), the prison film (The Criminal), science fiction (The

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Damned) and the anti-war film (King and Country). Like Resnais, Losey’s innovations were initially carried out from within traditional genre frameworks, for as he explained to Michel Ciment, ‘I think it’s much better that way; it’s a way of educating the audience rather than alienating it. And I think the public can be educated in matters of form 4 as well as content.’ However, starting with The Damned, Losey became far more ruthless, grafting science fiction to the juvenile-delinquent phenomenon to create what is, in effect, an improbable genre pastiche, an imitation or mimicry of styles that Fredric Jameson equates directly with the language of postmodernism. ‘Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language,’ asserts Jameson, ‘but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody’s ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic. Pastiche is blank parody, parody that has lost its sense of humour.’5 This is an excellent description of Modesty Blaise (which has always been vilified by critics because it fails as comedy), the apotheosis of Losey’s shattering of stylistic boundaries, as well as The Romantic Englishwoman, which changes genre as often as Modesty changes jumpsuits. In the wake of Austin Powers and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, such innovations may appear very tame, but read in light of Losey’s artistic odyssey from social realist to high modernist this early venture into stylistic schizophrenia was extremely daring. Moreover, it fits well into the ontological schema of Losey’s oeuvre as a whole for, as Jameson reminds us, the schizophrenic aesthetic experience is innately temporal, returning us full circle to the non-segmentable, immanent time of dialectics at a standstill: ‘as temporal continuities break down, the experience of the present becomes powerfully, overwhelmingly vivid and “material”: the world comes before the schizophrenic with heightened intensity, bearing a mysterious and oppressive charge of affect, glowing with hallucinatory energy.’6 I can’t think of a better description of the haunting power of Losey’s cinema, an art where historical time overcomes its own discontinuities to become timeless.

Notes 1 Roger Greenspun, ‘A Movie That Might Have Been Merely Ridiculous …’, New York Times, 17 November 1968, p. D3. 2 Robert Beyoun, France Observateur, 11 October 1962, cited in Caute, Joseph Losey,

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p. 392. Pierre Rissient, cited in ibid., p. 391. 3 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 214. 4 Losey, in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 306. 5 Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, WA, Bay Press, 1983), p. 114. 6 Ibid., p. 120.

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Theatre credits and filmography

Born on 14 January 1909 in La Crosse, Wisconsin, Joseph Losey studied medicine at Dartmouth College before becoming sidetracked into theatre activity with the Dartmouth Players. From 1930 to 1939, when he directed his first short film, Losey’s career was exclusively taken up with the stage, most notably the 1936 Living Newspaper productions, sponsored by Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA). His theatre work culminated with his 1947 staging of Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo in Los Angeles and New York with Charles Laughton. After completing his first Hollywood feature, The Boy with Green Hair for RKO in 1948, Losey was blacklisted in 1952 and worked predominantly in Britain and France until his death on 22 June 1984.

Director, theatre productions Little ol’ Boy, 1933, by Albert Bein, with Burgess Meredith. Playhouse Theater, New York. A Bride for the Unicorn, 1934, by Dennis Johnstone. Brattleboro Theater, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Jayhawker, 1934, by Sinclair Lewis and Lloyd Lewis, with Fred and Paula Stone. National Theater, Washington; Garrick Theater, Philadelphia; Cort Theater, New York. Gods of the Lightning, 1934, by Maxwell Anderson. Peabody Theater, Boston. Waiting for Lefty, 1935, by Clifford Odets, with expatriates in Moscow, USSR. Hymn to the Rising Sun, 1936, by Paul Green, with Will Geer, Charles Dingle. Theater Union at the Civic Repertory Theater. Conjure Man Dies, 1936, by Rudolph Fischer, for John Houseman’s WPA Negro Theatre. Federal Theater Project’s Negro Theater at Lafayette Theater, New York. The Living Newspaper: Triple A Plowed Under and Injunction Granted!, 1936, Federal Theater at Biltmore Theater, New York. Who Fights This Battle?, 1936, by Kenneth White. Theater Arts Committee, Delanee Hotel, New York.

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Political Cabaret, 1937. Redhead Baker, 1937, by Albert Maltz. Columbia Workshop Radio Production. Sunup to Sundown, 1938, by Francis Faragoh. Hudson Theater, New York. Russian War Relief, 1940–3, shows in New York, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit. 90 half-hour programs for NBC and CBS, 1943–4, including Worlds at War, Days of Reckoning Series. These include: The People vs Pierre Laval (Elmer Rice); The People vs The Unholy Three (Norman Rosten); They Burned the Books (Vincent Benét); The Long Name None Could Spell (Norman Corwin). Roosevelt Memorial Show, 1945. The Hollywood Bowl. Academy Award Show, 1946–7. Grauman’s Chinese Theater, Hollywood. The Great Campaign, 1947, by Arnold Sundgaard. Princess Theater, New York. Galileo, 1947, by Bertolt Brecht, with Charles Laughton. Coronet Theater, Los Angeles, Maxine Elliott Theater, New York. The Wooden Dish, 1954, by Edmund Morris. Phoenix Theatre, London. The Night of the Ball, 1955, by Michael Burn. New Theatre, London. Waiting for Lefty, 1975, by Clifford Odets. Dartmouth Players, Warner Bentley Theater, Hanover, New Jersey. Boris Godunov, 1980, by Modest Mussorgsky. Paris Opera.

Director, film Pete Roleum and His Cousins, 1939, 20 min., col. Production company: Petroleum Industries Exhibition Inc., New York Producer: Joseph Losey Screenplay: Joseph Losey Photography: Harold Muller Animation: Charles Bowers Puppets devised by: Howard Bay Editing: Helen Van Dongen Music: Hanns Eisler, Oscar Levant Narrator: Hiram Sherman

A Child Went Forth, 1940, 18 min., b/w Production company: National Association of Nursery Educators (for the US State Department) Producers: Joseph Losey, John Ferno Directors: Joseph Losey, John Ferno Screenplay: Joseph Losey Photography: John Ferno Music: Hanns Eisler Narrator: Munro Leaf

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Youth Gets a Break, 1941, 20 min., b/w Production company: National Youth Administration Screenplay: Joseph Losey Photography: John Ferno, Willard Van Dyke, Ralph Steiner

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A Gun in His Hand, 1945, 19 min., b/w Production company: MGM (A ‘Crime Does Not Pay’ Subject) Screenplay: Charles Francis Royal, based on a story by Richard Landau Photography: Jackson Rose Art director: Richard Duce Editing: Harry Komer Music: Max Terr Leading players: Anthony Caruso (Pinky), Richard Gaines (Inspector Dana), Ray Teal (O’Neill)

The Boy With Green Hair, 1948, 82 min., col. Production company: RKO-Radio Executive producer: Dore Schary Producer: Adrian Scott, replaced by Stephen Ames Screenplay: Ben Barzman, Alfred Lewis Levitt, based on a story by Betsy Beaton Photography (Technicolor): George Barnes Editing: Frank Doyle Art directors: Albert S. D’Agostino, Ralph Berger Music: Leigh Harline. Song ‘Nature Boy’ by Eden Ahbez Musical director: Constantin Bakaleinikoff Costumes: Adele Balkan Script supervisor: Richard Kinon Sound: Earl Wolcott, Clem Portman Leading players: Dean Stockwell (Peter Frye), Pat O’Brien (Gramp), Robert Ryan (Dr Evans), Barbara Hale (Miss Brand), Samuel S. Hinds (Dr Knudson), Walter Catlett (The King), Richard Lyon (Michael), Charles Meredith (Mr Piper), Regis Toomey (Mr Davis), David Clarke (The Barber), Billy Sheffield (Red), John Calkins (Danny), Teddy Infuhr (Timmy), Dwayne Hickman (Joey), Eilene Janssen (Peggy), Charles Arnt (Mr Hammond), Russ Tamblyn and Curtis Jackson (Pupils)

The Lawless (aka. The Dividing Line in the UK), 1950, 83 min., b/w Production company: Paramount/A Pine-Thomas Production Producers: William H. Pine, William C. Thomas Screenplay: Geoffrey Homes (aka Daniel Mainwaring), based on his novel, The Voice of Stephen Wilder

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Photography: Roy Hunt Design consultant: John Hubley Art director: Lewis H. Creber Editing: Howard Smith Music: Mahlon Merrick Musical Director: David Chudnow, Sound Recording: John Carter Leading players: MacDonald Carey (Larry Wilder), Gail Russell (Sunny Garcia), Lalo Rios (Paul Rodriguez), John Sands (Joe Ferguson), Lee Patrick (Jan Dawson), John Hoyt (Ed Ferguson), Maurice Jara (Lopo Chavez), Walter Reed (Jim Wilson), Guy Anderson (Jonas Creel), Argentina Brunetti (Mrs Rodriguez), William Edmunds (Mr Jensen), Gloria Winters (Mildred Jensen), John Davis (Harry Pawling), Martha Hyer (Caroline Tyler), Frank Fenton (Mr Prentiss), Paul Harvey (Blake, the Chief of Police), Ian MacDonald (Sergeant Al Peters), Robert B. Williams (Boswell), Julia Faye (Mrs Jensen), Pedro De Cordoba (Mr Garcia), Frank Ferguson (Carl Green), John Murphy (Mayor), Tab Hunter, Felipe Turich, Noel Reyburn, Russ Conway, James Bush, Howard Negley, Gordon Nelson, Ray Hyke

The Prowler, 1951, 92 min., b/w Production company: Horizon Pictures Producer: S. P. Eagle [i.e. Sam Spiegel] Screenplay: Hugo Butler, Dalton Trumbo, from an original story by Robert Thoeren, Hans Wilhelm Photography: Arthur Miller Art director: Boris Leven Design consultant: John Hubley Editing: Paul Weatherwax Music: Lyn Murray, song ‘Baby’ by Lyn Murray, Dick Mack, sung by Bob Carroll Musical director: Irving Friedman Costumes: Maria Donovan Script supervisor: Don Weis Sound: Benny Winkler Leading players: Van Heflin (Webb Garwood), Evelyn Keyes (Susan Gilvray), John Maxwell (Bud Crocker), Katherine Warren (Mrs Crocker), Emerson Treacy (William Gilvray), Madge Blake (Martha Gilvray), Wheaton Chambers (Dr James), Robert Osterloh (Coroner), Sherry Hall (John Gilvray), Louise Lorimer (Motel Manager), George Nader (Photographer), Benny Burt (Journalist), Tiny Jones

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M, 1951, 88 min., b/w Production company: Columbia Producer: Seymour Nebenzal Screenplay: Norman Reilly Raine, Leo Katcher, based on the original script by Thea von Harbou and Fritz Lang Additional dialogue: Waldo Salt Photography: Ernest Laszlo Art director: Martin Obzina Editing: Edward Mann Music: Michel Michelet Music director: Bert Shefter Script supervisor: Don Weis Sound: Leon Becker, Mac Dalgleish Leading players: David Wayne (Martin Harrow), Howard Da Silva (Carney), Luther Adler (Langley), Martin Gabel (Marshall), Steve Brodie (Lieutenant Becker), Raymond Burr (Pottsy), Glenn Anders (Riggert), Karen Morley (Mrs Coster), Norman Lloyd (Sutro), John Miljan (Blind Vendor), Walter Burke (MacMahan), Roy Engel (Regan), Benny Burt (Jansen), Lennie Bremen (Lemke), Jim Backus (The Mayor), Janine Perreau (Intended Victim), Robin Fletcher (Elsie Coster), Bernard Szold (Nightwatchman), Jorja Curtright (Mrs Stewart)

The Big Night, 1951, 75 min., b/w Production company: Philip Waxman Producer: Philip A. Waxman Screenplay: Hugo Butler, Ring Lardner Jr., Stanley Ellin, Joseph Losey, based on the novel Dreadful Summit by Stanley Ellin Photography: Hal Mohr Art director: Nicholas Remisoff Editing: Edward Mann Music: Lyn Murray. Song by Lyn Murray, Sid Kuller Musical director: Leon Klatzkin Costumes: Joseph King Script supervisor: Arnold Laven Special effects: Ray Mercer, Lee Zavitz Sound: Leon Becker Leading players: John Barrymore Jr., (Georgie La Main), Preston Foster (Andy La Main), Howland Chamberlin (Flanagan), Howard St. John (Al Judge), Dorothy Comingore (Julie Rostina), Joan Lorring (Marion Rostina), Philip Bourneuf (Dr Lloyd Cooper), Emil Meyer (Peckinpaugh), Mauri Lynn (Terry Angelus), Myron Healey (Kennealy), Joseph Mell (Mr Ehrlich), Robert Aldrich (Spectator at Boxing Match), Joe McTurk, Pick Lamar, Patricia Enright, Teresa Enright

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Stranger on the Prowl (aka. Encounter in the UK and Imbarco a Mezzanotte in Italy), 1952, 100 min. (Italy), 80 min. (UK), b/w Production company: Consorzio Produttori Cinematografici Tirrenia/Riviera Films Inc. Executive producer: Alfonso Bajocci Producer: Noël Calef Director: Andrea Forzano [i.e. Joseph Losey] Screenplay: Andrea Forzano [i.e. Ben Barzman], based on a story by Noël Calef Photography: Henri Alekan Art director: Antonio Valente Editing: Thelma Connell Music: G. C. Sonzogno Sound recording: Leon Becker Leading players: Paul Muni (The Man), Joan Lorring (Angela), Vittorio Manunta (Giacomo Fontana), Luisa Rossi (Giacomo’s Mother), Aldo Silvani (Peroni), Franco Balducci (Morelli), Enrico Glori (Signor Pucci), Arnoldo Foà (The Inspector), Elena Manson (The Storekeeper), Alfredo Varelli (Castelli), Fausta Mazzunchelli (Giacomo’s Sister), Cesare Trapani (Giacomo’s Friend), Léon Lenoir (Mancini), Linda Sini (Signora Raffetto), Giulio Marchetti (Signor Raffetto), Noël Calef (Flute-Player), Henri Alekan (Priest on Bicycle), Nando Bruno, Ave Ninchi

The Sleeping Tiger, 1954, 89 min., b/w Production company: Insignia Producer: Victor Hanbury Director: Victor Hanbury [i.e. Joseph Losey] Screenplay: Derek Frye [i.e. Harold Buchman, Carl Foreman], based on the novel by Maurice Moiseiwitsch Photography: Harry Waxman Design consultant: Richard Macdonald Art director: John Stoll Editing: Reginald Mills Music: Malcolm Arnold Musical director: Muir Mathieson Continuity: Marjorie Owens Sound recording: W. H. Lindop, C. Poulton Sound editor: Harry Booth Leading players: Dirk Bogarde (Frank Clements), Alexis Smith (Glenda Esmond), Alexander Knox (Dr Clive Esmond), Hugh Griffith (Inspector Simmons), Patricia McCarron (Sally), Maxine Audley (Carol), Glyn Houston (Bailey), Harry Towb (Harry), Russell Waters (Manager), Billie Whitelaw (Receptionist), Fred Griffiths (Taxi-Driver), Esma Cannon (Window-Cleaner)

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A Man on the Beach, 1955, 29 min., col. Production company: Hammer Films Producer: Anthony Hinds Screenplay: Jimmy Sangster, based on a story, ‘Chance at the Wheel’, by Victor Canning Photography (Eastmancolor, Cinepanorama): Wilkie Cooper Design consultant: Richard Macdonald Art director: Edward Marshall Editing: Henry Richardson Music: John Hotchkis Sound recording: W. H. P. May Leading players: Donald Wolfit (Carter), Michael Medwin (Max), Michael Ripper (Chauffeur), Alex de Gallier (Casino Manager), Edward Forsyth (Clement), Krik S. Siegenburg (Little Boy), Shandra Walden (Little Girl), Barry Shawzin (The American), Nora Maiden and Corinne Grey (Girls on the Beach)

The Intimate Stranger (aka. The Finger of Guilt in the US), 1956, 95 min., b/w Production company: Anglo Guild Executive producer: Tony Owen Producer: Alec C. Snowden Director: Joseph Walton (UK), Alec C. Snowden (US) [i.e. Joseph Losey] Screenplay: Peter Howard [i.e. Howard Koch] Photography: Gerald Gibbs Design consultant: Richard Macdonald Art director: Wilfred Arnold Editing: Geoffrey Muller Music: Trevor Duncan Musical director: Richard Taylor Costumes: Alice McLaren Continuity: Marjorie Owens Sound recording: Sidney Rider, Ron Abbott Sound editor: Derek Holding Leading players: Richard Basehart (Reggie Wilson), Mary Murphy (Evelyn Stewart), Constance Cummings (Kay Wallace), Roger Livesey (Ben Case), Mervyn Johns (Ernest Chapel), Faith Brook (Lesley Wilson), Vernon Greeves (George Mearns), André Mikhelson (Steve Vadney), Basil Dignam (Dr Gray), Grace Denbeigh-Russell (Mrs Lynton), Frederick Steger (Jenner), Wilfred Downing (Office Boy), Edna Landor (Miss Tyson), Jack Stewart (Gateman), David Lodge (Police Sergeant Brown), Michael Ward (Sydney), Jay Denyer (Studio Policeman), Katherine Page (Miss Sedgwick), Douglas Hayes (Draper), Lian-Shin Yang (Mary), Joseph Losey (The Director), Michael Segal (Waiter), Peter Verness

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(Policeman), Marianne Stone (Martine Vadney), Gordon Harris (Actor), Garfield Morgan (Waiter), John Preston (Fred), David Hurst (Dave Pearson), Richard Grant (Harry)

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Time Without Pity, 1957, 88 min., b/w Production company: Harlequin Executive producer: Leon Clore Producers: John Arnold, Anthony Simmons Screenplay: Ben Barzman, based on the play Someone Waiting by Emlyn Williams Photography: Freddie Francis Design consultant: Richard Macdonald Production designer: Reece Pemberton Art director: Bernard Sarron Editing: Alan Osbiston Music: Tristram Cary Musical director: Marcus Dods Continuity: Pamela Davies Sound recording: Cyril Collick Leading players: Michael Redgrave (David Graham), Ann Todd (Honor Stanford), Leo McKern (Robert Stanford), Peter Cushing (Jeremy Clayton), Alec McCowen (Alec Graham), Renee Houston (Mrs Harker), Paul Daneman (Brian Stanford), Lois Maxwell (Vicky Harker), Richard Wordsworth (Maxwell), George Devine (Barnes), Joan Plowright (Agnes Cole), Ernest Clark (Under-Secretary), Peter Copley (Padre), Hugh Moxey (Prison Governor), Julian Somers (First Warder), John Chandos (First Journalist), Dickie Henderson Jr. (The Comedian), Richard Leech (Proprietor of Espresso Bar), Christina Lubicz (Jenny Cole)

The Gypsy and the Gentleman, 1957, 107 min., col. Production company: Rank Producer: Maurice Cowan Screenplay: Janet Green, based on the novel Darkness I Leave You by Nina Warner Hooke Photography (Eastmancolor): Jack Hildyard Design consultant: Richard Macdonald Art director: Ralph Brinton Set decorator: Vernon Dixon Editing: Reginald Beck Music/Musical director: Hans May Costumes: Julie Harris Continuity: Gladys Goldsmith Sound recording: Robert T. MacPhee, Gordon K. McCallum

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Sound editor: Jim Groom Historical adviser: Vyvyan Holland Leading players: Melina Mercouri (Belle), Keith Michell (Sir Paul Deverill), Patrick McGoohan (Jess), June Laverick (Sarah Deverill), Lyndon Brook (John Patterson), Flora Robson (Mrs Haggard), Clare Austin (Vanessa), Helen Haye (Lady Ayrton), Newton Blick (Ruddock), Mervyn Johns (Brook), John Salew (Duffin), Gladys Boot (Mrs Mortimer), Edna Morris (Mrs Piggott), Catherine Feller (Hattie), Laurence Naismith (Forrester), David Hart (Will), Louis Aquilina (Coco), Nigel Green (The Game Pup), Laurence Taylor (Cropped Harry)

Blind Date (aka. Chance Meeting in the US), 1959, 95 min., b/w Production company: Independent Artists. A Julian Wintle–Leslie Parkyn Production Producer: David Deutsch Screenplay: Ben Barzman, Millard Lampell, based on the novel by Leigh Howard Photography: Christopher Challis Design consultant: Richard Macdonald Supervising art director: Edward Carrick Art director: Harry Pottle Editing: Reginald Mills Music: Richard Rodney Bennett Musical director: Malcolm Arnold Costumes: Morris Angel Continuity: Susan Dyson Sound editor: Malcolm Cooke Sound recording: Len Page Sound re-recording: Ken Cameron Leading players: Hardy Krüger (Jan Van Rooyen), Stanley Baker (Inspector Morgan), Micheline Presle (Lady Fenton, called Jacqueline Cousteau), Robert Flemyng (Sir Brian Lewis), Gordon Jackson (Police Sergeant), John Van Eyssen (Inspector Westover), Jack MacGowran (Postman), George Roubicek (Police Constable), Redmond Phillips (Police Doctor), Lee Montague (Sergeant Farrow), Shirley Davien (Girl on Bus), Christina Lubicz (The Real Jacqueline Cousteau)

First on the Road (advertisement for Ford), 1960, 12 min., col. Production company: Graphic Films for Ford Motors Producer: Leon Clore Photography (Technicolor): Larry Pizer Design consultant: Richard Macdonald Music: Frank Cordell

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The Criminal (aka. The Concrete Jungle in the US), 1960, 97 min., b/w Production company: Merton Park Studios Producer: Jack Greenwood Screenplay: Alun Owen, based on an original story by Jimmy Sangster Photography: Robert Krasker Design consultant: Richard Macdonald Art director: Scott MacGregor Editing: Reginald Mills Music/Musical director: Johnny Dankworth. Song ‘Prison Blues’ sung by Cleo Laine Continuity: Pamela Davies Sound recording: Sidney Rider, Ronald Abbott Sound editor: Derek Holding Leading players: Stanley Baker (Johnny Bannion), Sam Wanamaker (Mike Carter), Margit Saad (Suzanne), Patrick Magee (Chief Warder Barrows), Grégoire Aslan (Frank Saffron), Jill Bennett (Maggie), Rupert Davies (Mr Edwards), Laurence Naismith (Mr Town), John Van Eyssen (Formby), Noel Willman (Prison Governor), Derek Francis (Priest), Redmond Phillips (Prison Doctor), Kenneth J. Warren (Clobber), Kenneth Cope (Kelly), Patrick Wymark (Sol), Jack Rodney (Scout), Murray Melvin (Antlers), John Molloy (Snipe), Brian Phelan (Pauly Larkin), Paul Stassino (Alfredo Fanucci), Jerold Wells (Warder Brown), Tom Bell (Flynn), Neil McCarthy (O’Hara), Keith Smith (Hanson), Nigel Green (Ted), Tom Gerard (Quantock), Larry Taylor (Chas), Sydney Bromley (Frightened Prisoner), Luigi Tiano (Italian-Speaking Prisoner), Edward Judd (Young Warder), Richard Shaw (Warder in Van), Charles Lamb (Mr Able), Maxwell Shaw (First Man at Party), Victor Beaumont (Second Man at Party), Dorothy Bromiley (Angela), Ronald Brittain (Kitchen Warder), Tommy Eytle (West Indian Prisoner), Dickie Owen (First Man in Prison), Roy Dotrice (Nicholls), Bobby R. Naidoo (Serang), Maitland Williams (West Indian Prisoner)

The Damned (aka. These Are The Damned in the US), 1961, 87 min., b/w Production company: Hammer/Swallow Executive producer: Michael Carreras Producer: Anthony Hinds Screenplay: Evan Jones, based on the novel The Children of Light by H. L. Lawrence Photography (Hammerscope): Arthur Grant Design consultant: Richard Macdonald Production designer: Bernard Robinson Art director: Don Mingaye Sculptures: Elizabeth Frink Editing: Reginald Mills

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Music: James Bernard. Song, ‘Black Leather Rock’ by James Bernard, Evan Jones Musical director: John Hollingsworth Costumes: Mollie Arbuthnot Continuity: Pamela Davies Sound recording: Jock May Sound editor: Malcolm Cooke Casting: Stuart Lyons Leading players: MacDonald Carey (Simon Wells), Shirley Ann Field (Joan), Viveca Lindfors (Freya Neilson), Alexander Knox (Bernard), Oliver Reed (King), Walter Gotell (Major Holland), James Villiers (Captain Gregory), Thomas Kempinski (Ted), Kenneth Cope (Sid), Brian Oulton (Mr Dingle), Barbara Everest (Miss Lamont), Alan McClelland (Mr Stuart), James Maxwell (Mr Talbot), Rachel Clay (Victoria), Caroline Sheldon (Elizabeth), Rebecca Dignam (Anne), Siobhan Taylor (Mary), Nicholas Clay (Richard), Kit Williams (Henry), Christopher Witty (William), David Palmer (George), John Thompson (Charles), David Gregory, Anthony Valentine, Larry Martyn, Leon Garcia and Jeremy Phillips (Teddy-Boys), Edward Harvey, Neil Wilson, Fiona Duncan, Tommy Trinder

Eve, 1962, 118 min. (original running time, 135 min.), b/w Production company: Paris Film (Paris)/Interopa Film (Rome) Producers: Robert and Raymond Hakim Screenplay: Hugo Butler, Evan Jones, based on the novel by James Hadley Chase Photography: Gianni Di Venanzo (Venice Festival sequence shot by Henri Decaë) Art directors: Richard Macdonald, Luigi Scaccianoce Editing: Reginald Beck, Franca Silvi Music: Michel Legrand. Song ‘Adam and Eve’ by Michel Legrand, lyrics by Joseph Losey and Evan Jones, sung by Tony Middleton; ‘Willow Weep for Me’ and ‘Loveless Love’ sung by Billie Holiday Musical director: Carlo Savina Costumes: Pierre Cardin Continuity: Anita Borgiotti Sound: Federico Savina, Amelio Verona, Claudio Maielli, Renato Cadueri Leading players: Jeanne Moreau (Eve Olivier), Stanley Baker (Tyvian Jones), Virna Lisi (Francesca Ferrara), Giorgio Albertazzi (Branco Malloni), James Villiers (Arthur McCormick), Riccardo Garrone (Michele), Lisa Gastoni (The Redhead), Checco Rissone (Pieri), Enzo Fiermonte (Enzo), Nona Medici (Anna Maria), Alex Revides (The Greek), John Pepper (The Little Boy), Roberto Paoletti, Van Eicken, Evi Rigano, Ignazio Dolce, Peggy Guggenheim, Gilda Dahlberg, Joseph Losey, Vittorio De Sica

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The Servant, 1963, 115 min., b/w Production company: Springbok/Elstree Producers: Joseph Losey, Norman Priggen Screenplay: Harold Pinter, based on the novella by Robin Maugham Photography: Douglas Slocombe Production designer: Richard Macdonald Art director: Ted Clements Editing: Reginald Mills Music/Musical director: Johnny Dankworth. Song ‘All Gone’ sung by Cleo Laine Costumes: Beatrice Dawson Continuity: Pamela Davies Sound supervisor: John Cox Sound recording: Buster Ambler Sound editor: Gerry Hambling Leading players: Dirk Bogarde (Hugo Barrett), James Fox (Tony), Wendy Craig (Susan), Sarah Miles (Vera), Catherine Lacey (Lady Mountset), Richard Vernon (Lord Mountset), Ann Firbank (Society Woman in Restaurant), Doris Knox (Older Woman in Restaurant), Patrick Magee (Bishop), Alun Owen (Curate), Jill Melford (Young Woman in Restaurant), Harold Pinter (Young Man in Restaurant), Derek Tansley (Head Waiter), Gerry Duggan (Waiter), Brian Phelan (Irishman in Pub), Hazel Terry (Woman in Big Hat), Philippa Hare (Girl in Bedroom), Dorothy Bromiley (Girl outside Phone Box), Colette Martin, Joanne Wake and Harriet Devine (Her Friends), Alison Seebohm (Girl in Pub), Chris Williams (Coffee-Bar Cashier), Bruce Wells (Painter), John Dankworth (Band Leader), Davy Graham (Guitarist)

King and Country, 1964, 86 min., b/w Production company: B.H.E. Productions Executive producer: Daniel M. Angel Producers: Norman Priggen, Joseph Losey Screenplay: Evan Jones, from the play Hamp by John Wilson, based on a story by James Lansdale Hodson Photography: Denys Coop Design consultant: Richard Macdonald Art director: Peter Mullins Editing: Reginald Mills Music/Musical director: Larry Adler Costumes: Roy Ponting Continuity: Pamela Davies Sound supervisor: John Cox Sound recording: Buster Ambler Sound editor: Gerry Hambling

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Leading players: Dirk Bogarde (Captain Hargreaves), Tom Courtenay (Pte Hamp), Leo McKern (Captain O’Sullivan), Barry Foster (Lt Webb), James Villiers (Captain Midgley), Peter Copley (Colonel), Barry Justice (Lt Prescott), Vivian Matalon (Padre), Jeremy Spenser (Pte Sparrow), James Hunter (Pte Sykes), David Cook (Pte Wilson), Larry Taylor (Sergeant-Major), Jonah Seymour (Corporal Hamilton), Keith Buckley (Corporal of the Guard), Richard Arthure (Guard ‘Charlie’), Derek Partridge (Captain at Court Martial), Brian Tipping (Lieutenant at Court Martial), Raymond Brody, Terry Palmer and Dan Cornwall (Soldiers in Hamp’s Platoon)

Modesty Blaise, 1966, 119 min., col. Production company: Modesty Blaise Ltd Producer: Joseph Janni Associate producers: Norman Priggen, Michael Birkett Screenplay: Evan Jones, based on the comic strip created by Peter O’Donnell and Jim Holdaway Photography (Technicolor): Jack Hildyard Location photography (Amsterdam): David Boulton Production designer: Richard Macdonald Art director: Jack Shampan Editing: Reginald Beck Music/Musical director: John Dankworth. Songs ‘Modesty Blaise’ (sung by David and Jonathan) and ‘We Should Have’, by Benny Green, Evan Jones Costumes: Beatrice Dawson Continuity: Ann Skinner Sound recording: Buster Ambler Sound editors: John Cox, John Aldred Leading players: Monica Vitti (Modesty Blaise), Terence Stamp (Willie Garvin), Dirk Bogarde (Gabriel), Harry Andrews (Sir Gerald Tarrant), Michael Craig (Paul Hagan), Scilla Gabel (Melina), Tina Marquand (Nicole), Clive Revill (McWhirter and Sheikh Abu Tahir), Rossella Falk (Mrs Fothergill), Joe Melia (Crevier), Lex Schoorel (Walter), Silvan (The Great Pacco), Jon Bluming (Hans), Roberto Bisacco (Enrico), Saro Urzi (Basilio), Giuseppe Paganelli (Friar), Alexander Knox (Minister), Michael Chow (Weng), Marcello Turilli (Strauss), John Karlsen (Oleg), Robin Fox (Man who Presses the Doorbell).

Accident, 1967, 105 min., col. Production company: Royal Avenue, Chelsea Producers: Joseph Losey, Norman Priggen Screenplay: Harold Pinter, based on the novel by Nicholas Mosley

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Photography (Eastmancolor): Gerry Fisher Art director: Carmen Dillon Editing: Reginald Beck Music/Musical director: John Dankworth Costumes: Beatrice Dawson Continuity: Pamela Davies Sound recording: Simon Kaye, Gerry Humphries Sound editor: Alan Bell Leading players: Dirk Bogarde (Stephen), Stanley Baker (Charley), Jacqueline Sassard (Anna), Michael York (William), Vivien Merchant (Rosalind), Delphine Seyrig (Francesca), Alexander Knox (The Provost), Ann Firbank (Laura), Brian Phelan (Police Sergeant), Terence Rigby (Plain-Clothes Policeman), Harold Pinter (Mr Bell), Freddie Jones (Frantic Man at TV Studio), Jane Hillary (TV Receptionist), Jill Johnson (Secretary), Nicholas Mosley (A Don), Maxwell Findlater and Carole Caplin (The Children)

Boom!, 1968, 113 min., col. Production company: World Film Services/Moon Lake Productions Producers: John Heyman, Norman Priggen Screenplay: Tennessee Williams, based on his play The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, adapted from his story, ‘Man, Bring This Up Road’ Photography (Technicolor, Panavision): Douglas Slocombe Production designer: Richard Macdonald Editing: Reginald Beck Music: John Barry. Indian music by Nazirali Jairazbnoy, Viram Jasani. Song: ‘Hideaway’ by John Dankworth, Don Black, sung by Georgie Fame Costumes: Tiziani Sound recording: Leslie Hammond, Gerry Humphries Leading players: Elizabeth Taylor (Flora Goforth), Richard Burton (Chris Flanders), Noël Coward (Witch of Capri), Joanna Shimkus (Blackie), Michael Dunn (Rudy), Romolo Valli (Dr Lullo), Veronica Wells (Simonetta), Fernando Piazza (Giulio), Howard Taylor (Journalist), Gens Bloch (Photographer), Franco Pesce (Villager)

Secret Ceremony, 1968, 109 min., col. Production company: World Film Services. A Paul M. Heller Production Producers: John Heyman, Norman Priggen Screenplay: George Tabori, from the novel by Marco Denevi Photography (Technicolor): Gerry Fisher Production designer: Richard Macdonald Art director: John Clark Set design: Jill Oxley Editing: Reginald Beck

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Music: Richard Rodney Bennett Costumes: Susan Yelland, Klara Kerpen Continuity: Pamela Davies Sound recording: Leslie Hammond, Hugh Strain Leading players: Elizabeth Taylor (Leonora), Mia Farrow (Cenci), Robert Mitchum (Albert), Peggy Ashcroft (Hannah), Pamela Brown (Hilda), Albert Shepherd

Figures in a Landscape, 1970, 110 min., col. Production company: Cinecrest Films, for Cinema Center Films Executive producer: Sir William Piggott-Brown Producer: John Kohn Screenplay: Robert Shaw, based on the novel by Barry England Photography (Technicolor, Panavision): Henri Alekan, Peter Suschitzky Helicopter photography: Guy Tabary Editing: Reginald Beck Art director: Ted Tester Music: Richard Rodney Bennett Special effects: Manolo Baquero Costumes: Susan Yelland Continuity: Connie Willis Sound mixers: George Stephenson, Hugh Strain Dubbing editor: Garth Craven Leading players: Robert Shaw (MacConnachie), Malcolm McDowell (Ansell), Henry Woolf (Helicopter Pilot), Christopher Malcolm (Helicopter Observer), Andrew Bradford, Warwick Sims, Roger Lloyd Pack, Robert East and Tariq Younus (Soldiers)

The Go-Between, 1971, 116 min., col. Production company: MGM–EMI/World Film Services Executive producer: Robert Velaise Producers: John Heyman, Norman Priggen Screenplay: Harold Pinter, based on the novel by L. P. Hartley Photography (Technicolor): Gerry Fisher Editing: Reginald Beck Art director: Carmen Dillon Music: Michel Legrand Costumes: John Furness Continuity: Pamela Davies Sound editor: Garth Craven Sound recording: Peter Handford, Hugh Strain Leading players: Julie Christie (Marian), Alan Bates (Ted Burgess), Dominic Guard (Leo Colston), Margaret Leighton (Mrs Maudsley), Michael Red-

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grave (Leo as an Old Man), Michael Gough (Mr Maudsley), Edward Fox (Hugh Trimingham), Richard Gibson (Marcus), Simon Hume-Kendall (Denys), Amaryllis Garnett (Kate), Roger Lloyd Pack (Charles), Keith Buckley, John Rees, Gordon Richardson

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The Assassination of Trotsky, 1972, 103 min., col. Production company: Cinetel (Paris)/Dino de Laurentiis Cinematografica/ CIAC (Rome), for Joseph Shaftel Productions (London) Executive producer: Joseph Shaftel Producers: Norman Priggen, Joseph Losey Screenplay: Nicholas Mosley, Masolino d’Amico Photography (Technicolor): Pasquale De Santis Editing: Reginald Beck Production designer: Richard Macdonald Art director: Arrigo Equini Music: Egisto Macchi Costumes: Annalisa Nasalli Rocca Continuity: Pamela Davies Sound: Peter T. Davies Casting: Guidarino Guidi Leading players: Richard Burton (Trotsky), Alain Delon (Frank Jacson), Romy Schneider (Gita Samuels), Valentina Cortese (Natalya), Giorgio Albertazzi (Salazar), Luigi Vannucchi (Ruiz), Diulio Del Prete (Felipe), Jean Desailly (Alfred Rosmer), Simone Valere (Marguerite Rosmer), Carlos Miranda (Sheldon Harte), Peter Chatel (Otto), Hunt Powers (Ed), Gianni Lofredo (Sam), Pierangelo Civera (Pedro), Mike Forest (Jim), Marco Lucantoni (Seva), Claudio Brook (Roberto)

A Doll’s House, 1973, 106 min., col. Production company: World Film Services (London)/Les Films de la Boétie (Paris) Executive producer: John Heyman Producer: Joseph Losey Screenplay: David Mercer, based on the play by Henrik Ibsen, translated by Michael Meyer Photography (Eastmancolor): Gerry Fisher Editing: Reginald Beck Art director: Eileen Diss Titles: Richard Macdonald Music: Michel Legrand Costumes: Edith Head, John Furniss Continuity: Lilian Lee Sound recording: Peter Handford

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Dubbing mix: Gerry Humphries Dubbing editor: Peter Horrocks Leading players: Jane Fonda (Nora Helmer), David Warner (Torvald Helmer), Trevor Howard (Dr Rank), Delphine Seyrig (Kristine Linde), Edward Fox (Nils Krogstad), Anna Wing (Anne-Marie), Pierre Oudrey (Olssen), Frode Lien (Ivar), Tone Floor (Emmy), Morten Floor (Bob), Ingrid Natrud (Dr Rank’s Maid), Freda Krogh (Helmer’s Maid), Ellen Holm (Krogstad’s Daughter), Dagfinn Hertzberg (Krogstad’s Son)

Galileo, 1974, 145 min., col. Production company: Ely Landau Organization (London) Producer: Ely Landau Executive producer: Otto Plaschkes, for the American Film Theater Screenplay: Barbara Bray, Joseph Losey, after the play Life of Galileo by Bertolt Brecht, translated by Charles Laughton Photography: Michael Reed Editing: Reginald Beck Production designer: Richard Macdonald Music: Hanns Eisler. Additional music by Richard Hartley Choreographer: Ronald Hynd Leading players: Topol (Galileo Galilei), Edward Fox (Cardinal Inquisitor), Georgia Brown (Ballad Singer’s Wife), Clive Revill (Ballad Singer), Margaret Leighton (Court Lady), John Gielgud (Old Cardinal), Michael Gough (Sagredo), Michel Lonsdale (Cardinal Barberini/Pope), Richard O’Callaghan (Fulganzio), Tim Woodward (Ludovico), Judy Parfitt (Angelica Sarti), John McEnery (Federzoni), Patrick Magee (Cardinal Bellarmin), Mary Larkin (Virginia), Iain Travers (Andrea, the Boy), Tom Conti (Andrea, the Man)

The Romantic Englishwoman, 1975, 116 min., col. Production company: Dial Films (London)/Meric Matalon (Paris) Producer: Daniel M. Angel Screenplay: Thomas Wiseman, Tom Stoppard, based on the novel by Thomas Wiseman Photography (Eastmancolor): Gerry Fisher Editing: Reginald Beck Production designer: Richard Macdonald Music: Richard Hartley Costumes: Elsa Fennell, Ruth Myers Continuity: Pamela Davies Sound recording: Peter Handford, Gerry Humphries Sound re-recording: Peter Horrocks Casting: Mary Selway

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Leading players: Glenda Jackson (Elisabeth Fielding), Michael Caine (Lewis Fielding), Helmut Berger (Thomas Hursa), Marcus Richardson (David Fielding), Kate Nelligan (Isabel), Rene Kolldehof (Herman), Michel Lonsdale (Swan), Beatrice Romand (Catherine), Anna Steele (Annie), Nathalie Delon (Miranda), Bill Wallis (Hendrik), Julie Peasgood (New Nanny), David De Keyser (George), Phil Brown (Mr Wilson), Marcella Markham (Mrs Wilson), Lillian Walker (First Meal-Ticket Lady), Doris Nolan (Second Meal-Ticket Lady), Norman Scace (Headwaiter), Tom Chatto (Neighbour), Frankie Jordan (Supermarket Cashier), Frances Tomelty (Airport Shop Assistant)

Mr Klein, 1976, 123 min., col. Production company: Lira Films/Adel Productions/Nova Films (Paris)/ Mondial Te-Fi (Rome) Executive producer: Ralph Baum Producers: Raymond Danon, Alain Delon, Robert Kupferberg, Jean-Pierre LaBrande Screenplay: Franco Solinas Photography (Eastmancolor): Gerry Fisher Editing: Henri Lanoë Production manager: Ludmilla Goulian Art director: Alexandre Trauner Music: Egisto Macchi, Pierre Porte. Songs: ‘Premier Rendez-vous’ by Sylvano and Peterat, ‘Du darfst mir nie mehr rote Rosen schenken’ by Michel Jarry and Bruno Batz, ‘Tching Kong’, ‘Venez donc chez moi je vous invite’ by Misraki, ‘Je ne sais pas si je vous aime’ by Joseph Rico, sung by Jean Lumière, ‘Kindertotenlieder’ by Gustav Mahler Special effects: Georges Iaconelli Costumes: Annalisa Nasalli Rocca Cabaret act: Frantz Salieri with La Grande Eugène Sound recording: Jean Labussière, Maurice Dagonneau Leading players: Alain Delon (Robert Klein), Jeanne Moreau (Florence), Suzanne Flon (Concierge), Michel Lonsdale (Pierre), Juliet Berto (Janine), Francine Bergé (Nicole), Jean Bouise (Man with Painting), Louis Seigner (Old Klein), Michel Aumont (Official at Police HQ), Massimo Girotti (Charles), Francine Racette (Nathalie/Françoise/Cathy/Isabelle), Roland Bertin (Newspaper Publisher), Etienne Chicot and Pierre Vernier (Policemen), Jacques Maury (Dr Montandon), Gérard Jugnot (Photographer), Jean Champion (Morgue Attendant), Pierre Frag (Newsvendor), Fred Personne (Police Inspector), Isabelle Sadoyan (Woman under Examination), Maurice Vallier (Man in Doctor’s Waiting Room), Christian De Tillière (Auctioneer), Rosine Rochette (Woman at Auction), François Viaur (Concierge at Theatre), Magali Clément (Lola), Hermine Karagheuz (Factory Girl), Dany Kogan (Michelle), Mireille Françhino (Woman on

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Bus), Maurice Jany (Chauffeur at Ivry-la-Bataille), Michel Delahaye (Old Klein’s Companion), Alain David (Page at La Coupole), Stéphane Quatrehomme (Pierre’s Son), Maurice Baquet (Cellist at Château), Lucienne Lemarchand

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Les Routes du Sud, 1978, 97 min., col. Production company: Société française de production/Trinacra Films/FR3 (Paris)/Profilmes (Barcelona) Executive producer: Yves Rousset-Rouard Screenplay: Jorge Semprún Photography: Gerry Fisher Editing: Reginald Beck Art director: Alexandre Trauner Music: Michel Legrand. Songs performed by Tania Maria Special effects: March Cauvy Costumes: Lisele Roos Script supervisor: Marie-Josee Guissart Sound recording: Rena Magnol Sound mixing: Jacques Maumont Sound editing: Michelle Neny Casting: Margot Capelier Leading players: Yves Montand (Jean Larrea), Miou-Miou (Julia), Laurent Malet (Laurent Larrea), France Lambiotte (Eve Larrea), Jose Luis Gomez (Miguel), Jean Bouise (Farmer), Maurice Benichou (Garcia), Didier Sauvegrain (The Soldier, Korpik), Eugene Braun-Munk (The Producer, Egon), Claire Bretécher (TV Journalist), Francesco Vicens (Spanish Doctor), Jeannine Mestre (Nuria, Miguel’s Wife), Luis Pascual Sanchez (Bearded Youth), Roger Planchon (Parisian Lawyer), Christian de Tillière (Russian Officer), François Nadal (First Horseman), Alain Barbier (Second Horseman), Arja Toyryla (Arja), Francine Meunier (Francine), Guy Thomas (TV Presenter), Frédérique Ruchaud (Farmer’s Wife), Gérard Moisan (Jean Larrea, when Young), Sergio (Small Boy), Mario Gonzalez (Hotel Employee), Hilair Lovato (Man in a Car), Boda Visjnic, Reynald Lampert (German Officers)

Don Giovanni, 1979, 176 min., col. Production company: Opera Film Produzione (Rome)/Gaumont/Caméra One/Antenna-2 (Paris)/Janus Films (Frankfurt) Producers: Luciano De Feo, Michel Seydoux, Robert Nador Associate director: Frantz Salieri Screenplay: the opera Don Giovanni by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte. Adaptation by Joseph Losey, Patricia Losey, Frantz Salieri

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Photography (Technicolor): Gerry Fisher, Carlo Poletti Editing: Reginald Beck, Emma Menenti, Marie Castro-Vazquez Art director: Alexandre Trauner Music: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, performed by the Orchestra and Chorus of the Paris Opéra, directed by Lorin Maazel. Harpsichord continuo by Janine Reiss Special effects: Roberto Pace Costumes: Frantz Salieri, Annalisa Nasalli Rocca, Jean-François de Pouilly Sound: Jean-Louis Ducarme, Jacques Maumont, Michelle Neny, Rodolfo Montagnani, Jean-Paul Mugel Sound effects: Daniel Couteau Casting: Paolo Morosi Leading players: Ruggero Raimondi (Don Giovanni), John Macurdy (Commendatore), Edda Moser (Donna Anna), Kiri te Kanawa (Donna Elvira), Kenneth Riegel (Don Ottavio), José van Dam (Leporello), Teresa Berganza (Zerlina), Malcolm King (Masetto), Eric Adjani (Valet in Black)

The Trout, 1982, 105 min., col. Production company: Partner’s Production/TF1 Films Production/SFPC Producer: Yves Rousset-Rouard Associate producer: Patricia Losey Screenplay: Monique Lange, Joseph Losey, from the novel by Roger Vaillard Photography (Fujicolor, Panavision): Henri Alekan Editing: Mario Castro Vazquez Art director: Alexandre Trauner Music: Richard Hartley Costumes: Annalisa Nasalli Rocca Set décor: Robert Christides Script supervisor: Catherine Prévert Sound recording: Bernard Bats Sound mixing: Jean-Paul Loublier Casting: Margot Capelier Leading players: Isabelle Huppert (Frédérique), Jean-Pierre Cassel (Rampert), Jeanne Moreau (Lou), Daniel Olbrychski (Saint-Genis), Jacques Spiesser (Galuchat), Isao Yamagata (Daigo Hamada), Lisette Malidor (Mariline), Jean-Paul Roussillon (Père Verjon), Roland Bertin (The Count), Craig Stevens (President of the Company in the USA), Ruggero Raimondi (Himself), Alexis Smith (Gloria, the Rich American), Lucas Delvaux (Shop Assistant), Pierre Forget (Frédérique’s Father), Ippo Fujikawa (Kumitaro), Yuko Kada (Akiko), Anne François (Air France Hostess), Pascal Morand (Luronne), Frédérique Briel (Luronne), Joseph Losey

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Steaming, 1985, 95 min., col. Production company: Columbia Executive producer: Richard F. Dalton Producer: Paul Mills Screenplay: Patricia Losey, from the play by Nell Dunn Photography: Christopher Challis Editing: Reginald Beck Production manager: Ted Morley Music: Richard Harvey; song ‘Steaming’, music by Richard Harvey, lyrics by Robin Ellis-Bextor, sung by Stephanie de Sykes Wardrobe: Rita Wakely Set décor: Josie Macavin Script supervisor: Pamela Davies Sound recording: Malcolm Davies Sound mixing: Peter Handford Leading players: Vanessa Redgrave (Nancy), Sarah Miles (Sarah), Diana Dors (Violet), Patti Love (Josie), Brenda Bruce (Mrs Meadows), Felicity Dean (Dawn), Sally Sagoe (Celia)

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Bibliography

Ahmad, Aijaz, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, London and New York, Verso, 1992. Anderson, Lindsay, ‘Get Out and Push!’, in Tom Maschler, ed., Declaration, New York, E. P. Dutton, 1958, pp. 137–60. Archer, Eugene, ‘Chance Meeting’, New York Times, 27 October 1960, p. 45:2. Ashton, T. S., The Industrial Revolution, 1760–1830, London and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1968. Aspinall, Sue, and Robert Murphy, eds, Gainsborough Melodrama, London, BFI, 1983. Barr, Charles, ed., All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema, London, BFI, 1986. Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, New York, Hill & Wang, 1972. Barzman, Ben, ‘Pour Joe’, Positif, Nos 293/4, July–August 1985, pp. 9–11. Baumbach, Jonathan, ‘The House That Losey Built’, Partisan Review, Vol. 41, No. 1, 1974, pp. 82–8. Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, London, Fontana/ Collins, 1973. —— The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne, London, Verso, 1977. —— Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott, New York and London, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. Bergson, Henri, Mind–Energy, trans. H. Wildon Carr, London, Macmillan, 1920. Betjeman, John, Collected Poems, London, John Murray, 1988. Bogarde, Dirk, Snakes & Ladders, New York, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978. Brecht, Bertolt, Three Plays: Baal, A Man’s a Man, The Elephant Calf, trans. Eric Bentley and Martin Esslin, New York, Grove Press, 1964. —— Brecht on Theater: The Development of an Aesthetic, John Willett, ed., New York, Hill & Wang, 1964. —— Galileo, trans. Charles Laughton, New York, Grove Press, 1966. —— Collected Plays, Volume 5, John Willett and Ralph Manheim, eds, including ‘Life of Galileo’, Notes and Variants, New York, Pantheon Books, 1972.

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Index

Note: the main reference to each of Losey’s films is given in bold. Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations, while ‘n.’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page. Titles of films and literary works can be found under their authors’ names where the names are also mentioned in the text. Accident 1, 5, 82n.4, 92, 115, 135, 147–62, 180, 192, 233, 247, 274 Adorno, Theodor 17, 99 Aggie 15 Ahmad, Aijaz 17 Albertazzi, Giorgio 96 Aldrich, Robert 9 Alekan, Henri 201 Ali, Tariq 268 Althusser, Louis 267 Altman, Robert 96 Nashville 96 Ambler, Eric 61 Journey into Fear 83n.33 Mask of Dimitrios, The 83n.33 American Film Theater 212 American Legion 15, 72, 84n.44 Ames, Stephen 7 Anderson, Lindsay 41 Andrews, Harry 123 Andrews, Robert Hardy 12n.20 Angel, Daniel 112, 247 Anglo-Guild Pictures 31 Angry Young Men 2, 66, 267 Antonioni, Michelangelo 3, 72, 93, 95, 100, 122, 130–1, 131n.11, 159, 241, 275 Deserto Rosso, Il 131 L’Avventura 130 L’Eclisse 95, 100 Notte, La 131 Aquilina, Louis 59 Archer, Eugene 72 Archibald, James 51 Arliss, Leslie 52

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Love Story 52 Man in Gray, The 52 Wicked Lady 52 Arnold, Malcolm 25 Artaud, Antonin 182, 185 Cenci, The 185 Ashcroft, Peggy 185 Aslan, Grégoire 80 Aspinall, Sue 52 Asquith, Anthony 15 Assassination of Trotsky, The 16, 207, 214, 263, 265–6, 268 Association of Cinematographic Technicians (ACT) 15 Audley, Maxine 18 Augusta Productions 122 Austin, Clare 54 Austin Powers 93, 276 Avengers, The 93 Baker, Stanley 1, 5, 12n.8, 41, 61–2, 68, 72–4, 84n.46, 87, 94, 148, 159, 202, 209, 233 Balcon, Michael 32, 83n.20 Barrymore, John Jr. 7 Barthes, Roland 119 Barzman, Ben 7, 12n.17, 50, 61, 71, 92, 103 SOS Pacific 61 Basehart, Richard 31 Bates, Alan 165 Baumbach, Jonathan 153 Beatles, The 38n.3, 84n.46 Beaton, Betsy 6

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becoming-animal 22, 28, 42, 55, 66, 80, 85, 115, 161, 187, 203, 207, 215– 16, 220 becoming-machine 42, 66, 115, 150, 203, 215–16, 219 Benglis, Lynda 199 Benjamin, Walter 92, 223, 267 Bennett, Jill 78, 233 Bennett, Richard Rodney 62, 191, 201 Bentley, Eric 217 Berger, Helmut 243 Bergman, Ingmar 198, 262n.28 Seventh Seal, The 198 Silence, The 262n.28 Bergson, Henri 221 Bernard, James 103 Bernard, Marc 82n.6 Betjeman, (Sir) John 40 Beyoun, Robert 274 BHE Productions 112 Big Night, The 7–8, 94, 274 Black, Edward 52 Blick, Newton 54 Blind Date 5, 12n.17, 40–2, 44, 61–72, 92, 101, 232–3, 243, 274 Bogarde, Dirk 5, 16, 18, 51, 72, 85, 88, 112, 123, 130, 136–7, 148, 156, 159, 263 Bogart, Humphrey 244 Brook, Lyndon 54 Boom! 16, 25, 92, 180–2, 192–201, 205, 207, 233, 256, 264–5 Botticelli, Sandro 197 Bowles, Paul 265 Box, Muriel and Betty 52 Box, Sydney 52, 61 Boy With Green Hair, The 6–8, 31, 109, 181, 226, 257, 278 Bray, Barbara 214, 229n.9 Brecht, Bertolt 2, 5, 9, 16, 40, 58, 70, 76, 91, 109, 114, 117, 135, 147, 181–3, 192, 198, 212–16, 218, 220–6, 229n.4, 229n.17, 233, 238, 266, 275, 278 Baal 58, 214–15 Berliner Ensemble 214, 226 Epic Theatre 5, 147, 183, 212–13, 221 From Circus Life 215–16 Galileo (1938 play) 216–18, 224 Galileo (1947 play) 2, 40, 212–14, 218, 224, 227, 278 gestus 212, 229n.3 lehrstücke 212 Mann ist Mann (A Man’s A Man)

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215–16 Massnahme, Die (Measures Taken, The) 213, 215 Short Organum 226 Verfremdungseffekt 5, 16, 18, 22, 76, 111–12, 147, 212–13, 219, 221, 224, 226, 233–4, 238, 258 Bresson, Robert 188 Mouchette 188 Bridge on the River Kwai, The 105 Bridges, Harry 12n.20 British Lion 122 Brontë, Emily 100, 132n.17 Brook, Faith 32 Brown, Georgia 223 Brown, Pamela 185 Browning, Robert 22 Bruce, Brenda 253 Brueghel, Pieter 222, 240 Bruno, Giordano 216 Buchman, Harold 17 Burgess, Anthony 105 Burn, (Sir) Clive 14 Burn, Michael 14 Night of the Ball, The 14 Burton, Richard 180, 192–4, 196, 198, 266 Busch, Ernst 214 Butler, Hugo 94 Byron, Lord 103 Cahiers du Cinéma 62, 82n.6, 182 Caine, Michael 131n.5, 244 Calder, Alexander 194 Cammell, Donald 74 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) 103 Cannes Film Festival 214, 264 Canning, Victor 29 Carey, MacDonald 86, 103–4 Carreras, Michael 29 Carroll, Lewis 121 Alice in Wonderland 121 Caute, David 1, 15, 57, 72, 84n.45, 198, 233, 237, 252, 258, 263, 266–8 Chagall, Marc 198 Challis, Christopher 67 Chance Meeting see Blind Date Chandler, Raymond 6 Charteris, Leslie 123 Chase, James Hadley 94 Chase, Richard 181 Chatman, Seymour 160 Chatto, Tom 244

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index Christie, Julie 164 Ciment, Michel 1, 5–6, 11, 181–2, 247, 265, 269, 276 Clarke, Ernest 44 Clayton, Jack 153 Pumpkin Eater, The 153 Clore, Leon 15, 38n.3 Cocteau, Jean 274 Codelli, Lorenzo 8, 262n.28 Cohen, Nat 17, 31 Cohn, Harry 9 Cohn, Sidney 17, 72 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel 268 Cole, Lester 10 Coleman, John 133n.52 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 197 Collinson, Peter 252 Up the Junction 252: see also Dunn, Nell Columbia Pictures 7, 9, 13n.26, 61, 72, 84n.45 Combs, Richard 214, 252 Concrete Jungle, The see Criminal, The Connolly, Mike 39n.32 Conti, Tom 224 Cope, Kenneth 76 Copernicus, Nicolas 217, 223 Copley, Peter 45, 113 Corbusier, Le 198 Costa-Gavras, Constantin 266 Cotton, Joseph 83n.33 Coursodon, Jean-Pierre 182 Courtenay, Tom 84n.46, 88, 112, 116–17 Coward, Noël 194 Cozarinsky, Edgardo 147 Crabtree, Arthur 52 They Were Sisters 52 Craig, Michael 123 Craig, Wendy 137–8 Criminal, The 5, 40–1, 72–82, 92, 105, 209, 232–3, 243, 266, 275 Crosby, Bing 130 Cummings, Constance 33 Curtiz, Michael 31 Casablanca 31, 244 see Koch, Howard Cushing, Peter 44 Cutts, Graham 83n.20 Damned, The 4, 12n.17, 61, 79, 86, 92– 3, 103–11, 114, 126–7, 135, 181, 196, 201, 204, 232, 275–6 Daneman, Paul 43 Dankworth, Johnny 80, 160 Danzinger, Edward and Harry 15

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309

Da Ponte, Lorenzo 263 Dartmouth College Players 2, 278 David, Jacques-Louis 259 Davis, Bette 246 Davis, John 51–2 Davis, Miles 97, 131n.13 Dawson, Jan 238 Dean, Felicity 253 De Gallier, Alex 29 Deighton, Len 131n.5 De Keyser, David 246 Deleuze, Gilles 4, 22, 28, 46, 93, 144–5, 166, 216, 221, 231, 275 crystalline image 144–5, 161, 222, 227–8, 274 impulse-image 4 Delon, Alain 269 Delon, Nathalie 249 Dempsey, Michael 188 Denbeigh-Russell, Grace 34 Denevi, Marco 182–3, 185, 193 Derrida, Jacques 60, 180, 184, 210 Descartes, René 219 Devine, George 45 Dies, Martin 9, 10 Dignam, Basil 32 Dimes, Albert 74 Di Venanzo, Gianni 95 Dividing Line, The see Lawless, The Dmytryk, Edward 6, 10, 12n.17 Cornered 12n.14 Crossfire 12n.14 Give Us This Day 12n.17 Murder My Sweet (aka. Farewell My Lovely) 6 Doane, Mary Anne 26, 30 Doll’s House, A 92, 180, 214, 231, 233– 43, 256, 263–4 Don Giovanni 53, 58, 263, 268–71 Dorast Pictures 17 Dors, Diana 253 Douchet, Jean 62, 70 Duncan, Trevor 34 Dunn, Michael 193 Dunn, Nell 252–3, 257–8 Duras, Marguerite 3, 72 Durgnat, Raymond 18, 30, 44, 60, 66, 69, 74, 97, 127, 135, 241 Dutschke, Rudi 268 dystopia 93, 110–11, 271 Ealing Studios 32, 41, 130 Eisenstein, Sergei 59, 275 Potemkin 59

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index

Eisler, Gerhardt 10 Eisler, Hanns 10, 222 Eisler, Ruth 10 El Cid 130 Eliot, T. S. 134 Elsaesser, Thomas 163, 257, 260 Elvin, George 15 Encounter see Stranger on the Prowl Endfield, Cy 1 Hell Drivers 1 Zulu 1 England, Barry 180, 201, 206–7 Eros Productions 15 Escher, M.C. 98 Esslin, Martin, 215, 220 Eve (aka. Eva) 5, 16, 87, 93–103, 107, 115–16, 122, 124, 130–1, 131n.12, 135, 146, 181, 232–3, 235, 247, 259, 274 fable 181, 195, 208–9, 232, 267, 269 Fabre, Michel 82n.6 Falk, Rossella 123 Faragoh, Francis 10 Farrow, Mia 90, 184 Federal Theater Project 2, 9, 10 Feller, Catherine 54 Fellini, Federico 131n.11 Field, Shirley Ann 86, 104 Fielding, Henry 245 Tom Jones 245 Figures in a Landscape 180, 182, 201–10, 243, 256, 264 film noir 6–7, 16, 25, 67, 103, 157, 275 Films de la Boétie, Les 234 Finch, Peter 153 Finger of Guilt, The see Intimate Stranger, The Finney, Albert 41 Firbank, Ann 156 First on the Road 38n.3 Flanagan, Hallie 10 Fleming, Ian 124, 178n.11 Flemyng, Robert 64 Fonda, Jane 231, 234–5, 261n.2 Foreman, Carl 15, 17 Foster, Barry 119 Foucault, Michel 44, 73, 77, 81–2n.12 Fourth International 265 Fox, Edward 125, 166, 168, 220, 235 Fox, James 74, 88, 125, 136, 168 Fox, Robin 125 Francis, Freddie 48 Franco, (Generalissimo) Francisco 265–6

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Free Cinema 41, 275 Freud, Sigmund 22–8, 31, 35, 54, 143, 157, 181, 183, 187–91, 196, 210, 250 condensation 24 displacement 24 family romance 23, 201 incest 183, 186–8, 191 masculinity complex 210n.14 Oedipus Complex 27, 186–92, 201, 253, 266 paranoia (female) 26–8, 30, 187 paranoia (male) 22–3, 26–7, 30 primal scene 187–8, 200 scopophilia 30 ‘Wolf Man’ 28 Frink, Elizabeth 111, 126 Frye, Derek 17 see Buchman, Harold Fuegi, John 212, 226 Futurism 50 Gainsborough Studios 41, 52–3, 59, 83n.20 Galilei, Galileo 214, 266 Galileo (1974 film) 25, 91, 212–28, 238, 243, 256 Gang, Martin 9, 12n.25 Garrone, Riccardo 99 Gaumont-British Studios 83n.20 Genêt, Jean 143 Gerard, Tom 78 Gérôme, Jean-Léon 259 Gibson, Richard 162 Gilliat, Sidney 122 Giscard d’Estaign, (President) Valery 264 Go-Between, The 1, 83n.27, 90, 92, 115, 135, 162–77, 180, 185, 192, 198, 235, 252, 264, 274 Godard, Jean-Luc 98, 129, 132n.15, 213, 272n.9 Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle 132n.15, 213 Dziga Vertov group 272n.9 Femme mariée, Une 132n.15 Pierrot le fou 129 Vivre sa vie 132n.15 Gorin, Jean-Pierre 272n.9 Goslar, Lotte 215 Gotell, Walter 106 Gough, Michael 163, 221 Gow, Gordon 15, 51, 181 Grade, Leslie 136

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index Gramsci, Antonio 270 Grande Rafle 269 Grant, Arthur 103 Grant, Cary 84n.44 Grayson, Charles 12n.20 Green, Janet 51–2 Green, Nigel 55, 78 Greenspun, Roger 274 Griffith, D. W. 106 Griffith, Hugh 19 Guard, Dominic 162 Guattari, Félix 22, 28, 216 Gypsy and the Gentleman, The 38n.16, 40, 51–61, 83n.20, 86, 134, 232–3, 275 Hakim, Robert and Raymond 95, 131n.13 Hamilton, Guy 131n.5 Funeral in Berlin 131n.5 Goldfinger 126 Hammer Films 29, 73 Hamp 112 Hanbury, Victor 17 Hardy, Thomas 103, 117, 232 Mayor of Casterbridge, The 117 Harlequin Productions 15 Hart, David 58 Hartley, L. P. 162, 172, 174–5 Hartley, Richard 222, 250 Has“ek, Jaroslav 229n.17 Good Soldier Schweik 217, 229n.17 Haskell, Molly 261n.2 Hawes, Elizabeth 10 Haye, Helen 54 Heflin, Van 7 Hegel, G. F. W. 22, 110, 269, 273 Heidegger, Martin 184 Hepburn, Audrey 30 Heraclitus 60, 271 Herman, Joszef 67 Heyman, John 180, 234, 257 Higbee, Ina 233 Hirsch, Foster 5, 135, 159, 195, 239 Hitchcock, Alfred 42 Hitler Youth 71 Hobsbawm, Eric 53 Hodson, James Lansdale 112 Return to the Wood 112 Holdaway, Jim 122 Holiday, Billie 97, 100 Homes, Geoffrey see Mainwaring, Daniel Hooke, Nina Warner 52 Darkness I Leave You 52

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311

Hoover, J. Edgar 10 Hope, Bob 130 House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) 7–9, 11, 37, 40, 213 Houston, Beverle 162, 173 Houston, Glyn 20 Houston, Penelope 198 Houston, Renee 45 Howard, Leigh 61 Howard, Peter see Koch, Howard Howard, Trevor 236 Hubley, John 38n.7 Hughes, Howard 8, 52 Hurst, David 33 Hyams, Phil and Sid 15 Ibsen, Henrik 214, 231, 234–5, 237–8 I Married a Communist 8 Imbarco a Mezzanotte see Stranger on the Prowl immanence 4, 110 Independent Artists 61 Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique 259 Injunction Granted! 2 Insignia Productions 17, 31 Intimate Stranger, The 16–17, 31–8, 39n.30, 40, 58, 232 Jackson, Glenda 243 Jacob, Gilles 5, 132n.27, 232 Jameson, Fredric 276 Janni, Joseph 122 Billy Liar 122 Darling 122 Kind of Loving, A 122 Johns, Mervyn 32, 57 Johnson, (President) Lyndon 113 Jones, Evan 72, 92–5, 98, 103, 107, 114, 120, 122, 125, 127 In a Backward Country 92–3 Kael, Pauline 264 Kant, Immanuel 121 Katz, Sam 13n.26 Kinder, Marsha 162, 173 King and Country 1, 88, 93, 111–22, 126, 185, 201, 203, 208, 247, 252, 258, 276 Kipling, Rudyard 215 Klein, Joanne 143, 151 Knox, Alexander 18, 105, 123, 154 Koch, Howard 31, 51, 92 Bird of Paradise 51 War of the Worlds 31

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index

Kohn, John 181 Kolldehof, Rene 244 Kramer, Stanley 9, 13n.26, 72 Four-Poster, The 9 Inherit the Wind 72 Wild One, The 9 Kristeva, Julia 27 abject 27 Krüger, Hardy 61, 71 Kubrick, Stanley 78, 105, 113, 275 Clockwork Orange, A 105 Killing, The 78 Paths of Glory 113 Lacan, Jacques 22, 27 Name of the Father 22, 23 Lampell, Millard 61 Landau, Ely 212 Landy, Marcia 52 Lang, Fritz 7 Lardner, Ring Jr. 10 Larkin, Mary 219, 226 Laughton, Charles 2, 213–14, 218, 221, 278 Laverick, June 54 Lawless, The 7, 8, 122, 274 Lawrence, H. L. 103 Children of Light, The 103 Lawrence of Arabia 130 Lawson, John Howard 10 Leahy, James 109, 115, 139, 144, 158 Le Carré, John 124 Spy Who Came in From the Cold, The 124 Legrand, Michel 97, 164, 240 Leighton, Margaret 90, 164 Lester, Dick 38n.3, 84n.46, 124 Hard Day’s Night, A 84n.46 Help! 124, 130 Three Musketeers, The 38n.3 Levinas, Emmanuel 184 Levitt, Alfred Lewis 7 Ligeti, György 201 Lindfors, Viveca 105 Lisi, Virna 96, 233 Livesey, Roger 32 Living Newspaper 2, 40, 212–13, 229n.4, 278 Loach, Ken 40, 234, 252 Family Life 234 Poor Cow 252; see also Dunn, Nell Lockwood, Margaret 52 Lodge, David 34 Lonsdale, Michel 220, 245

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Losey, Joseph Jr. 233 Losey, Louise 9 Losey, Patricia 231, 252, 258, 264 Love, Patti 91, 253, 262n.33 Lubicz, Christina 42 M 7–8, 98, 122, 187, 274 Macavin, Josie 258 McCarron, Patricia 18 McCarthy, Joseph 6, 8, 14, 37, 269 McCowen, Alec 43, 46, 85 Macdonald, Richard 16, 38n.7, 67, 74, 107, 112, 138, 198–9, 263 McDowell, Malcolm 180, 201 McEnery, John 219 McGoohan, Patrick 55, 57 McKern, Leo 42, 46, 50, 72, 120 MacMahon Group 41, 70, 82n.6, 274 Macmillan, Harold 2 Magee, Patrick 76 Mainwaring, Daniel 8 Malcolm, Christopher 202 Malle, Louis 131n.13 Ascenseur pour l’échafaud 131n.13 Manheim, Ralph 214 Mann, Stanley 180 Man on the Beach, A 17, 29–31 Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo, The 51 Marcuse, Herbert 77 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 50 Marshall, George 12n.17 True to Life 12n.17 Marx, Karl 26, 28, 31, 54, 73, 94, 125, 143, 181, 183, 220, 235, 264–5, 267, 270 Masaccio 102 Masefield, John 121 masochism 93–6, 101–2, 116, 127–30, 143 Maugham, Robin 135–7 Maugham, Somerset 135 Maxwell, Lois 45 May, Hans 52 May, Lary 3, 6 May 1968 263, 266, 268, 272n.9 Mayersberg, Paul 105, 130 Medwin, Michael 29 Melvin, Murray 75 Mercer, David 72, 92, 234–5, 238 Merchant, Vivien 148 Mercouri, Melina 55, 86 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 48 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 212–13

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index MGM Pictures 8, 10 Michell, Keith 53, 86 Mikhelson, André 33 Miles, Sarah 91, 139, 253 Milestone, Lewis 113 All Quiet on the Western Front 113 Mill, James 235 Elements of Political Economy 235 Miller, Arthur 3, 11 Crucible, The 11 Milne, Tom 43, 125, 190 Milton, John 101 Miró, Joan 24 Mitchell, James 180 Mitchum, Robert 12n.14, 90, 185 Modesty Blaise 89, 93, 107, 122–31, 233, 235, 276 Modigliani, Amedeo 259 Moiseiwitsch, Maurice 17 Monckton, Lord 14 Montand, Yves 266 Moreau, Jeanne 87, 95, 122, 131, 131n.13, 232 Mosley, Nicholas 147, 149, 155, 161, 266 Mourlet, Michel 50, 82n.6 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 263, 269– 70 Mr. Klein 4, 92, 114, 181–2, 263, 268–9 Murphy, Mary 34 Naismith, Laurence 58, 79 naturalism 4 Negri, Antonio 110–11 Negulesco, Jean 83n.33 Nelligan, Kate 245 Nettlefold Studios 32 New Deal 2, 10 New Left 213, 266, 268 Newley, Anthony 84n.46 New Wave 275 Nietzsche, Friedrich 1, 4, 28, 31, 38, 45, 58, 92, 102, 111, 135, 142, 144, 200, 208, 212, 227, 234, 243, 263, 269–70 Now Voyager 246 Odets, Clifford 212 Waiting for Lefty 212 O’Donnell, Peter 122, 124 Okhlopkov, Nikolai Pavlovich 212–13 OPEC 128 Oppenheimer, J. Robert 225 Orientalism 259, 261 Orton, Joe 267

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313

Oudart, Jean-Pierre 31 Owen, Alun 72–4, 84n.46, 92, 266 No Tram to Lime Street 84n.46 Owen, Tony 39n.32 Pay the Piper 31, 39n.32 Palmer, James and Michael Riley 118, 149, 152, 245–6 Paramount Pictures 7, 71–2, 84n.44 Park, Leslie 61 Peck, Gregory 187 Pete Roleum and His Cousins 2 Petley, Julian 42, 52 Phelan, Brian 75, 84n.46, 152 Pickwoad, Michael 258 Pinter, Harold 41, 72, 92, 115, 134–7, 147–9, 151, 153, 157, 161–2, 167, 173, 180, 205, 246–7, 264, 266, 275 Birthday Party, The 134 Caretaker, The 134 Dumb Waiter, The 134 Proust Screenplay, The 162, 231, 264 Room, The 134 Slight Ache, A 134 Piscator, Erwin 213, 229n.17 Plato 37 Plowright, Joan 45 Plummer, (Sir) Leslie (Dick) 14 politique des auteurs 274 Pontecorvo, Gillo 266 Popular Front 2–3, 217 Porter, Cole 12n.25 Powell, Dick 12n.14 Powell, Michael 275 Preminger, Otto, Exodus 72 Presle, Micheline 63 Presley, Elvis 131 Pressburger, Emeric 275 Priggen, Norman 136 Proust, Marcel 102, 115, 148–9, 153–4, 158, 170, 173–4, 177, 180, 199– 200, 239, 265, 267 Prowler, The 7–8, 16, 18, 94, 144, 247, 256, 274 Pulcinella 240 Quigley, Isabel 115 Rabelais, François 222 Radin, Paul Benedict 12n.25 Radin, Victoria 204 Raimondi, Ruggero 270 Rank Organization 51, 83n.20

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314

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Ray, Nicholas 2, 8 Rayns, Tony 235 Redgrave, Michael 43, 46, 85, 162, 171 Redgrave, Vanessa 91, 253 Reed, Oliver 86, 104 Reisz, Karel 1, 41, 82n.4, 234 Morgan, A Suitable Case for Treatment 234 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning 1, 41 Renoir, Pierre Auguste 259 Resnais, Alain 3, 72, 93, 131n.11, 173, 249, 266, 275 Last Year at Marienbad 173, 246, 249 Revides, Alex 100 Revill, Clive 123, 223 Richardson, Marcus 246 Richardson, Tony 41 Rigby, Terence 152 Ripper, Michael 29 Rissient, Pierre 82n.6, 274 Rissone, Checco 97 RKO Pictures 6–8, 12n.23, 31, 39n.32, 52, 278 Robson, Flora 58 Roc, Patricia 52 Rodin, Auguste 68 Rodney, Jack 77 Rodowick, David 30 Roeg, Nicolas 74 Performance 74, 77 Romand, Béatrice 245 Romantic Englishwoman, The 44, 198, 233, 243–52, 258, 263–4, 276 Roosevelt, Eleanor 10 Roosevelt, (President) Franklin Delano 278 Rosenbaum, Jonathan 248 Ross, T. J. 126 Roud, Richard 15 Routes du Sud, Les 92, 182, 214, 263, 265–6, 268 Rushdie, Salman 14 Russian Formalism 213 Russian War Relief 3, 265 Ryan, Robert 12n.14 Saad, Margit 79, 232 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von 94 Sagoe, Sally 260 Said, Edward 14, 16–17, 95 Sangster, Jimmy 29, 73 Sarris, Andrew 117 Sassard, Jacqueline 148, 151

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Sayre, Nora 234 Schary, Dore 6–8 Scott, Adrian 6–7 Secret Ceremony 90, 180–92, 195, 200, 205, 232, 235, 256, 258, 264–5, 274 Semprún, Jorge 92, 265–6 Serguine, Jacques 82n.6 Servant, The 1, 4, 16, 25, 51, 57, 88, 92, 106, 130, 135–47, 150, 157, 162–3, 166, 168, 186, 195, 198–9, 206, 233, 247, 256, 273–4 Seyrig, Delphine 156, 231, 235, 249, 261n.2 Shakespeare, William 248 Hamlet 248 Shaw, Robert 12n.8, 72, 180, 201, 209, 210n.3 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 185 Cenci, The 185 Shimkus, Joanna 193 Shumacher, Ernst 213 Sight and Sound 41 Sinyard, Neil 170 Sleeping Tiger, The 4, 15–29, 30–2, 35–7, 40, 51, 56, 60, 85, 130, 134, 157, 183, 187, 263, 274–5 Slocombe, Douglas 141 Smith, Alexis 18, 85 Snowden, Alec 31 Socrates 220 Solinas, Franco 92, 269 Spenser, Jeremy 88, 118 Spicer, Andrew 41 Spielberg, Steven 204 Duel 204 Spinoza, Baruch 4, 110 Stalin, Josef 2, 213, 265, 267–8 Stamp, Terence 89, 123 Stassino, Paul 80 Steaming 91, 233, 252–61, 263 Steffin, Margarete 216 Stéphane, Nicole 231, 264 Stevenson, Robert 12n.20 Woman on Pier 13, The 12n.20 Stockwell, Dean 6 Stoppard, Tom 72, 247–8, 267 Real Inspector Hound, The 248 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead 248 Stranger on the Prowl 11, 12n.17 Stripling, Robert E. 10 Suvin, Darko, 220

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index Tabary, Guy 201 Tabori, George, 183, 185, 192, 267 Tarantino, Quentin 276 Pulp Fiction 276 Tavernier, Bertrand 82n.6 Taylor, Elizabeth 180, 183, 192–3, 196 Taylor, Larry 78 Taylorism 75 Teddy Boys 18, 28, 103–4, 106, 132n.24 temps mort 159–60 Theatre Committee for Republican Spain 265 Theatre of the Absurd 135 These Are The Damned see Damned, The Thomas, J. Parnell 9 Thompson, J. Lee 187 Cape Fear 187 Time Without Pity 9, 12n.17, 15, 40–51, 61, 82n.6, 85, 92, 119, 130, 233, 274–5 Todd, Ann 43 Topol, Chaim 91, 213, 218–19, 221–2, 224, 226 Towb, Harry 18 Townsend, Leo 12n.25 Beach Blanket Bingo 12n.25 Bikini Beach 12n.25 Night and Day 12n.25 Trauner, Alexandre 198 Travers, Iain 91, 218 Triple-A Plowed Under 2, 10 Trotsky, Leon 214, 265–6, 268 Trout, The see Truite, La Truffaut, François 81–2 Tirez sur le Pianiste 81 Truite, La 263 Trumbo, Dalton 10, 72, 84n.45 20th Century-Fox Studios 122 United Artists 7 Universal Studios 180 Vadim, Roger 234 Barbarella 234 Valli, Romolo 194 Van Dyke, Anthony 69–71 Van Eyssen, John 62 Vietnam War 213 Villiers, James 106, 119 Villion, Emile 82n.6

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315

Visconti, Luchino 131n.11 Vitti, Monica 89, 122–3, 130–1 Wagner, Richard 169, 199 Walker, Alexander 121, 234, 264 Hollywood England 264 Walker, Lillian 245 Wallington, Mike 210 Wanamaker, Sam 77 Warhol, Andy 131 Warner, David, 235 Warner Brothers 31 Warren, Kenneth J. 76 Watergate 213 Wayne, David 7 Welles, Orson 2, 31, 83n.33 Wexley, John 10 Wilde, Oscar 126 Willett, John 214 Williams, Emlyn 42 Someone Waiting 42 Williams, Tennessee 92, 192–6, 201, 267 Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Any More, The 193, 196 Wilson, John 93, 112, 120 Wintle, Julian 61 Wiseman, Thomas 243, 248, 250–1 Wolfit, Donald 29 Wood, John S. 9 Wood, Robin 42, 75, 81 Woodward, Tim 219 Woolf, Henry 202 Wordsworth, Richard 44 Works Progress Administration (WPA) 278 World Film Services 180, 234 Wren, Christopher 145 York, Michael 148 Young, Nedrick 72 Young, Terence 30 Wait Until Dark 30 Yovel, Yermiyahu 4 Zanuck, Darryl F. 122 Zedong, Mao 131, 213, 268 Zinnemann, Fred 47, 180 High Noon 9, 47 Man for All Seasons, A 180

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