The Servant 9781838713454, 9781844573820

Citation preview

Sargeant Prelims

16/6/11

9:31 am

Page 4

For my grandma, who, as a girl, did know about ponchos, zarapes and cloaks in South America; and my ma, who knows about landscaping, batteries de cuisine, the merits of Elizabeth David, Hebe skirts, DAKS, Antartex, mohair coats and 1963 trends in mandarin red and fuchsia. © Amy Sargeant 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN on behalf of the BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN www.bfi.org.uk There’s more to discover about film and television through the BFI. Our world-renowned archive, cinemas, festivals, films, publications and learning resources are here to inspire you. Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. Series cover design: Ashley Western Series text design: ketchup/SE14 Images from The Servant, © Springbok Films Ltd; The Admirable Crichton, © Modern Screen Play Productions Ltd; The World of Wooster, BBC Set by Cambrian Typesetters, Camberley, Surrey Printed in China This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 ISBN 978–1–84457–382–0

(Frontispiece) Joe Losey relaxing on location: The Servant

Sargeant Prelims

6

16/6/11

9:31 am

Page 6

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Acknowledgments Very many thanks to Mary Jane Walsh (fellow Smedley Girl) and Christine Gledhill for their support of the original proposal. Catherine Constable shared her knowledge of Wodehouse, along with some well-thumbed copies of the Jeeves and Wooster stories; Susie Painter explained the Tanganyika Ground Nut Scheme; Diane Davies confirmed my readings of Shakespeare and Marlowe, while Ifor Williams provided valuable advice re breaking and entering. Lawrence Napper read the first outline, while Jay Weissberg stoically and assiduously commented on subsequent drafts. I should also like to thank the equally stoical Sean Delaney and the inestimable staff of the BFI Library. I am grateful to Kate Jones at RIBA for the welcome she extended to a thoroughly lapsed architect. It was a pleasure, as always, to work with Rebecca Barden and Sophia Contento at BFI Publishing. Publication was assisted by a grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art – again, many thanks.

Sargeant Prelims

16/6/11

9:31 am

Page 7

T H E S E RVA N T

Plot Synopsis A young man who has recently acquired a house in London interviews and hires a manservant: the master is gulled, failing the first of a series of tests. The servant proceeds to take control, not only of the house but also of its master, by way of infringements of authority and invasions of territory. The young man’s fiancée (a provisional attachment) sees what is happening and says that she does not trust the servant. Her advice goes unheeded. The servant then introduces a maid into the house, as his sister, instructing her to seduce the master. He is tested and proves easy prey. Returning from a weekend in the country, the young man and his fiancée discover the servant and the maid together in their master’s bed. The fiancée tests the master’s metal: servant and maid are both duly dismissed. The master fails to manage the house without them and mourns his losses. Some time later, the servant pleads with the master to be reinstated (another ploy – another test). His plea is successful but the house continues to fall into disarray. The servant, once invited back, forcibly reasserts his dominance over the master. The maid returns, pleading for compensation. The master meanwhile continues to ignore his fiancée, who eventually returns to the house and makes a plea on the maid’s behalf. She pleads on her own behalf; she pleads on the master’s behalf. But, for the master, it is already too late and he fails this final test: he is ruined, the house is ruined, it’s all gone.

7

Sargeant Introduction

8

20/6/11

1:26 pm

Page 8

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Introduction The extravagantly wordy stage directions to the opening act of J. M. Barrie’s ‘well-made’ 1902 play, The Admirable Crichton, set out the arrival of a dandy at his uncle’s house, Loam House, in Mayfair. Barrie’s description of the Hon. Ernest Woolley is not entirely favourable: There is a happy smile on his pleasant, insignificant face, and this presumably means that he is thinking of himself, but, on the other hand, he almost never thinks of any other person. Probably Ernest’s great moment is when he wakes of a morning and realises that he really is Ernest, for we must all wish to be that which is our ideal. We can conceive him springing out of bed light-heartedly and waiting for his man to do the rest. … He is no fool. He has the shrewdness to float with the current because it is a labour-saving process, but he has sufficient pluck to fight, if fight he must (a brief contest, for he would soon be toppled over). He has a light nature, which would enable him to bob up cheerily in new conditions and return unaltered to the old ones. His selfishness is his most endearing quality. If he has his way he will spend his life like a cat in pushing his betters out of the soft places, and until he is old he will be fondled in the process.1

Ernest, when we first encounter him, is already half-engaged to the Earl of Loam’s daughter, Lady Agatha Lasenby. He is met at the door by a footman, while Crichton, Loam’s butler, guards a door above. Crichton, Barrie informs us, ‘is devotedly attached to his master, who, in his opinion, has but one fault, he is not sufficiently contemptuous of his inferiors. We are immediately to be introduced to this solitary failing of a great English peer.’ A peer of advanced ideas, it amuses Loam once a month to stage a tea party in which his servants are served by his family and guests: Ernest is an invitee.

Sargeant Introduction

20/6/11

1:26 pm

Page 9

T H E S E RVA N T

Marooned on a desert island, Loam’s household reorganises itself. Ernest sets his cap at the ‘between’ maid, Eliza, on whom Crichton has formerly cast a favourable eye – butlers not ‘keeping company’ – while capable Bill Crichton, now ‘the Governor’, ‘the best man among us’, seems destined for Polly (Lady Mary Lasenby, as was, daughter of ‘Daddy’ Loam) – and Daddy approves the match in this ‘Happy Home’. The Fourth Act returns us to ‘The Other Island’ in Mayfair, with order temporarily interrogated but ultimately restored. Loam is ‘sitting on a volcano’. Mary, who has not forgotten the interlude and evaluates it as more than a mere charade, concludes that ‘there is something wrong with England’. Barrie’s variants of his play allowed for the final coupling of either Crichton with Eliza or Crichton with Mary.2 Loamshire, George Eliot’s fictional construction (surveyed through a series of novels culminating in 1871–2 in Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life), has been identified as Warwickshire, the county that Henry James called ‘the core and centre of the English world; midmost England, unmitigated England’.3 The ‘Loamshire play’ was adopted as a term of abuse (not least, as provincial and pitifully nostalgic) by a new generation of critics and playwrights in the later 1950s – notably, John Osborne, author of the seminal 1956 Royal Court production, Look Back in Anger.4 In 1957, the most proximate of a number of film versions of The Admirable Crichton was released, directed by Lewis Gilbert. This cast Kenneth More as the deferential eponymous servant (‘We have had misgivings ever since we found his name in the title, and we shall keep him out of his rights as long as we can,’ said Barrie, sardonically), with Cecil Parker as the philanthropic peer, Sally Ann Howes as Mary, Gerald Harper as Ernest and Diane Cilento as ‘Tweeny’ (Eliza). Miles Malleson (as a vicar) and Martita Hunt (as the formidable Lady Brocklehurst) further buttressed the film as a vehicle for ‘character’ acting. For Crichton, social rank is as natural as the English landscape: which, we may choose to comment, is not so natural, after all.

9

Sargeant Introduction

20/6/11

1:26 pm

Page 10

Sargeant Introduction

20/6/11

1:26 pm

Page 11

T H E S E RVA N T

My purpose in starting with this somewhat oblique introduction to The Servant is to suggest that Harold Pinter’s screenplay and Joseph Losey’s 1963 film have deeper roots than the acknowledgment of Robin Maugham’s 1948 novella and Maugham’s 1956 stageplay as the immediate source of their adaptation might indicate.5 Relationships between masters and servants provide a recurrent theme in English literature and drama, on the page, the stage, and the small and large screen. Generally, characters who find themselves ‘below stairs’ are as conscientiously and jealously observant of hierarchy as those above, and maintain correct proprieties among themselves as much as and between the characters who, by privilege of wealth and/or birth, find themselves in command of servants. In other words, an elaborate hierarchy of servants mirrors and sustains (rather than challenges) a hierarchy of masters. The very notion of hierarchy is conservatively upheld to servants’ and masters’ mutual advantage. In Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), the hostility and malice of the housekeeper, Danvers, towards her new mistress is driven by her fanatical, near hysterical, posthumous attachment to the former Mrs de Winter; in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989), the loyalty of the butler, Stevens, is driven by his blind faith in his erstwhile master, Lord Arlington. Here, my references will extend from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1601), through Wilkie Collins, Henry James, E. W. Hornung, Barrie, Dorothy L. Sayers, P. G. Wodehouse, du Maurier and Graham Greene to Maugham, L. P. Hartley and Ishiguro. Reviewing The Servant in 1963, Richard Roud (of the Guardian) referred viewers to Cervantes’ pairing of Don Quixote with Sancho Panza; Penelope Gilliatt, the Observer reviewer, more ominously to Peter Quint in James’ 1898 The Turn of the Screw, chillingly adapted to film by Jack Clayton as The Innocents in 1961, another critic remarking that ‘as played by Bogarde, Barrett alive is more terrifying than Peter Quint dead’; Isabel Quigley of The Spectator and John Coleman of the New Statesman to Nico Papatakis’ 1963 Les Abysses, an unauthorised adaptation to film of Jean Genet’s 1947 Les Bonnes (The Maids); (Opposite page) Kenneth More in The Admirable Crichton (1957)

11

Sargeant Introduction

12

20/6/11

1:26 pm

Page 12

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Pauline Richardson, for the Sunday Times, to Buñuel’s 1961 Viridiana; and the Evening News reviewer to Strindberg’s Miss Julie. A Daily Mail critic refered to ‘a treacherous Jeeves’ and an ‘unlaughable’ Wooster, while another cited Crichton as a benign precedent for The Servant’s malevolent Barrett.6 What I want to suggest is that, in The Servant, Losey and Pinter explore dominance and servitude as concepts rather than straightforwardly adapt a particular source text called The Servant. Dialogue, mise en scène, performance, props and costuming all contribute in the film towards the structuring and reconfiguration of this relationship. Furthermore, in 1963 the film was read by various critics, at home and abroad, to carry a sense of political and social prescience and urgency. Despite anguish in elevated circles after the First World War over ‘the servant problem’, there were still 1 million servants in Britain in 1939, a significant percentage of the population. After the Second World War, the introduction of laboursaving equipment into middle-class homes reduced the number of people employed in domestic service. The post-war promise of postfeudal egalitarianism discouraged entry into service. But, of course, many people in England even now continue to be employed in activities previously performed by the old servant class, now employed by people (a differently constituted bunch of employers) who have not the time, care, energy or ability to execute such chores for themselves, but who do have the money to pay for services. They may consider themselves too important for such tasks, distinguishing themselves from labour by employing labour. These employers may (to paraphrase Veblen) still choose to exhibit their capacity to pay by paying for servants.7 The newer servant class of living-out secretaries, nannies, cleaners, gardeners, minders and hired helpers may be more professionally qualified, mobile and may be less beholden to the favours of a particular individual or household – while performing the jobs of the older servant class. They may consider their employers not worth the pay or the effort, distinguishing the labour and service they provide from the remuneration and rewards delivered. They

Sargeant Introduction

20/6/11

1:26 pm

Page 13

T H E S E RVA N T

may not enjoy the security of Loamish old retainers. In other words, the title ‘servant’ and the relationship it designates may sound antiquated, while the categories of labour it once covered continue to be performed by some people on behalf of others. The Servant, in 1963, primarily referred to a particular master–servant relationship. Indeed, the young master, Tony (James Fox), quips that his manservant, Barrett (Dirk Bogarde), is ‘too skinny for a nanny’, when he is pampered with a splendidly tingley footbath in front of a blazing drawing room fire, yet immediately apologises for the presumed affront to Barrett’s pride – even though nannying, thereby infantilising Tony, precipitating Tony’s demise, is

Barrett: ‘too skinny for a nanny’

13

Sargeant Introduction

14

20/6/11

1:26 pm

Page 14

BFI FILM CLASSICS

frequently seen to be Barrett’s main concern. Barrett ostensibly presents himself as something more than a cut above a nanny – ‘a gentleman’s gentleman’ – a personal fag – a ‘man who does’ for his master, lives in and presumes and exploits, thereby, a privileged position of intimacy. Barrett similarly assumes a superior status to other servant classes when he first negotiates an entry for his ‘sister’ to the household. Tony suggests that a cleaning woman (who would live out) would be sufficient to their needs, while Barrett complicitly says that the smallest room will do for a maid – ‘well, they can be useful’. It may be that Barrett is testing Tony’s ability to pay for such an extravagance. He is certainly pursuing his own agenda. But professional decorators get the measure of Barrett when he presumes, as Tony’s adjutant, to order them about their business: he is keen to see any problem corrected ‘before it becomes a fault’. An ample look exchanged between painter and chippie is good enough said. Barrett is posing, presuming authority, getting above himself. From the 1920s, Sayers’ fictional Lord Peter Wimsey (foppish in speech if not in dress) availed himself of a devoted manservant (Bunter) to ‘do’ for him while he was busying himself as an amateur sleuth: in Wimsey’s very busyness there was a demonstrable need for someone to ‘do’, occupying himself on the right side of the law while Hornung’s Raffles had been busily entertaining himself as a gentleman criminal (assisted by his sidekick, Bunny), from the 1890s, on its wrong side. These men call upon other men to ‘do’. Wodehouse’s archetypal Jeeves and patently unbusy Wooster (clubman and boulevardier), survived the Second World War unscathed and unseparated, comfortably ensconced in Crichton Mansions, Berkeley Street, with only gestural references to contemporary events intruding upon their very particular relationship (perennial bachelors, both, despite Jeeves’ various ‘understood’ relationships with women and Wooster’s misunderstandings with more). In a succession of Wodehouse stories, Wooster’s lazy dependence on Jeeves is played as farce; for Tony, in The Servant, it is played (I shall contend) as tragedy. Both Jeeves and (Opposite page) Ian Carmichael, as Wooster, with Dennis Price, as Jeeves

Sargeant Introduction

20/6/11

1:26 pm

Page 15

Sargeant Introduction

16

20/6/11

1:26 pm

Page 16

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Barrett are examples of Realpolitik in operation. While Jeeves deploys his wiles, resourcefulness and tact, Machiavellian manoeuvres, pandering to Wooster’s weaknesses and applying ‘great intellect’ to protect his master and coincidentally maintain a status quo which suits him well, Barrett uses vice to dismantle Tony’s conceit and overthrow his equilibrium. Susan (Wendy Craig), in The Servant, astutely observes that Tony’s hiring of a manservant betokens his laziness and vanity and (more worrisome for her) may confirm him in his bachelor status. As Jeeves remarks of his master (in 1925): I had no desire to sever a connection so pleasant in every respect as his and mine had been, and my experience is that when the wife comes in at the front door the valet of bachelor days goes out at the back.8

The appointment of Barrett as manservant poses a threat to a relationship which needs must be re-established after a temporary estrangement. Equally, once installed inside the house, Barrett recognises Susan as a double threat: as a feminine and as a modernising force at odds with the masculine pairing he seeks to promote and to the feudal relationship he seeks to reinstate even in its reversal. Susan exclaims at Barrett’s pretentious reference to a ‘bottler’. Tony is risibly outmoded, apparently seeking to surround himself with the trappings and creature comforts of his lost parents, while Barrett, Tony’s senior by some fifteen years or more, is parading a vocabulary suspiciously learnt at second hand and long since out of date.

Sargeant Ch1

20/6/11

1:28 pm

Page 17

T H E S E RVA N T

1 Losey and Pinter Dirk Bogarde (who first worked with Losey – as Victor Hanbury – and Richard Macdonald on Sleeping Tiger, 1954) had discussed the possibility of collaborating on an adaptation of Maugham’s novella some years before Harold Pinter, then unknown as a screenwriter, produced his screenplay. Losey duly sought out Pinter while Bogarde continued to advise Losey on scripts, despite the temperamental ups and downs in their relationship. By Pinter’s own account, his first meeting with Losey was not very encouraging: I went to see him in his house in Chelsea. ‘I like the script,’ he said. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘But there are a number of things I don’t like about it.’ ‘What things?’ I asked. He told me. ‘Well, why don’t you make another movie?’ I said, and left the house. Two days later he called me. ‘Shall we try again?’ he said. I said ‘Okay.’ I went back to his house, we did further work on the script and over the next twenty-five years we worked on three more screenplays and never had another cross word.9

In truth, Losey was an astute and sensitive editor of Pinter’s already spare draft and generous in his direction of the final screenplay. Material from the original script was rarely simply excised wholesale. Instead, it was transposed, concentrated or dispersed. Performances, vocal (intonation, pitch and accent) and physical (gesture), speak volumes in The Servant, volunteering adverbs and adjectives rendered implicit or redundant in Pinter’s rudimentary script. Lines of dialogue explicitly scripted were converted to delivery in performance. For instance, Dirk Bogarde (as the manservant) makes his army nickname ‘Basher Barrett … I was a very good driller’ tacitly sound and look like a double entendre – provoking a momentary pause for disarmed

17

Sargeant Ch1

18

20/6/11

1:28 pm

Page 18

BFI FILM CLASSICS

reflection from Tony – rather than Tony saying outright that the appellation meant something entirely different to him. He smirks behind Tony’s back after the first bathroom incident. When Barrett utters what Tony calls his ‘mouthful’ – ‘it makes all the difference in life – tasteful and pleasant surroundings’ – Bogarde renders the line enigmatic, even ominous. Does he have ambitions for Tony to be more than an everyman and for himself to be thereby distinguished by his attachment to an exemplary house? Is he tacitly bolstering his claim to years of experience in his vaunted profession? Is he looking out for his own future comfort, already? ‘Harold doesn’t develope dear’ (sic), Bogarde later aptly commented to Losey.10 Bogarde made telling use of Pinter’s notorious pauses. For instance, when Tony observes to Barrett that Vera (Sarah Miles) has been ‘under the weather’, Barrett, having made a start on clearing the piles of unwashed plates, cutlery and uneaten food – incriminating evidence – and putting the table mats back in the sideboard, holds Tony in his eye and disingenuously asks ‘Under the what, Sir?’, pursuing the blatant insinuation of his earlier remark, did she ‘manage to do anything for you, Sir?’. Macdonald, Losey’s designer on Blind Date (1959), made ample use in The Servant of mirrors to allow for characters’ awareness of being watched (as indicated in Pinter’s stage directions) and for the film’s viewer to thus witness characters’ evasions and subterfuges. Losey postponed the introduction of Tony’s fiancée, and Tony’s line at the initial interview with regard to his solicitor checking the applicant’s references was shifted to the incomparably more worldly Susan (she subsequently asks Tony whether he has checked Barrett’s criminal record). A weekend boating holiday with the Mounsets became a couple of weekends – cut short – at the ancestral home referred to in Pinter’s draft, Losey noting that American audiences would fail to understand the ‘Norfolk Broads’.11 Vera, as ‘niece’ to Barrett (something of a cliché – see, for example, the manservant Baines’ ‘niece’ in Greene’s 1935 novella, filmed in 1948 as The Fallen Idol, and Barrett’s sister’s daughter in Maugham’s stage adaptations),

Sargeant Ch1

20/6/11

1:28 pm

Page 19

T H E S E RVA N T

became his supposedly incestuous (and therefore criminal) sister. It is never explicitly said that the nymphomaniac Vera (‘You’re like a ruddy machine,’ comments Barrett; ‘I know I am … I can’t help it,’ she replies) falls pregnant by Barrett, Tony, or even the supposed ‘bookie from Wandsworth – Wandsworth!’, but this could be the ostensible reason for the ‘hospital bills’, to which she lays claim, and for a visit to Susan – who dutifully pleads with Tony on Vera’s behalf, reminding him that she is owed ‘some form of compensation’ (noblesse oblige). Tony has, after all, exercised an ancient droit de seigneur and good form ordains that he is, thereby, reciprocally liable. Two scenes with a madame and her ‘girls’ in Pinter’s original screenplay were contracted into one (in the house) – and two bits (in two pubs) in the film. Other changes made by Losey served to emphasise Tony’s Chelsea house as the focus of the action and reinforced the film (as The Times critic duly noted) as a ‘chamber piece’ in its intense interiority and reduced cast.12 Susan, separated from Tony by an excursion abroad (he is travelled but not worldly wise) is tentatively reunited with him in the new house – their would-be home (where the couple can be forcibly and purposefully intruded upon by Barrett) rather than in a private moment at the riverside – a public space. A suggestion that a scene be set at Susan’s flat was similarly dropped. Indeed, we know that Susan hails a taxi to keep an after-lunch appointment in Berkeley Square and has a job in an office, but we never do find out at what she works nor see where she lives – although an invitation to Tony to her flat, in the film, is left hanging. Tony meanwhile remains unemployed (he can ‘manage for a good few months’) and may yet remain unemployable. The thrust of a scene at Barrett’s lodgings, in which he was to confide to his grasping landlady (and the audience) that he is nothing more than a conman secure in the knowledge that Tony is the latest and softest in a series of stings, is shifted to the opening interview in the master’s house and to the call from a public phone box in which a flatcapped Barrett asks his flirtatious supposed ‘sister’ if she is ‘being a good girl’.

19

Sargeant Ch1

20

20/6/11

1:28 pm

Page 20

BFI FILM CLASSICS

A later scene, in which Barrett was to turn on the television for Tony (it was intended that he watch a sequence from the concurrent BBC satirical sketch show, That Was The Week That Was) was cut during production, Losey explaining to the show’s writer/producer Ned Sherrin that the film was already running over length.13 The exterior world impinges less and less on Tony’s life as Losey’s film approaches its dénouement. Aeroplanes, suggesting the lure of travel to distant destinations, are heard to pass overhead while Tony fixedly stays put. Tony is increasingly confined to the gilded cage he has constructed, actively and passively, around himself. Appropriately, with a keen awareness of detail and spatial hierarchy, Losey chose to end the film with a close-up of Barrett’s hand lightly trailing along a much burnished mahogany handrail (the product of years of servants’ toil: for Losey, the Devil is in the detail) as he ascends the stairs, rather than (as Pinter had suggested) with Barrett back in his basement kitchen. From the very outset, Losey was keen to establish the layout of the house as crucial to the film’s action.14 The amendments drew the screenplay towards preoccupations previously evinced in Losey’s films (notably, Blind Date and The Gypsy and the Gentleman [1957] – according to Raymond Durgnat, ‘a fancy dress draft for The Servant’).15 They simultaneously render Pinter’s screenplay more Pinteresque – as if written by Pinter – pulling it yet further from Maugham: the novella’s sympathetic and partial narrator, Richard, an erstwhile friend of Tony (implictly the man whom Tony claims to have been close to, ‘once’, in the army) and confidant/suitor of Sally, sharing her alarm at Tony’s decline, is displaced in favour of clinical and voyeuristic observation.16 If, as Susan says to Tony only half-jokingly, Barrett is a ‘peeping Tom’ (‘every time you open a door in this house that man’s outside’), then so is The Servant’s viewer. Delays in the editing of synchronous action in the film match Pinter’s pauses. Mirrors and mirrorings are, likewise, recurring visual and structural motifs in the film. For Losey, shooting with mirrors (something cinematographers generally tend to avoid) was to become something of a fetish. They

Sargeant Ch1

20/6/11

1:28 pm

Page 21

T H E S E RVA N T

had already featured large in Eve (1962), on which Losey collaborated with Macdonald. Bogarde wrote waspishly to his friend, Dilys Powell, the Sunday Times critic, commenting in 1975 on Losey’s The Romantic Englishwoman, ‘filled with mirror shots and staircases and overdecoration’.17 In The Servant, outside in the Avenue, there are reflective puddles and pigeons aplenty. The interior of Tony’s house is amply equipped with mirrors, both seen (in the bedroom, dressing room and drawing room) and unseen (the Regency hallway mirror in which Vera checks her appearance before descending to greet Barrett – the same mirror, seen catching Vera and Tony, before Barrett’s return from the off-licence). There are round mirrors, oval mirrors, square mirrors and rectangular mirrors. There are tilted mirrors, flat mirrors (including the gleaming vertical kitchen fitting fascias which reflect Tony’s coupling with Vera) and curved mirrors (convex in the drawing room, spherical upstairs, further disorientating Tony’s increasingly warped point of view and perspective). The most obvious pictorial precedent for the bolection frames is surely Jan van Eyck’s 1434 The Arnolfini Marriage – since 1842 displayed in the National Gallery in London. Lorne Campbell explains how the studded, convex mirror mounted over the heads of the man and his wife allows the painter to be present as witness to the scene. His testimony, ‘Johannes de Eyck fuit hic’, is central to the event. Campbell further explains that the painter, reflected in the mirror, is accompanied by his varlet – his manservant.18 There are, of course, other lenses witnessing events in The Servant, as Barrett (purposefully) and Vera (clumsily) record Tony’s demise on camera – reflected in yet another mirror – perhaps as ‘intimate capital’ to be traded at a future date for cash. Losey likewise uses mirrors to convey a sense of characters’ awareness of being watched: Barrett catches Tony’s eye, watching him, as he polishes a mirror in the drawing room, framing and isolating Tony and Barrett as one item in the alternative couplings and multiple configurations successively distributed among the comings and goings witnessed by the house. Barrett duly intrudes

21

Sargeant Ch1

22

20/6/11

1:28 pm

Page 22

BFI FILM CLASSICS

into a frame containing Susan and Tony. Tony is seen to be kissing Vera, pushing her against a wall, as Barrett’s shadow is glimpsed through the mottled glass of the tradesman’s door, with Barrett returning from his spurious errand. Mirrors betray the secrets of the house. Pinter’s screenplay had called for a mise en scène which allowed characters to spy or eavesdrop on one another. Again, this is a device familiar from the stage. In Twelfth Night, its title referring to a carnivalesque overturning of master–servant relationships at Epiphany, Fabian (Olivia’s servant), Maria (Olivia’s maid), Sir Toby Belch (Olivia’s uncle) and his accomplice, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, mischievously spy on Malvolio (Olivia’s overweening, ambitious steward) as he falls into the trap they have laid for him: Malvolio’s vanity invites their conspiracy, as he all too readily believes himself the object of Olivia’s admiration and affection and a potential match in marriage.19 In Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868), a narrative partly constructed from the depositions of servants, the staff of a large country house suspiciously eavesdrop (through screens, cracks and gaps) and report on one another as well as on the comings and goings of their employers and their guests. A divorced couple Domestic voyeurism: mirrors; doors

Sargeant Ch1

20/6/11

1:28 pm

Page 23

T H E S E RVA N T

occupying separate rooms in a Riviera hotel in Noel Coward’s 1929 Private Lives are provided with adjacent balconies to assist their mutual, curious, spying. Moreover, it is a device played for farce in Wodehouse (the hapless Wooster variously hiding in wardrobes and behind doors, enabling him to be accidentally privy to conversations not intended for his ears) – what the master hears rather than What the Butler Saw – whereas, in The Servant, surveillance is used as subterfuge, intrusion and with menace. As John L. Locke has commented, eavesdropping, whether deliberate or inadvertent, can be converted into ‘intimate capital’ and used as leverage by the

Barrett: eavesdropping with intent

23

Sargeant Ch1

24

20/6/11

1:28 pm

Page 24

BFI FILM CLASSICS

surveillant over the object of surveillance, either sold outright or as a means of blackmail.20 In The Servant, however swiftly and keenly Tony attempts to evade detection, he will nevertheless be unwittingly reported on camera behind his back: with Tony out of frame but still within earshot, Vera hastily nods at Barrett after his return from the off-licence, as if to confirm that her mission to seduce the master has been accomplished. Incidentally, it may confirm to us (as eavesdroppers) that Vera is Barrett’s accomplice and that Tony’s urgent sense of guilt at an event we have already witnessed is liable to exploitation. Although Pinter was regarded as a New Dramatist in the early 1960s, his supporters extended to practitioners of old drama and the ‘well-made play’. Richard Burton, who had also invested in the 1959 film version of Look Back in Anger (volunteering himself as Jimmy Porter) was one backer of Clive Donner’s 1962 film of Pinter’s The Caretaker; Noel Coward was another.21 Pinter’s ear for vernacular speech, inconsequential small-talk (the lesbian couple’s neurotically adversarial exchange in the restaurant; the labourer’s mournful monologue in The Queen’s Elm pub in Fulham – ignored by Tony and Barrett, who are preoccupied by their own agenda) and his crafting of delivered dialogue bears comparison with Coward’s use of language in screenplays for In Which We Serve (1942) and This Happy Breed (1944). The construction and mise en scène of Pinter’s screenplay for The Servant bears comparison with Private Lives, again, with Pinter aiming (maybe) at tragedy where Coward delivered formulaic farce. The Servant, I shall argue, shows as much what Coward and Pinter shared in common as what Coward found in Pinter to admire. Coward, a son of suburbia, and Pinter, a son of the East End, recognised and ably styled patterns of speech, marking, by punctuation and declension, characters and their social placement.22 Despite their inauspicious first encounter, by 1963 Pinter and Losey were already discussing an adaptation of Hartley’s 1953 The Go-Between. Pinter confessed that he felt intimidated by the novel’s

Sargeant Ch1

20/6/11

1:28 pm

Page 25

T H E S E RVA N T

beauty: ‘It’s wonderful. But I can’t write a film-script of it. I can’t touch it. It’s too painful, too perfect, if you know what I mean.’23 Their 1967 collaboration on Accident (from Nicholas Mosley’s 1965 novel and again starring Bogarde) and other projects intervened while The Go-Between was blocked by rights issues. Pinter completed his screenplay in 1969 and Losey’s film thereof (with a cast including James’ brother, Edward Fox) was released in 1970.24 Hartley wrote to congratulate Pinter: [Your script] is absolutely splendid – and more faithful to the letter and spirit of the book than I could have believed possible. … To have condensed so much, without ever losing – rather, with enhancing and pin-pointing (if one can use such an expression) the essentials of it, is indeed a triumph.25

Maugham, on the other hand, despite the initial payment received from Michael Anderson for his rights, subsequently acquired at great expense by Maugham’s friend, Losey, did not approve of the Losey–Pinter treatment of The Servant and set about producing his own, revised, dramatisation for the stage. Anderson had failed to raise the funds for his own company, Troy Films, to put the film into production. In 1966, Maugham moved the action from 1946 to the present day and cut the cast.26 Losey, meanwhile, suggested to Grade that Maugham’s elevation to the peerage be used as a ‘tag’ in the film’s promotion, while distancing himself from Maugham’s novella as the film’s source, inspite of its direct transposition of incidents, dialogue and details.27 Indeed, Losey advised his American publicist early in 1964 that ‘the novel of The Servant bears so little resemblance to the film that I think one should stay away from it if possible’.28 Hence, Losey objected to the synopsis prepared for the film’s release in France, which padded out the protagonists’ back story with detail which Losey found superfluous and eroneous.29

25

Sargeant Ch2

26

20/6/11

2:04 pm

Page 26

BFI FILM CLASSICS

2 The House When Losey (once of Bywater Street, SW3) received the draft screenplay commissioned by Anderson from Pinter, he was living at 15 Markham Street, SW3, while Sarah Miles was in Hasker Street, SW3; Bogarde had lived at Chester Row, SW1, and retired to Cadogan Gardens, SW3, ‘a short walk from Harrods’, in 1988. When Losey bought the leasehold on 29 Royal Avenue in 1966 (a grander house than Tony’s), he borrowed £16,000 from Leslie Grade – whose company, at the instigation of Robin Fox, had financed The Servant.30 Royal Avenue, Chelsea, SW3, was an early choice of location for Tony’s house. Losey shifted the opening action of the film from high summer to late autumn, the passing seasons marking the chronology of the story as surely as the changes initiated by Tony,

Royal Avenue, Chelsea, London SW3

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:04 pm

Page 27

T H E S E RVA N T

Susan and Barrett inside the house. The exterior of the house, meanwhile, remains unchanged throughout – truly a façade – ostensibly neat, ordered and dignified – a front. Nikolaus Pevsner authoritatively informs us that Royal Avenue is ‘a broad gravelled expanse’ between disappointingly weedy trees, ‘laid out in 1692–4 to connect the Royal Hospital with William III’s Kensington Palace … It got no farther than King’s Road.’31 The terrace on its west side, on the right as one walks from King’s Road towards the Royal Hospital, dates from the early nineteenth century. Long shots of Barrett arriving for his interview and returning, from a shopping trip, reveal a regiment of terraced façades: sash windows, rather than casements, serve uniformly to assert the flat planes of consistently articulated elevations on either side. The archetypal London terrace had been regulated by a succession of Building Acts, largely concerned to prevent the spread of fire, since 1774. ‘The story of the better-class London house’, explains Sir John Summerson, ‘is a story of ingenious variation within the inflexible limits of party walls … The insistent verticality of the London house is idiomatic. The French learnt at an early date to live horizontally and most, if not all, continental capitals followed the French lead.’32 The very words ‘apartment’ (French) and ‘flat’ (Scottish) were alien in England. Citing the many comments prompted from foreigners on the vertical living-idiom, Summerson proceeds to quote from a journal published by a French American visitor to London in 1817: These narrow houses, three or four storeys high – one for eating, one for sleeping, a third for company, a fourth underground for the kitchen, a fifth perhaps at top for the servants – and the agility, the ease, the quickness with which the individuals of the family run up and down, and perch on the different storeys, give the idea of a cage with its sticks and birds.33

‘As for the plan of the house itself’, says Summerson, ‘nothing could be simpler. There is one room at the back and one at the front on

27

Sargeant Ch2

28

20/6/11

2:04 pm

Page 28

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Basevi designs for Pelham Crescent, London, SW7, 1833 (courtesy of RIBA Library Drawings and Archives Collection)

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:04 pm

Page 29

T H E S E RVA N T

each floor, with a passage and staircase at one side. … There is no escape from it.’ In practice, however, as Rachel Stewart has observed, interior arrangements behind the Georgian façade were sometimes not so constrained nor predictable.34 For The Servant, Losey and Macdonald took further liberties with the pattern, stretching a plausible interior geography without disrupting our sense of architectural integrity – abetted by smooth cuts on action effected by Reginald Mills (Losey’s longstanding collaborator and preferred choice as editor) within and between separate sets. The ‘virtual’ house created by Macdonald and Mills thus cheats the predictable limits of the film’s location by encroaching through the party wall of an adjacent terrace property by the width of a stair and the depth of a room above. Meanwhile, Tony’s view from his room of Vera and Barrett departing for Manchester, as he answers Susan’s phone call, and Susan’s arrival by taxi, establish an actual interior in relation to the Avenue. Continuity between Macdonald’s studiobuilt Avenue interior and the outside is provided by service steps into the basement area; first-floor iron balconies; bare trees; an estate agent’s sign; and a street lamp. Nets and blinds serve a practical purpose, masking the join between the sets and their artificial backdrops. They also serve, dramatically, to assert the interiority of the house as cage and Tony’s gradual withdrawal behind its façade. Rather than protecting Tony from the encroachment of public prying, these flimsy barriers increasingly prove insufficient to inhibit private behaviour which Tony would not have exposed to public gaze. Whether we want to or not, we are obliged to spy on Tony from the inside. The poet John Betjeman (once a rather severe architectural critic respected in elevated and elitist circles) had become, by the 1960s, a populariser of unloved old buildings. He had, accordingly, shifted his campaigning zeal from a neo-Classical to a neo-Gothic allegiance. His comments in his 1933 Ghastly Good Taste (republished in 1970) nevertheless remain useful to my argument, here:

29

Sargeant Ch2

30

20/6/11

2:04 pm

Page 30

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Everyone can tell an eighteenth-century house if he uses his eyes. The material is generally local brick or stone; the front of the house is flat, and the windows, whose shape is made interesting by the sizes of the panes divided by thick glazing bars in earlier, and thin in later examples, are smaller on the first floor than on the ground floor and smaller still on the top floor. The roof is generally hidden by a low wall or balustrade, and the servants’ bedrooms looked out on to this brick parapet in earlier houses. Servants, when there were only two classes, lived ‘according to their station’. … Any decorative extravagance confined itself to the front door of the house, which perhaps had the familiar pediment over it, or a round head containing a lead fanlight. If the house did not face flat on the street, keeping an orderly, dignified countenance next its neighbours of whatever style, a neat wroughtiron gate broke the high brick wall which kept the continuity of the street. Houses like these exist in every large town today of any antiquity.35

Tony’s standard, patternbook, town house, with the pitched roof hidden by a parapet and its windows graded from top to bottom, is thus, outwardly, a match for the typical ‘everyman’ Losey noted on Pinter’s script at the introduction of Tony: with the exception that predictable countenances in house and man are increasingly individualised in details and by conduct.36 Below the first floor piano nobile, the brickwork is smoothly rendered (a more modest and urbane version of the Mounsets’ vermiculated country pile, to which the film’s viewer is later invited), giving the impression that the building sits on a durable and impregnable base. Adjacent houses in the street have raked bands in the render, in imitation of layered stone slabs. Some houses on the right-hand side of the Avenue have four storeys to the parapet, some five. On the opposite side, also seen in The Servant’s title sequence, there are fancy corbels below the parapet, gesturally denoting the dentils of an antecedent construction practice. The Avenue is a distant derivative in which the antique source yet remains clearly discernible. All the houses in the Avenue have spiked railings demarcating a boundary between public thoroughfare and private

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:04 pm

Page 31

T H E S E RVA N T

realm. The area, admitting light into the basement quarters and providing a separate entry for ‘trade’, serves as a moat to the house – further barricading it against strangers.37 An unlocked door In The Servant’s title sequence, Losey’s cameraman, Chic Waterston, promptly swings into action, simultaneously paraphrasing the film’s principal location and its thematic concerns: Barrett is discovered crossing King’s Road, beneath the royal insignia emblazoned on the shop front of Thomas Crapper & Co. (one of Losey’s first choices of locations for filming). Even in provision for the most basic and

Susan despatched from the house by Barrett: ‘not very encouraging, Miss … the weather forecast’

31

Sargeant Ch2

32

20/6/11

2:04 pm

Page 32

BFI FILM CLASSICS

universal of bodily functions, privilege and patronage can be granted and exercised and a hierarchy thereby appointed and sustained. With umbrella in hand, Barrett proceeds disregardingly into the Avenue. Martin Esslin, in his discussion of Pinter’s stageplays (including his 1959 The Dumb Waiter and 1960 The Caretaker), has commented upon the number of instances in which a man in a room receives a visitor – sometimes arriving out of nowhere, sometimes known but unwelcome. The visitor ‘may or may not stay with him, may or may not leave’.38 In The Servant, Barrett, who proves himelf in no sense ‘dumb’, arrives on cue in response to a pre-arranged appointment. Ringing the doorbell elicits no immediate response. Barrett then pushes lightly but pointedly at a heavy door left open. Pausing briefly to gaze up the staircase from the hallway (taking stock of the territory), he then proceeds to the back of the house. Here, a church clock (among a number of clocks and watches punctuating the action), in the environs of the house, marks Barrett’s professional punctuality. He gently emits Jeeves’ ‘deferential cough … which sound likes a well-bred sheep clearing its throat on a distant mountain top’.39 Already Barrett is at an advantage over his Thomas Crapper: an early choice of location

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:04 pm

Page 33

T H E S E RVA N T

prospective master, semi-recumbent in a deck chair in the conservatory, who feebly apportions the blame for his inattentiveness at three in the afternoon to ‘too many beers at lunch’. The attempt at ingratiation proves doubly ineffective: Barrett denies that he is a fellow imbiber (although we soon discover this to be a lie) and Tony’s later attempt at a similar ruse – despatching Barrett to buy a quart of ‘plain brown ale’ when Barrett arrives precipitously from Manchester (while Tony dispenses with Vera) similarly falls flat. Tony cannot stomach beer (as opposed to lager) and cannot fool Barrett. The opening encounter of master with servant graphically opposes one with the other. In the background, Barrett, a dark, middle-aged saturnine figure, looms over blond Tony, fresh-faced apart from his late adolescent outcrop of spots. James Fox (son of Losey’s agent Robin Fox and, in 1962, boyfriend of former public schoolgirl Sarah Miles), an Harrovian himself, had briefly served in the Coldstream Guards in Kenya, served time in advertising (which he liked even less), before appearing as an honourable but accidental public school sporting hero in Tony Richardson’s 1962 The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.40 When Tony is caught out by Barrett (the brown ale incident), Fox draws back his arms, pushing out his chest in his buttoned-up Smedley-style top, like a junior Guardsman awaiting inspection.41 He similarly ‘stands by his bunk’, by the conservatory curtains, when Barrett ‘finds him out’, bursting in on his midnight lovemaking tryst with Susan (i.e., Tony may feel guilty about sex but guiltier still at betraying his relationship with Barrett by asking Susan to marry him: Tony pleads on Barrett’s behalf that he made a mistake). Bogarde (by his own account) saw James, ‘the golden haired boy’, acting under a pseudonym on television and, unwittingly, suggested him to Fox senior (his own agent) and to Losey.42 With the exception of The Blue Lamp (1949) – in which Basil Dearden cast him as a juvenile delinquent – Bogarde had been known previously for solidly middle-class roles, from juvenile lead (Sidney Carton) and Rank matinée heart-throb (Dr Sparrow) to the

33

Sargeant Ch2

34

20/6/11

2:04 pm

Page 34

BFI FILM CLASSICS

successful and impeccable barrister, Melville Farr, in Basil Dearden’s 1961 Victim, professionally and socially compromised by his association with a lower-class rent boy. For this reluctant ‘Idol of the Odeon’, Losey’s offer of The Servant came as a welcome departure. Bogarde had long since expressed a preference for acting roles in Advantage: Barrett; Advantage: Tony; Advantage: Susan; Advantage: Barrett

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:04 pm

Page 35

T H E S E RVA N T

small ventures over starring roles in big films.43 Substituting for Losey during a bout of bronchial pneumonia on filming of The Servant, the trial also confirmed Bogarde’s preference for acting over direction: the experiment was never to be repeated. Losey’s 1964 King and Country (also with Mills as editor and Macdonald as designer) again cast Bogarde as officer class. However, Libel (Anatole de Grunwald, 1959) had already cast Bogarde in a double role: as the lawful scion of an ancient estate (Sir Mark Loddon) and as the duplicitous subaltern (Frank Welney) who seeks to usurp an officer’s privileged status by replicating his memories, manners and dress – learnt over a period of joint wartime incarceration. ‘Gentlemen’s gentlemen’ likewise learn to be gentlemen themselves by following the example of their master. In Libel, class is temporarily presented as a matter of mere imitation of attributes and readily imitable masquerade – subject to question – before being conclusively tested and order duly restored. In 1961, Losey initially considered Bogarde for the role of master in The Servant. In The Servant, master and servant (at the outset) are equally contrasted in costume. Tony wears a classic double-breasted camel overcoat, loosely carried over the shoulders of a typical city suit, the traditional uniform of a regular man-about-town.44 Only the elephant-hair bracelet, worn on the right wrist sleepily hanging from the deck chair, betokens that Tony has been away from London for some time: Tony continues to wear this momento throughout the film, suggesting continuing Wanderlust, while Susan, throughout, carries an engagement ring betokening her attachment to Tony (in other words, pinning him to home – and, potentially, to family). Pinter suggested that Tony had been in Ceylon (Sri Lanka, after 1948) and that he had worked as a tobacco planter; Maugham (1966) topically drew on his own experience of Tanganyika (Tanzania, after 1964).45 Regardless of the exact location of his sojourn, Tony is cast as a son of Empire. With colossal arrogance, at the cabaret date with Susan, Tony laps one hand over another and leans forward (he strikes a pose). He casually boasts of a ‘giant

35

Sargeant Ch2

36

20/6/11

2:04 pm

Page 36

BFI FILM CLASSICS

development’ costing ‘millions’ and that thousands of peasants can be transplanted from Asia Minor (‘they’re having a pretty rough time there’) to occupy the projected cities in Brazil; he rolls the idea around his mouth, savouring it, like wine. Susan (the moderniser) idiomatically quips that he (rather than the previous bottle) is ‘corked’, unimpressed by his pretentious masculine show of bossy command and bravura, and, it seems, recognising a pose when she sees one. The tiny upwards glance at the waiter may be sympathetic to an affront as much as saying that it’s alright for him to pour: Susan, seemingly, perennially knows what she is doing with looks and gestures, and how to interpret looks and gestures. For Tony, Susan, unimpressed by Tony’s display of bravura

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:04 pm

Page 37

T H E S E RVA N T

‘peasants’ are as shippable as any other commodity and can be summoned and despatched at will, like waiters, on possibly false pretences. Regardless of the reason for Tony’s temporary separation from Susan, it allows Barrett to break an entry on Tony. In his memoirs, Bogarde describes how his portrayal of Barrett drew initially on a manservant whom he had once hired, who had absconded with various items belonging to his employer, and other waiters and salesmen he had encountered. For Bogarde, and Losey’s costume designer, Beatrice (‘Bumble’) Dawson, the character began with his appearance, ‘a mean shabby outfit for a mean and shabby man’: Next the detail. Brylcreemed hair, flat to the head, a little scurfy round the back and in the parting, white puddingy face, damp hands (arms which hang loosely often have damp hands at their extremities, I don’t know why). Glazed, aggrieved eyes, and then the walk to blend the assembly together. … No make-up, ever.46

The seedier aspects of Barrett’s dress and demeanour were reprised by Bogarde for the sinister stranger, ‘Uncle’ Charlie (named after Barrie’s Captain Hook), who avails himself of an orphaned family in Jack Clayton’s Our Mother’s House (1967). Barrett’s costume in the film is less Jeevesian than suggested by Pinter’s prototype. When we first meet Barrett in The Servant, he wears a lumpy, belted coat, a shiny serge suit, nylon scarf with horses’ heads and stirrups, a porkpie hat with a jay’s feather in its ribbon (the feather of a crow with ideas above its station), and ‘black shoes which squeaked a little, lending a disturbing sense of secret arrival’, ‘like some reincarnation of the Blessed Mary Poppins’, quipped Eric Rhode.47 Barrett is distinctly unappetising (quite an achievement for Bogarde). Early in the film, he appears equipped (as needs must) in a much worn hand-knitted fairisle vest and shirt plus full apron, later choosing lounge suits (in which garb he mirrors his master: an outwardly indistinguishably matched

37

Sargeant Ch2

38

20/6/11

2:04 pm

Page 38

BFI FILM CLASSICS

couple playing cards fireside across a table – or, as in Maugham, completing crosswords, at which Tony is alarmingly inept and clueless – even when Barrett supplies the clues), then later optionally sporting a dark polo sweater (in which he looks disconcertingly like a raffish young Lord Snowdon), later still casually wearing a dressing gown to greet house guests (as if it were his house, now). Tony, in the short wrap given him by Susan, makes love to Vera in the drawing room, Vera wearing a lumber shirt borrowed from Barrett; a dishevelled Vera, summoned by Tony, bounces down to the drawing room in a shirty bathroom robe, matching his eagerness Tony and Barrett matched in dress – but the game is played to Barrett’s advantage

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:04 pm

Page 39

T H E S E RVA N T

with a chirpy ‘Yes, Sir!’. Costume is thus used to mark and efface differences between characters, between occasions, between different rooms in the house and to clarify and confuse emotional and sexual registers. Costume is an affective signifier of domestic propriety and of the shifting relationships between the ménage of characters contained by the house. Introductions once made, Tony suggests that he and Barrett conduct their interview upstairs, where there are chairs enough remaining for Barrett to sit down. A meagre, dark, stair carpet, painted handrail and fading, filigreed paper (Tony idly tears off a loose flap as he ascends) may indicate that the house has been tenanted (a variety of wallpaper prints, from pale stripes to patterns, suggests an absence of coordination). Certainly, the house has been poorly maintained, it ‘needs a lot done with it’, with dust outlines marking the removal of previous occupants’ furniture, pictures and/or mirrors (we know not which). Plaster has flaked; lightbulbs hang bare; curtains have been removed from windows; cracked flowerpots have been left on sills; a discarded duster hangs from a niche in the stairwell. The empty cot bequeathed to the blousily papered front room into which Barrett is escorted hints that apartments have been outgrown and that the house requires rejuvenation. However, Tony pays little heed to the reiterated call on the film’s soundtrack from an adjacent school playground, although he does, in the first instance, allow himself to be distracted: he curiously tweaks aside the net curtain to glance outside. Tony thereby fails his second test. Barrett bluffs his CV, boasting that he has been, for thirteen years, in loyal service to ‘various’ members of the peerage. Tony corrects him, telling him that the Viscount Barr whom he cites as most recent employer was a friend of his father, is equally recently dead, and was no more than a Lord. Barrett puffs out his cheeks – he may have opportunistically selected Barr as an unreachable guarantor of credentials but still may fear himself rumbled by his ignorance of the aristocratic connections to which he is laying claim. Barrett has overreached himself.

39

Sargeant Ch2

40

20/6/11

2:04 pm

Page 40

BFI FILM CLASSICS

In The Go-Between, likewise a class-bound story of inappropriate attachments (with tragic consequences), Pinter returned to the matter of social distinction. In the nicest possible way, Trimingham (Edward Fox) alerts the fatherless schoolboy, Leo (Dominic Guard), to correct forms of address. An intimacy once invited, negotiated and established, Trimingham, ‘with the glassyeyed insousciance of the landed gentry’ then proceeds to enlist Leo, a desperately willing, obliging, but ultimately compromised servant, in pursuit of his own interests: TRIMINGHAM

I don’t think we’ve been introduced. My name is Trimingham.

LEO

How do you do, Trimingham.

TRIMINGHAM LEO

You can call me Hugh, if you like.

looks at him

TRIMINGHAM

Or Trimingham, if you prefer.

LEO

Why not Mister Trimingham?

TRIMINGHAM

I think Trimingham is slightly more in order, if you prefer it to Hugh.

LEO

But why not Mister?

TRIMINGHAM

Well, as a matter of fact, I’m a Viscount.

LEO

Viscount Trimingham?

TRIMINGHAM

That’s right.

LEO

Oughtn’t I to call you My Lord?

TRIMINGHAM

No, no. Hugh will do … or Trimingham if you like. What’s your name?

LEO

Colston.

TRIMINGHAM

Mister Colston?

LEO

Well, Leo if you like.

TRIMINGHAM

I’ll call you Leo, if I may.

LEO

Oh yes, that’s quite all right.48

Tony, in The Servant, ploughs on regardless of Barrett’s bluff. He is more keen to pursue his own immediate and egocentric agenda (who will generally look after and ‘do’ for him now that he is parentless and

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:04 pm

Page 41

T H E S E RVA N T

alone?). Recovering an appropriate demeanour, fingering the rim of his hat and hunching in his chair, Barrett ventures, with affected circumlocution, understatement and modesty (again reminiscent of Jeeves and anticipating Stevens junior, Ishiguro’s butler-narrator in The Remains of the Day), that ‘if I might put it this way, Sir, cooking is something in which I take a great deal of pride’; ‘my soufflés have always received a great deal of praise’. In turn, Tony, momentarily seated and slapping his knees, then jumps up and strides around the room, seemingly regaining command of the situation, asserting that he knows a hell of a lot about Indian dishes (presumably from his travels abroad). The encounter has already become a form of passiveaggressive flirtation, with Tony, as potential employer presuming and exercising the prerogative (already lost) to alternate between establishing likeness and claiming distinction. Tony (a chap) chummily informs Barrett (another chap) that ‘the thought of some old woman running around the place telling me what to do rather put me off’. Barrett reciprocates at his second interview by pleading with Tony to restore him to his status as a man’s servant and to save him from an ‘old lady in Paultons Square … up and down those stairs all day, I’m skin and bone’. With Barrett, of course (chap or not), an ‘old woman’ is exactly what he gets – with salads and soufflés and so forth – and ultimately much more. ‘As soon as I get the hoover out you’re straight up it,’ says Barrett, complaining at the muck and slime left behind by Tony, ‘I can’t expect to get any work done’; ‘why don’t you get a job’ with ‘butter gone up tuppence a pound’, Barrett nags, campily swinging empty bottles over his shoulder and taunting Tony with ‘the Man from Brazil’. James Palmer reads Tony’s circling at interview of the now-seated Barrett as his entangling himself in a spider’s web, a snare of Barrett’s making, while I find myself more persuaded by Pinter’s image, on reading Maugham, of two crabs approaching and engaging one another.49 Throughout the film, Barrett cannily shifts his verbal delivery and physical performance between passivity and aggression; Tony is rendered increasingly passive, with spurts of aggressive command becoming increasingly intermittent and desperate. (Next page) Passive-aggressive flirtation and flattery: Barrett pleads for reinstatement

41

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:04 pm

Page 42

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 43

Sargeant Ch2

44

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 44

BFI FILM CLASSICS

The drawing room (and dining room) Tony feebly develops a winter chill and takes to his bed, prompting an altercation over flowers in the ‘patient’s’ sickroom: Barrett brings him his medicine and the post on a silver salver; Susan brings in a vase displaced by Barrett and, keeping her eyes focused on Tony, propped up on plumped pillows, imperatively instructs the servant to put it down when he moves to take the flowers away. Tony selfishly betrays a fear that Barrett will leave him if Susan continues to yap; Susan, bridling slightly at Tony’s rebuke, reminds Tony that Barrett is, after all, only a servant and only half-heartedly apologises for being rude. Tony, Loamishly, patronises Barrett as ‘still a human being’ (Barrett, in fawning mode, rubbing his knee, will later press Tony for reassurance that he wouldn’t like him if he were not human, passing him a draft from a man in Jermyn Street – a male enclave – in a glass previously passed by Tony to Vera); Barrett chivvies women with clucks and whistles as though they are not human at all. Apart from this episode, battles between Susan and Barrett mostly occur in the drawing room, although her chosen weapons include kitchen accoutrements – she introduces a spice rack (subsequently demonstratively ripped from the wall, dumped unceremoniously by a fag-smoking Barrett into a depleted Carlsberg box) and tells him to use the tarragon she bought on Wednesday (reminding him of her most recent administrations and evidence of her contributions to the management of the house) when ordering a salad for her lunch. Evidently, Susan is a follower of Elizabeth David (resident of Halsey Street, SW3), who, in articles until the end of 1960 for Vogue and the Sunday Times and thereafter for House and Garden and The Spectator, endeavoured to reinvigorate and introduce a continental flavour to an English cuisine grown stolid. In 1958, she wrote appreciatively of poulet à l’estragon in Vogue; in 1962 she praised shops dispensing envelopes of herbs and spices; in 1965 she opened her own shop off King’s Road, stocked with the very best kitchenware available, including copper pans and kettles and le Creuset ironware enamelled to her own, exacting, specification

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 45

T H E S E RVA N T

(Gauloises bleu). David subsequently supplied a booklet with packs of herbs and spices.50 Susan, in The Servant, may be hoping to cater to Tony’s vaunted knowledge of curries – but never gets the chance. The leftover electric fire from Tony’s first encounter with Barrett is retained for Susan’s introduction to the house, to which she is boisterously conveyed in Tony’s boy-racer sportscar, gliding into his parking space. The single bar of the fire apologetically, tepidly, warms the bare room and illuminates the couple’s faces as they lie stretched on the newspaper-strewn floor: the house is a work in progress. Susan seductively, gently, teases Tony – ‘bachelor’ – and mocks his appointment of a manservant ‘a what!?’. After some weeks, Susan returns, this time for dinner, where she is introduced to Barrett as Tony’s fiancée. A convex mirror allows the film’s viewer to survey the décor as does Susan, looking side to side, sniffing the flowers and declaring the room beautiful (the drapes, upholstery, carpet, lighting, lacquer screen and antique cabinet), before she chooses an armchair to the right of the fireplace (Tony’s ‘mother’s favourite’, he says, approvingly). Much of Tony’s furniture, mostly inherited, dates from before the Great Exhibition (1851), let Susan’s first encounter with the house; Susan’s first encounter with Barrett

45

Sargeant Ch2

46

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 46

BFI FILM CLASSICS

alone the Festival of Britain (1951). He has reopened the fireplaces blocked by the previous tenants. Theoretically, the drawing room is a decorative and leisurely space in which guests are received and company welcomed, a public private realm: at the end of the film, with ladies of one sort in the dressing room, Barrett shows Susan, a Lady of another sort, into the drawing room. Susan refuses to be intimidated by the more ‘prehistoric’ and oversized adornments with which she is presented on her first encounter with the restored house and perkily orders a vodka on the rocks; Barrett (already intimating familiarity with the master of the house) suggests Sir’s ‘usual’ – presumed again at the reconciliation in the pub – without asking, but overhearing, Barrett orders ‘scotch – a large scotch’ on Tony’s behalf. In the dining room (a more functional space), overlooked by equine prints, military lithographs, oil paintings and funerary urns (possibly the vestiges of Tony’s antecedents) – and perhaps recalling the miniature gun carriages on the drawing room mantelpiece (she has yet to be subjected to the unremitting assemblage of military and boys’ school photos covering Tony’s dressing room walls) – Susan suggests that the house needs ‘lightening … more variety … colour’ (i.e., the feminine touch). Barrett, with his hands full, meanwhile petulantly kicks the door from the kitchen to the dining room. We may assume Susan to be a reader of the same issues of Country Life, House and Garden and Vogue consulted and pillaged by Macdonald in the preparation of his designs for the interior of the house.51 Susan’s later gift to Tony of a cropped silk karate wrap is taken from its tissue and hung over a glass stand in the drawing room displaying a buttocky, gladiatorial bronze figure, to be featured, large and elsewhere, later: Barrett unctuously declares the gift ‘handsome’. Pointedly, Barrett chooses the dining room to launch a riposte, while he briskly and efficiently goes about his business. ‘I like the changes you’ve been making around the house – you’ve been enjoying yourself,’ Tony congratulates him and is duly thanked. ‘Oh, by the way, Sir, I’ve taken the liberty of removing those chintz frills off the dressing table – not very practical,’ says Barrett, rhetorically

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 47

T H E S E RVA N T

and complicitly, adding: ‘We’ve not seen very much of Miss Stewart lately have we, Sir? My sister’s arriving tomorrow, as we agreed.’ It is over dinner together (‘Fabulous – I don’t know how you do it’) that Tony subsequently, mollifyingly, says to Barrett (who, perhaps pretending modesty and a niceness of taste only to earn favour, claims the stew a little salty) that he has had this shared feeling once before – in the army. Barrett self-assuredly helps himself to a beer. Feminine touches are never welcome to Barrett. Perhaps no longer to Tony, either. On Susan’s third evening visit to the house, Tony shows her the new abstract – ‘very chic’, he says, tipsily, drawing on a panatella – selected by Barrett for the garden. Susan draws the curtains from the drawing room to the conservatory, to reveal a tall white cone, a smoothly rounded obelisk, centrally placed. She turns to Tony, bows her head knowingly, cigarette in hand, and says nothing for a moment, measuring a response: he’s not only too attached to masculine company, he’s also too lazy. Meanwhile Pinter’s lyrics, sung by Cleo Laine, continue on the soundtrack: Leave it alone It’s all gone It’s all gone Don’t stay to see me Turn from your arms Leave it alone It’s all gone Give me my death Close my mouth Give me my breath Close my mouth How can I bear The ghost of you here Can’t love without you Must love without you …

47

Sargeant Ch2

48

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 48

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Susan’s ski jumper and pants (possibly procured by Dawson from Lillywhites) and sheepskin jacket (perhaps Morlands or Antartex) match the snow falling outside – yet more reason for the action to be staged indoors. Tony sports smart, dapperly trim slacks and striped shirt (possibly by DAKS from Simpsons of Piccadilly – Tony is tastefully unsusceptible to the sartorial excesses of Wooster). Susan flirtatiously enquires after Tony’s ‘new frontier’ – the Brazilian project – and starts unbuttoning his shirt. On the soundtrack, Laine continues to the refrain of ‘All Gone’, composed by Pinter from lines in his script (‘gone’ … ‘alone’ … ‘mouth’), to music from John Dankworth: Now while I love you alone Now while I love you alone Now while I love you Can’t love without you Must love without you Alone.

Dankworth, with whom Losey had previously worked on The Criminal (1960), was commissioned for the score of The Servant before the completion of the final script. His band appears in the film for the cabaret date; the sleeve of ‘At Newport’ (Dankworth had appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival) is conspicuously in shot to the right of the drawing room wing chair in which Tony couples with Vera – explicit lovemaking – again with Tony deliberately putting Laine’s disc on the record player, duly released as a single in 1964. Losey generously promoted Dankworth and the score in publicity material accompanying the release of the film abroad, advising Grade: [Dankworth] is the only name in English jazz who is recognised outside the shores of this island and one of the few jazz musicians in the world who is also recognised as a top musician, irrespective of his work in the jazz field.52

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 49

T H E S E RVA N T

Warped versions of the song recur at the first departure of Vera and, at the end, with Vera reinstalled in the ménage (here it becomes more screechy than sultry), layered with elements from the film’s other musical motifs. Misha Donat analysed Dankworth’s score for the 1964 issue of Isis devoted to The Servant: At its second appearance the song has a similar backing to its first version, with the important difference that the Vera theme is twice added … The modality of the song is also changed, from minor to major. The third version of the song which is back to the minor, follows immediately after Tony’s discovery of Barrett’s relationship with Vera and Susan’s simultaneous discovery of Tony’s relationship with Vera. It is heard beneath Vera’s nervous humming of Wagner’s Wedding March from upstairs, and the Vera theme ends the song as Susan leaves the house. … The backing of the fourth version of the song reflects fully the completely distorted state of Tony’s mind.53

Dankworth’s Tony–Barrett theme is similarly varied and distorted, sometimes overriding the song and Vera’s theme, muddling the relationships and underscoring the shifts in power. In front of the drawing room’s open fire, to the lush and sensuous accompaniment of Laine, Tony and Susan kiss and Tony asks Susan to stay – to marry him. At this moment, Barrett taps brusquely on the ‘blind’ door to the hallway and stumbles in. This door is backed by shelves of books which Tony never reads – these are leather-bound books as furnishing, books which serve merely to make a room by lining it. These books back a door which attempts to deny the servicing of the room by maintaining an uninterrupted interior surface, for the ease of those invited inside. Barrett’s preference, it later transpires, is for telly – the set brought from the dressing room (secondary space) to centre stage (the drawing room), along with a radio and atlas jigsaw puzzles which further underline Tony’s failure to achieve his ambitions abroad. Susan does not appreciate the effect (and the mood) being broken by Barrett and harshly asks Tony whether he knows no better (we may decide that

49

Sargeant Ch2

50

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 50

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Barrett knows all too well). She asks why he cannot live ‘out’ or be restricted to ‘quarters’ – in other words, remain out of sight and out of mind and out of the way, beyond the padded baize or bookshelf door. Instead of regarding this door as a definite boundary, Barrett uses it as a vantage point as he dusts the unread books: looking up at Susan as she brings in her flowers mid-morning from the landing sidetable to Tony’s bedroom and again swinging the door open as Susan and Tony frustratedly say their goodbyes at night. Barrett, dark against the white hallway, intervenes between the symmetrically

Tony, evasive

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 51

T H E S E RVA N T

paired profiles of Susan and Tony: there can be no privacy for them in this house. Susan sarcastically asks why Barrett is up after his bedtime. Barrett proceeds to nanny Tony with a rubbing gesture and the offer of ‘a nice hot drink’ – ‘There’s no need for that,’ says Tony, thickly (he has been thwarted in his need for a different sort of comfort).54 An able and assiduous servant, Barrett dutifully sets about providing for Tony’s other needs, as nurse, then pimp, then puppeteer. Tony guiltily draws this same door shut after Vera has been summoned to the drawing room (this time redundantly closing it against Barrett’s prying eyes and ears – but Barrett knows already). After the arrival of Vera, Susan has yet further cause for concern (not least, the unanswered phone calls and the unanswered thick-papered note which we see Tony tear apart). She launches an offensive and, again, the battlefield is the drawing room. Susan and Barrett have the measure of one another as grown-ups managing adolescents: Tony and Vera. Susan and Barrett, in their respective ways, both tidy up after Tony’s messes. Susan arrives at midday when she knows Tony is out at lunch with his father’s solicitor (she has agreed, by phone, a 2.30 departure for the country, but, for once, Barrett may not be party to this knowledge and may be assaulted unawares – ‘I know’, she informs him). Having, from the doorstep, said please for the retrieval of parcels from her taxi, Susan immediately assumes the role of mistress of the house (she still has no key and resents ringing the bell). Her subterfuge gains her an entry. She then instructs (rather than requests) the servant to answer her demands. Once in, she throws an arm out pre-emptorily, directing him to bring and despatch objects – a dog could expect to be treated more solicitously – and she goes on to de-humanise him further (in contrast to Tony’s Loamishly pathetic plea, ‘he’s still a human being’). Susan takes command, decisively repositioning a chair to its proper place, opposite a work desk (at which Tony has never ‘worked’). She smartly pushes up her sleeves and plunges the new flowers (a reprisal) into a vase (‘a jar’, says Barrett, servilely rubbing the glass, as he has for Tony, now caught temporarily off-guard and flustered – or (Next page) Susan seizes the initiative

51

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 52

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 53

Sargeant Ch2

54

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 54

BFI FILM CLASSICS

knowing that this is the act he needs must temporarily perform). She scatters cushions (one could suppose that Susan has bought these at Peter Jones on Sloane Square) on the fireside chairs and sofa. Barrett, at his greasiest and shabbiest, hands hanging limply, is apparently reduced to submission by her imperious manner and imperative form of address. She orders a light for her cigarette (whereas Tony finally has Barrett sticking a cigarette into his mouth and lighting it for him with Barrett weighing the lighter in his hand as a grenade). Shot frontily, behind the perfunctorily arranged flowers, a stem casts a shadow rendering Susan momentarily diabolical. Barrett has previously presumed to aerosol-spray the hallway, as if fumigating the house against germs or disguising the scent of a feminine presence in the house (or both simultaneously), and has unceremoniously ushered Susan out with the evasive line – ‘not very encouraging, Miss … the weather forecast’ – slamming the door and leaving Susan out on a windy street, clutching a lamppost for support, a foreshadowing of her final expulsion (when she clutches onto a tree). Now, Susan seizes the prerogative, bargeing in, and asks Barrett whether he uses a deodorant, whether he goes well with the colour scheme, what he thinks of the flowers and cushions – telling him, in no uncertain terms, that she doesn’t ‘give a tinker’s gob’ what he thinks and asking him what he ‘wants’ from the house. Disingenuously, superficially passively, Barrett replies that he is ‘simply the servant’, thereby passively, aggressively reminding her that she is still not yet Tony’s wife and not yet in a position to command him at will. Susan (who may well think that she has won this sally) settles to smoking in the leather wing chair in which Tony has been ‘nannied’ by Barrett and in which Tony has already made love to Vera (little does Susan know) and waits for Barrett to bring the lunch she has ordered (Barrett may well know already all that has gone on with Vera in that chair). Returning after their second country weekend with Willy and Agatha Mounset (Richard Vernon and Catherine Lacey), Susan and Tony receive Barrett and Vera as unwelcome guests in their drawing

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 55

T H E S E RVA N T

room in (as Susan forcefully and pleadingly reminds him) Tony’s house. A convex mirror catches Barrett tripping downstairs in his dressing gown before he confidently confronts his master. Susan and Tony are here framed together in a mirror, while Barrett and Vera, joined shoulder to shoulder and paired by matchingly cut, corded and tasselled gowns, are framed in the doorway. Vera, in close-up, iterates lines in which she has been coached by Barrett, falteringly, at his cue, attempting a majestic declaration: ‘Hugo and I … are going to be married.’ We (and Tony and Susan) have overheard the name before but not seen it voiced. Lip quivering, Vera continues (reverting to an almost apologetic tone): ‘you can’t have it on a plate forever’, metaphorically reminding Tony that she has been literally served up and taken for granted along with Tony’s meals. A mirror again takes in the entire scene, the stage, as Tony hugs a cabinet, an inert piece of furniture, for support. Tony realises that, despite Barrett’s supercilious assurance that he is ‘within his rights’ (Hugo is affianced to Vera as Tony is to Susan) and that he and Tony are complicitly ‘in the same boat’ (both having screwed Vera – and both been ‘done’ by her, Barrett later claims), he is actually all alone – it’s all gone – any delusion of love is gone – his dream of a ‘house’ is all gone. Tony’s misfortune may be compounded, emotionally, for his mistaking that Vera actually cared for him (his burying his head in her pillow after her departure suggests that he pines for her – she later reassures him that she still loves him), in addition to his shame at Vera disclosing their affair to Susan (his fiancée), in addition to his discovery that Vera is not Barrett’s sister. Tony is, initially, horrified at Barrett’s bestiality. Tony then finds himself proved fatally naive, credulous and thus duped – he has been betrayed by Barrett, as well. It’s complicated, he’s confused and he absolutely can’t cope. Lunch at Au Jardin des Gourmets The restaurant scene was a late addition to Pinter’s screenplay, enlisted with an originally small production budget running low and time running out on a tight shooting schedule.55 It was to be intercut

55

Sargeant Ch2

56

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 56

BFI FILM CLASSICS

with Vera’s arrival, ostensibly a typical provincial ingénue appearing in the metropolis (Rita Tushingham at the opening of Dick Lester’s 1965 The Knack is one of many instances), but for Dankworth’s suggestively sleazy accompaniment. Vera, with her hair bouncily ‘done’ runs to greet Barrett (a high shot); skips down the steps of St Pancras Station (a mid-shot allowing us to take in this landmark location); chews on a sweetie bar as she trippingly leans this way and that, agog to take in all the new sights from the back of a taxi (a two shot with Barrett finding her hand comfortably back on his knee – she’s affirming her ‘readiness’ from the phone-box call, a similarly confessional space – ‘I’ve bought something new … I’m wearing it now’). Finally, point-of-view shots convey Vera’s voracious curiosity for the delights of the house – including Tony’s bathroom and the flowers in the maid’s bedroom, seemingly (less sweetly) placed by Barrett. Levity and rusticity is introduced, temporarily. Menace remains in the details. Losey entrusted Mills with the complex task of managing the internal aural and visual cuts between a series of lunch dates in Macdonald’s studio-built restaurant, alongside the introduction of Vera. Tony and Susan form one couple, already known to the film’s viewer and apparently habituées of Au Jardin des Gourmets (she is greeted to her reserved table as Miss Stewart), here, apparently, transposing a ‘Kensington’ aspect of Soho to Kensington proper.56 Losey invited Ann Firbank (initially a candidate for the role of Susan, subsequently cast in Accident) to partner Pinter, as actor, as ‘society couple’: Pinter coolly and urbanely refers to a mutual friend being in prison, before turning his attention to his girlfriend (who evidently dresses for lunch).57 He proceeds to sit sideways on, nonchalantly smoking and observing his partner, as she smokes and nibbles at her food (shot in profile, behind Tony and Susan). His mind is not on her conversational skills. ‘Really … pity’, he intermittently drawls, suavely, leaning one elbow, just to show that he is paying a modicum of attention, as she relates the difficulty of getting or not getting into gorgeous somethings (I assume clothes but she might have said

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 57

T H E S E RVA N T

anything as far as he cares), as snatches of dialogue are allowed to be overheard: ambient evesdropping. Doris Knox and Jill Melford were brought in to play an antagonistically paired lesbian couple, with Dawson supplying complementary, tailored, flatly coloured costumes: the older woman’s suit cross-buttoned to the throat, accessorised with Arrival of the ingénue

57

Sargeant Ch2

58

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 58

BFI FILM CLASSICS

a wide ribboned cloche; the younger woman in lapelled jacket and buttoned-up blouse, with a broad-brimmed straw boater, narrowly trimmed. The older woman digs into and stirs a shared bowl with the table salad servers as she continues, spitefully, to interrogate the younger over the attentions of a potential or imagined rival. Sparring couples at Au Jardin des Gourmets

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 59

T H E S E RVA N T

Dankworth provided a jaunty Celtic jig motif for the arrival of a similarly contending pair of Irish clerics. Losey called upon Alun Owen (writer of Losey’s 1960 The Criminal) and Patrick Magee (who appeared in The Criminal) as a favour. The senior (Owen), with a slight remonstrative glance, bids his junior (Magee) behind him as they head through the doubly beaded doorway together, reminding him that rank needs must be obeyed here, too. This pushy upstart needs to learn to show deference in order to secure advancement. Deference (‘Your Grace’) needs must be shown for hierarchy to be maintained; the ambitious young priest needs must win approval for his advancement (both grace and favour). Magee and Owen evidently enjoy their mildly comic, cameo performances, raising, glugging and downing their brandy glasses in unison after a hearty lunch (the junior priest matches his superior and is evidently a senior in the making), having convivially gossiped over the excesses of fellow clerics at previous convocations. The older of the couple exercises his prerogative as superintendent of his junior (perhaps with the benefit of his own knowledge of such matters), asking after his contender’s afternoon appointments: ‘and where will you be off to now?’. The country mouse, once let loose in town, will play. Coincidentally, having enquired after Tony’s health and happy to see him (a pathetic figure rather than comic), Susan prodding her food with a fork, informs Tony of her anxieties about Barrett: ‘I just don’t trust him.’ Tony, in Woosterish mode (adapting a phrase from Maugham), admits that ‘he looks like a fish with red lips’ but resents Susan’s hurtful questioning of his judgment: they have sparred, even if Susan is prepared, for the time being, to admit that she is, just ‘perhaps’, getting ‘things’ out of proportion. Susan suggests a trip away together and Tony takes this opportunity to extend an invitation from the Mounsets to enjoy a country weekend, where they can be together, without Barrett. ‘Damn awful lunch,’ he tetchily reports to Barrett, on his return home, and promptly, as indulgent as the priests on holiday, orders a brandy (duly served up and heavily foregrounded). Tony has listened in his conversation with Susan but

59

Sargeant Ch2

60

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 60

BFI FILM CLASSICS

does not care for what he has heard. He is at least offended (if not troubled) by what she says. Barrett responds – meanwhile expediently performing the servile hand-washing gesture given by Barrie to Crichton – and asks if ‘I might introduce my sister to you, Sir?’.58 Tony’s first meeting with Vera is duly postponed for The Servant’s audience – a pause. This interlude, generously subsidised by the restaurant (Susan and Tony gratefully brandish their menus to camera so that there can be no mistaking Losey’s host) serves, incidentally, superficially, as a quiet form of product placement. But the dialogue bartered between the other couples in the restaurant, inserted into the conversation An introduction postponed: Barrett announces Vera’s arrival

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 61

T H E S E RVA N T

exchanged between Susan and Tony, is simultaneously pitched (by Pinter and Mills) to serve as some sort of commentary on the shifting ménage in the house. The interlude may be staged outside the house but it is not a diversion from affairs therein. For Tony it affords little relief. The kitchen Despite the enthusiasm for ‘hands-on’ cooking expressed by Elizabeth David, the kitchen remains an alien realm for Tony. Linen tea towels (to which Tony is generally a stranger) hang drying on a string stretched over an Aga or Rayburn decked with scrubbed copper pans and a kettle. This is the servant’s domain, his den, and his butler’s pantry from which (like Stevens in Remains of the Day) he manages household operations and affairs. We never get inside Barrett’s room on the upper floor, only snatching a glimpse before it becomes his room, when he is obliged to leave, and when (reinstated) he is confronted by Tony with a floorcloth (as strange to Tony as a tea towel, and equally an infringement of propriety). What we see of Barrett’s room is not pleasant; not only does the camera not explore the room, we are not made to feel invited to see the room. Barrett’s taste in paintings is primitive (one makes its way downstairs after his reinstatement – he thereby makes his mark) and the wallpaper loud. In the kitchen, Barrett can be at ease, assuming himself to be unwatched: we see him with his feet up, enthroned in a chair with layers of paint almost obliterating an inscription commemorating a once significant national event: a mass-produced souvenir as opposed to the ‘unique’ items of furniture distributed elsewhere in the house: a chair very like the one in which he was first interviewed and possibly the same (at one point it makes its way into the conservatory, one of a number of the film’s props that migrate their way around the fabricated house). In the kitchen, Barrett pulls on a bottle of beer, draws on a fag and tosses aside the ‘dinky’ white gloves (Pinter had archly indicated the equally camp ‘chi-chi’) condescendingly suggested by Barrett as a mark of willing servitude. In the kitchen,

61

Sargeant Ch2

62

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 62

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Vera, too, with Barrett descending the service steps, casts aside her frilled gingham apron, langourously lights a cigarette and rasps the box of matches out of her way before hitching her skirt and hoisting herself onto the table. Barrett gulps a mug of tea then draws a leather-gloved hand roughly across his mouth before going down on Vera. Barrett snatches the cigarette from her mouth. She throws back her head, opening her mouth wide in laughter and ecstasy, exhaling smoke into Barrett’s face. On the matter of skirts: the weave of Vera’s is modestly pinstriped, an appropriate match to the uniform of a male servant, even of a civil servant. So far, so good. If anything, it is inappropriately immodestly cut too tightly (notwithstanding the skirt’s side slits), in stretchy fabric (I suspect, here again, the presence of nylon) rather than too short, exaggerating the swing of her hips as she sashays, with calculated ease, around kitchen and bedroom furniture (she’s less assured in her clumsy handling of a tray on the stairs). But Pinter is surely addressing an issue of contemporaneous debate, as witnessed by the vox-pops at the opening of The Knack, ‘girls’ legs up all down the road’. ‘The Chelsea Girl’, of course, led

Dinky white gloves on (dining room); Dinky white gloves off (kitchen)

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 63

T H E S E RVA N T

the charge, with Mary Quant launching her first shop, Bazaar, on the King’s Road in 1955 and her trademark miniskirts securing recognition and imitation in the early 1960s. ‘Terribly Chelsea I thought I was,’ at twenty, says an already retrospective Diana (Julie Christie) in voiceover in Darling (John Schlesinger, 1965). The theatre critic, Milton Schulman, in his contribution to Len Deighton’s 1967 London Dossier, enthused: In Chelsea, girls in their breath-taking short skirts, their outrageous dresses inspired by anything from Art Nouveau to the Union Jack, their mad stockings and kinky boots, their oblivious acceptance of stares of stunned, gasping males, are so tantalising and so beautiful that any account of entertainment in London must inevitably give them pride of place. … Sociologists and historians will no doubt soon be offering academic explanations for this explosion of fashion and frivolity.59

Vera tentatively tells Tony that all the girls are wearing skirts short – even shorter than the flappy skirts worn by the girls – one in fishnet stockings – at the phone box whom Barrett (here flatcapped) Vera ‘above stairs’; Vera ‘below stairs’

63

Sargeant Ch2

64

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 64

BFI FILM CLASSICS

misogynistically abuses as ‘filthy’ bitches – he doesn’t like women; he likes what he can use women for; he does relish sex. The point is that skirt lengths, appropriated by young women in the 1960s as a sign of liberation, have been perpetually interpreted by men as a token of looseness and availability. Barrett need hardly remind Tony that he is none too modern, but remind him he does, drawing attention to his ‘sister’s’ skirts in case Tony has failed to notice for himself. By contrast, Susan’s woolly daytime city skirt (I suspect Hebe or some approximation) is flatteringly panelled and boxpleated, easing her own comfort and mobility, her ski pants sensible if quietly fashionable, and her evening dress entirely appropriate but demurely Tony ‘below stairs’ with Vera in that skirt (again)

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 65

T H E S E RVA N T

inaccessible: her extensive wardrobe is governed by propriety to each and every occasion and a proper presentation of her own person. We never see above her knees (or below her shoulders). Vera, groomed and encouraged by Barrett, is somewhat ahead of the game and persists with the same skirt. Vera, too, bothers to ask Tony whether he thinks her skirt too short. Vera discomforts Tony and does not disappoint his expectations. Long before Tony’s coupling with Vera in the kitchen, Tony has Vera on his mind – Barrett (and Vera) have managed it so. Vera’s nakedness is planted in the master’s bathroom for Tony to find, along with her advertently, wantonly, cast aside skirt (that skirt) and underwear. Her protestation a mere moment later that she is wrapped in a towel only serves to draw attention to the nakedness beneath (Vera is a fausse naïve – no innocent – however much she is the tool of Barrett). She has leant closely across Tony’s bare torso, serving him breakfast in bed at 10.00 in the morning, belatedly drawing aside the elaborately festooned drapes to allow in the sunshine: the heavy chimes of the church clock, outside, echoes a tinkling clock closer to hand, slightly out of kilter. Tony (a schoolboy eager for a pampered

Vera, naked, in Tony’s bathroom

65

Sargeant Ch2

66

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 66

BFI FILM CLASSICS

lie-in in the sick-bay) seems oblivious to his nakedness, tucking the top sheet, like a bib, up to his armpits; Vera, fingering the tableware and slinkily circumnavigating his bed (meanwhile casting Susan’s gift into a corner), certainly is not. As the crudely cut-out magazine pictures of body-builders in her bedroom attest, Vera’s appetite is simple and straightforward. At night, at Nick’s Diner, thinking that Vera and Barrett are away in Manchester to visit their sick mother (‘it’s touch and go, Sir’), Tony is served by a waitress whose loose, relaxed, dank hair (as opposed to Susan’s blonde and consistently maintained coiffure), dark polo sweater and gingham apron with frilled pockets, remind him of Vera. A guitarist strums and sings ‘Take me baby, to your big brass bed … till my face turns cherry red … rock me darling one more time before you go’, the lyric underscoring Tony’s current and pressing preoccupation and casting Vera as primitive and natural (an antidote to the elliptical, cultured sophistication of Susan). Tony has drunk at the Diner, but not eaten (although he has previously, peevishly, informed Barrett that he would prefer a hot supper to the cold buffet proposed), lights a cigarette and walks home, to a reprise of Vera’s theme tune. He collects the mail, goes into the kitchen (a borrowed or reclaimed domain, in Barrett’s absence) and smoothly, idly, drags a newspaper across the table (echoing the rasp of Vera’s matchbox). He draws a glass of water, then turns, leaving the tap dripping loudly. Vera’s arrival is announced by a close-up of her legs on the utilitarian black-and-white chequered floor: in anticipation and preparedness, she perches and swivels on the balls of her bare feet. Tony is alarmed. She nervously volunteers that she has heard a noise – and, questioned by Tony as to her not being in Manchester with Barrett, she says that he sent her back because she felt unwell at the station – but can confidently assert that, ‘Oh, yes, he went’. Vera withholds information from Tony (as in, subsequently, ‘his room’s dark’) while answering and reporting to Barrett. Vera lies by way of brief emissions of blatant honesty, while Tony is susceptible to a more complicated and compromised apprehension of Barrett: of Barrett as Vera’s guardian and older ‘brother’ (Vera neither confirms

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 67

T H E S E RVA N T

nor denies this); of Barrett as witness to his attachment to Susan; of Barrett, perhaps, already as his own ideal companion and, perhaps already, sado-masochistic object of desire. Needless to say, the task of first move falls to Vera and Tony proves an easy conquest. Whereas Susan is playing for a materially and mutually advantageous marriage (one sort of catch of house and home), Vera, in the kitchen (habitually a place for the transformation of raw food into cooked dishes for delivery elsewhere) is pure sex on legs (and Tony is a pretty desirable dish – another sort of catch). Vera, Miles has observed, was one in a long line of ‘fuckable objects’ in which she found herself cast.60 Vera again hitches up that skirt and

Barrett suspects that his plan has been accomplished; (Next page) Barrett’s suspicions are confirmed

67

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 68

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 69

Sargeant Ch2

70

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 70

BFI FILM CLASSICS

lightly hops onto the table, drawing her knees sideways and together – at once, demurely submissive (passive) and provocative (aggressive). Her prerogative is abetted by her being more familiar with this room and the goings-on it has witnessed than is Tony (she’s used, not least, to those tea towels hanging in the background) and accustomed to the terrain (she does not have to be persuaded): ‘I didn’t fancy being alone … by myself … in this house,’ she says, encouragingly. The vast kitchen light shade, mid-frame, illuminates her entire, compact body: the shape of a softly folded, furry animal, wanting to be stroked. The phone rings. Tony does not answer. In close-up, he’s already looking rather queasy and worse for wear. Vera’s eyes, kittenishly made-up with liner and heavily mascared lashes, slide to the phone and back to Tony; she smiles, slithering her tongue and exposing her teeth. The ringing stops. She has won, already, but to secure her prey she slaps her bare tummy, under her jumper, and comments that the room is hot, slipping into an uncultivated, natural, vernacular (using an accent acquired for Peter Glenville’s 1962 Term of Trial): ‘int it hot in here, int it’, feigning collapse (her final cover should her advance be rejected but simultaneously a prompt to Tony who needs little encouragement) – before reaching a hand to Tony’s face, without looking at him. Tony will subsequently, in the drawing room, ask a shivering Vera if she is feeling ‘cold’ – and proffer a tipple – while we may suspect that Vera’s tremors are prompted more by sexual excitement. Tony has long since lost control of the situation below stairs but makes one last ditch attempt, in the kitchen, at asserting his authority and position as master: ‘You’re skirt’s too short,’ he says, a comment all the more pathetic for being instigated by Barrett. Tony’s moral descent is accompanied by his keeping company with Barrett and Vera in the bowels of the house (he moves into his servants’ quarters in response to his servants’ invasion of his rightful territory – on both sides a boundary has been irretrievably crossed). The windows of a house, as Beatriz Colomina reminds us, are its eyes on the exterior world, just as mirrors, in The Servant, grant a privileged view of its interior.61 Increasingly, Tony (like the victimised

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 71

T H E S E RVA N T

protagonist in Roman Polanski’s 1965 Repulsion – another émigré’s, ‘outsider’s’ view of London) closes his eyes and the eyes of the house to the city around him. After Barrett’s return, Tony passes time in the kitchen with the blinds doubly drawn during the day: he says that he wouldn’t mind going for a walk – it must be nice outside (more beckoning calls of children) – but fails to summon the energy to get out. Inside, it’s stifling, Tony disregarding Susan’s advice that he needs ‘more air’ and her initially gentle reprimand that he doesn’t know what is good for him. Literally and metaphorically, the schoolchildren and their lives, timetabled between regulation and liberation, pass over his head. Barrett has secured him against the prying or even concerned eyes of neighbours and blanked out any curiosity Tony may have for the actual, diurnal world. Conspicuously, despite their abundance, mirrors in the house are not placed to reflect the external world into the interior of the house. Weekends with the Mounsets Chiswick House, built in the late 1720s for the English champion of Palladian architecture, the Earl of Burlington, served Macdonald and The Mounsets’ country pile

71

Sargeant Ch2

72

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 72

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Losey as the location for the country house to which Tony and Susan escape for weekends. Tony, a very ersatz latterday Burlington, has meanwhile been seen tinkering with his own designs for his miniscule urban plot. A long, stately, panning shot from the grounds of Chiswick takes in an expansive vista of well-kept lawns under a smooth carpet of snow, ancient trees, topiary, old obelisks, outbuildings and the horizontal span of the house. The Mounsets’ rank – their aristocratic wealth and provenance – is further established in the interior: decks of oil paintings on Classical themes (‘pre-historic’ as Susan says of Tony’s family heirlooms – ‘We’ve always had it and I like it,’ he replies, defensively, of one particular bequest), ornate gilded swags and yet more statuary and antique porphery vases. Dankworth ushers in the action with a bright, staccato saxophone, strings and percussion fanfare. Centre frame, the Mounsets’ butler, bearing a tray of cut glass tumblers and a decanter, opens then closes heavy double mahogany Tony tinkering with designs for his urban plot

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 73

T H E S E RVA N T

doors on a static tableau. In the central room of Burlington’s tripartite gallery, Lord Mounset, at ease in a three-piece tailored suit, leans on a chair with one leg crossed over the other, nonchalantly striking an attitude in imitation of the figure in a niche, behind him to his right. The figure is neo-Classical, thereby drawn from the Ancients (a long provenance), the sculpture a cast from a copy. At his side sits his Lady (in a dark fitted dress, lace shawl and a triple-stringed necklace), politely occupying herself with an embroidery frame: ‘fancy sewing’, as Amanda Vickery notes, ‘was one of the few activities that could be performed in company without reproach’ by society women in the eighteenth century.62 Tony (a junior aristocrat – likewise a derivative copy of a copy – in checked tweed jacket, cavalry twill trews, perhaps a Viyella shirt and a chunkier knitted cardigan and tie than worn in town), meanwhile, lounges with an arm thrown behind his head. Susan, in herringbone tweed and ribbed poloneck, stands against a fluted pilaster looking out at the grounds – her posture reflecting that of the figure in a niche to the left of Lord Mounset. For the costume film The Gypsy and the Gentleman, Losey’s art director (assisted by Macdonald) and cinematographer had referred to Thomas Rowlandson’s prints. Thomas Gainsborough portraits, I suggest,

Thomas Gainsborough, Mr and Mrs Andrews, © National Gallery, London

73

Sargeant Ch2

74

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 74

BFI FILM CLASSICS

provided a source to Macdonald and Losey for the Chiswick ensemble of husband and wife in The Servant – I am thinking, for instance, of Mr and Mrs Andrews (c. 1750), which sets its patrons against an agriculturally cultivated and harvested landscape to which their wealth and status can be attributed.63 The conversation, here, is somewhat stilted. Tony, the orphaned boy, beams his ‘pleasant, insignificant face’ up at Lord Mounset, a substitute patrician figure. He proudly enthuses, yet again, over the hypothetical Brazilian project. The construction of Brasilia, a utopian modernist city, built on a vast expanse of cleared jungle, was realised Tony: a ‘beamish boy’

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 75

T H E S E RVA N T

in the early 1960s and provides an actual contemporary parallel – concrete in both senses of the word – for Tony’s mere pipe dream.64 Susan, who by now knows the script from memory, affectionately, teasingly, prompts Tony in the delivery of his much-rehearsed lines: no less than three cities are proposed, she trills. She knows that this is a ‘cosy’ relationship (one for which he has not worked) and a comfortable excuse for his continuing indolence; she indulges (while disapproving) his claim to a ‘rest’ he neither needs nor deserves. A complicit exchanged glance between Susan and Tony (there is even the ghost of a snigger) bonds the couple as Susan graciously allows herself to be corrected by the Mounsets on the matter of ponchos.

A happy couple

75

Sargeant Ch2

76

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 76

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Susan may already know that the poncho (not a cowboy) was to become a staple fashion item of the 1960s. Evidently, a girlhood spent in the country she archaically calls the Argentine may well have proved superficially ‘fascinating’ for Lady Mounset, but she has left it sadly ignorant of its people. Susan may be a lady – even a Lady (the brooch worn high on her dark tailored cocktail dress at the cabaret gives her the air, at least, of an erstwhile debutante) – but is also young; Tony may be a fogey, but he is young, too. On a later visit to the Mounsets, playing in the snow, Tony and Susan seem at their happiest. Their hosts, the old duffers, have installed the pair separately and Susan wonders why Tony did not come to her room the previous night – ‘There’s a wonderful view,’ she gushes. Not least from those unanswered, appointed phone calls, Susan may realise intuitively that Tony is already partially lost to her: Dankworth’s fanfare is repeated at a slower pace. Tony responds to her initiative and suggests that they cut the weekend short and return to their house, the house in London. The master bedroom: a door unbolted Since Vitruvius (active in the first century BC), Classical architectural decorum has dictated that respectable town houses and their rooms be disposed, differentiated and decorated in accordance with their function and the station of their occupants: ‘The proper form of economy must be observed in building houses for each and every class’; ‘Bedrooms and libraries ought to have an eastern exposure, because their purposes require the morning light.’ After settling the positions of the rooms with regard to the quarters of the sky, we must next consider the principles on which should be constructed those apartments in private houses which are meant for the householders themselves, and those which are to be shared in common with outsiders. The private rooms are those into which nobody has the right to enter without an invitation, such as bedrooms, dining rooms, bathrooms and all others used for the like purposes.65

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 77

T H E S E RVA N T

Furthermore, it has been deemed proper, following Classical precedent, that external display complement internal distribution. Neo-Classical derivatives place the more important rooms at the front, with the lower and servicing quarters relegated towards the back, the basement and the attic. On acquiring the house, Tony takes upon himself the responsibility to put it into good order (by repairing its fabric) and to restore order (by establishing a correctly differentiated hierarchy). Tony’s sumptuous front bedroom, facing north east, benefits from the light and air granted by its elevation to the first floor, even while Tony proves himself oblivious to the call of dawn and remains content to insulate himself behind layers of heavy drapery: the flattened balconies of the house are, here, functionally superfluous. As he has no use for books, it matters little to him that his ‘library’, contravening the advice of Vitruvius, faces south west (although, in truth, the advice of Vitruvius was not directed at London, where the light from whichever direction can prove dingey for much of the year). Tony’s bedroom is accorded an appropriately higher ceiling than his dressing room and bathroom. Barrett’s back bedroom is smaller in groundplan, cursorily decorated and furnished

Vera summoned from her attic … to that chair

77

Sargeant Ch2

78

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 78

BFI FILM CLASSICS

and yet lower in height; Vera is granted a fittingly yet smaller boxroom, horizontally matchboarded in deal, smaller still and set off to one side, with a high window allowing her a view only of the sky. Vera may be temporarily installed on the same top-floor level of the house as Barrett, but she is clearly hierarchically perched (as maid) below him (as manservant) in the pecking order of this ‘cage’. Even her brass bedstead is less fancy than his. Arriving back at the house with Susan after their second weekend away, after Tony has referred to ‘our room at the house’, Tony notices the bedroom lights on, checks his watch (it is 11.45) and swerves his car to the pavement. Susan and Tony may fear burglars; the truth may be worse.Vera has not only not bolted the door but Barrett has disclaimed his responsibility to ensure the door’s bolting. Again, centre frame, Barrett comes between Susan and Tony, the shadow of his naked body looming over the banisters above them as they stand on the threshold, frightened in their own domain. Susan averts her gaze; Vera calls Barrett back to bed (‘I’m all rosy’). Susan asks Tony if he knew ‘this’ was going on – ‘in your room … in your bed’ – and urges him to act decisively, to assert his mastery of the house and to reclaim Confrontation

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 79

T H E S E RVA N T

the bed intended for Susan but now despoiled and usurped by the servants. We have seen Susan tending to Tony in his bed; we have seen Vera tending over Tony in bed; we have seen Tony bedding Vera outside his bed; we have not, as yet, seen Susan in bed with Tony. Their presumedly promised and shared inner sanctum has been invaded and violated. This is yet another test to which Tony proves hardly adequate, compromised in his authority over his servants by his failure in so many previous snares and trials laid in his way. His presumption of command, at Susan’s behest, now smacks of desperation and Barrett’s response is suitably mocking. While Susan demands that Tony prove himself man enough by rising to the test, Barrett attempts to exclude Susan by asking to speak with Tony privately, man to man. At the departure of Hugo and Vera, Tony’s immediate response is to pour himself a drink and switch on the record player. His invitation to Susan to ‘come to bed’ can but elicit revulsion. With Vera’s garish rendition of the Wedding March overlaying the (diegetic) Laine song and Dankworth’s (non-diegetic) Vera theme intervening on the soundtrack, The Servant’s audience may well wonder to whom the invitation is addressed: which woman or which attachment does he most miss?

Barrett is summoned to answer for his actions

79

Sargeant Ch2

80

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 80

BFI FILM CLASSICS

At the dénouement of the film, to mark the imposition of Barrett’s will on the house and its master, Macdonald re-covered Tony’s dressing room with a dark, subtly figured William Morris paper. Although Morris enjoyed a fashionable revival in the 1960s (not least through the efforts of Betjeman and his cohort at the Victorian Society), this matt surface contributes (together with candles – as previously evident over suppers – a magic lantern and the madame’s flamboyant hat and elbow-length gloves) towards an atmosphere, at once Gothic and fin de siècle, surrounding Tony’s demise: as much Hell Fire Club as Cliveden. Macdonald manages to convey decadence rather than contemporaneity or resuscitation. Only

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 81

T H E S E RVA N T

one photograph, previously seen reflected as Tony preens himself in his dressing room mirror, seemingly survives Barrett’s furniture shifting and wall and ceiling papering onslaught, perhaps meant as a studio portrait of Tony himself in a now lost and, perhaps mourned, previous existence. Barrett’s cruder interventions in the décor of the house include a particularly tacky drinks trolley, which migrates upstairs from downstairs. Barrett coarsely and brusquely thrusts a brandy glass at Susan, cackling ‘D’you want one, love – eh?’ and, blowing smoke in her face, ‘Want a fag?’. Barrett’s obsequious use of ‘Sir’ and ‘Mister Tony’ is now dropped, as he proceeds to maul his master’s face and sarcastically taunts ‘Tone’ with a trip to Brazil in the morning (Tony will be going nowhere other than in fantasy). The madame’s ‘Where’s that Tony?’ suggests that this is not her first visit and Barrett’s ‘one yesterday; one tonight’ that Tony has become promiscuous. In a desperate attempt to provoke Tony to act in the here and now, to save himself and their relationship, Susan flinchingly kisses Barrett, who then triumphantly seizes her and locks her to him. But Tony’s stumbling and blinking attempts to take command elicit nothing but laughter from the dull-eyed girl (whom

One dull-eyed girl in a pub … reappears to witness Tony’s demise

81

Sargeant Ch2

82

20/6/11

2:05 pm

Page 82

BFI FILM CLASSICS

we have previously encountered as a distraction in the first pub episode – a second girl awaits attention in the pub in Fulham) and her companions. The mocking laughter of women and servants thus marks Tony’s final humiliation. Recognising a spoiling of the atmosphere, and that, for now, enough has been accomplished already, Barrett chivvies out the women – and Susan, too, but not Vera – instructing the madame to return tomorrow and to ‘bring John’. This may suggest that the homosocial regime enforced by Barrett has encouraged an appetite in Tony for homosexual liaisons – or, at least, that ‘John’ is to be used, like Vera, as some sort of instrument in Barrett’s plans for his master’s demise. In contrast to Tony’s dopey bleariness, Susan confronts Barrett with a level and measured stare, fingering her cabochon bracelet, before determinedly cuffing him. With one hand to his wounded face, Barrett responds by gently, deferentially, placing Susan’s jacket across her shoulder. While willing and all too readily achieving vengeance on his

Barrett, dominant; (Opposite page) Barrett, cuffed

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:06 pm

Page 83

Sargeant Ch2

84

20/6/11

2:06 pm

Page 84

BFI FILM CLASSICS

master by accomplishing his downfall (the master offering little resistance to his own subjugation), Barrett yet desires to be dominated. Stairs and landings Apart from enlargening the ‘house’ (adding rooms) and its rooms in the reconstructed studio set, to accommodate cameras and crew, the greatest liberty taken by Macdonald and Losey for The Servant was with the staircase. The stairwell is not simply relegated to secondary circulation space, merely linking master and servant quarters, but is accorded its own status, as room in its own right, a shared space, ending as a trap at the top (Vera’s attic bedroom) and another trap, at the bottom (the basement kitchen). Mills ably cut Macdonald’s construction of an additional straight flight of stairs to the attic (apparently behind the alcoved wall). A stairwell (created by editing) becomes a vertical slot in the nominal house, opposing the horizontal layering and social stratification of its floors. Waterston’s camera, meanwhile, sweepingly articulates the arrangement of ground and basement floors as coherent slabs. By generously wrapping a continuous stair around a double storey well curvilinearly rather than squashing runs of stairs rectilinearly, Macdonald and Losey radiated rooms from a vantage point in the hallway. Vera, in robe, is thus summoned to face the camera in the dining room mirror as she arrives at the foot of the stairs. Furthermore, this curvilinear arrangement enhances the facility with which characters are allowed to spy on the affairs of others, aurally and visually. Barrett sees Susan move her flowers from the landing into Tony’s room; Barrett opens Tony’s bathroom door to hear the front door close to be sure that he can join Vera with Tony safely out of the way (while the cat’s away the mice will play). On the soundtrack, offstage, at the very end of the film, Vera’s distinctive nervous giggle rattles through the hallway from above. The stairwell, as a self-contained space rather than simply a secondary connecting space, is further reiterated in the games which Barrett and Tony play after their reconciliation: in the absence of women, the men revert to

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:06 pm

Page 85

T H E S E RVA N T

boyhood, but a boyhood still compromised (there is nothing natural in this house). The ball game seems to be an obscure variation, of the boys’ own devising, on Eton Fives.66 They score points against each other by the rules (13:10; 14:12), blame the ‘court’ (Barrett is at a disadvantage having to play, on this occasion, uphill against Tony) and plead to the gentlemanly rules of ‘fair play’ (Barrett says that he wasn’t ready, Tony says that he has called service and judges one of Barrett’s shots a bit wild). A broken statue in an alcove goes unheeded. The hurling of abuse is another form of point scoring, with Barrett telling Tony that he has grown into a ‘fat pig’ and reminding Macdonald’s wrapping stairwell

85

Sargeant Ch2

86

20/6/11

2:06 pm

Page 86

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Tony what he has done for him (washing his pants) and his house (its fixing and management). As Jonathan Swift once observed, all games are a form of fighting, and this engagement ends with Barrett spitting that he is nobody’s servant, with Tony weakly admitting that he could not cope without him, and Barrett ordering Tony downstairs to fetch him a brandy. Likewise, although ostensibly matched in egalitarian and uniform manner, Tony is dressed for the game in the striped shirt in which he has tentatively made love to Susan, while Barrett is dressed in the checked shirt in which Vera has more explicitly coupled with Tony. The stairwell decisively marks shifts in the circumstances of the master/servant relationship: Tony desperately, pathetically, bounds up to Barrett’s attic room with an unfamiliar floorcloth in hand (wetting it in the servants’ bathroom), demanding that Barrett clean up tea dregs on the carpet in the drawing room below. But violence will get him nowhere, says Barrett. Barrett asserts that he is a

Tony reminds Barrett that cleaning is his job

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:06 pm

Page 87

T H E S E RVA N T

gentleman’s gentleman – and Tony is no gentleman. The hierarchy of floors has been disrupted and barriers have been crossed (Tony now goes to Barrett rather than shouting for him from floors above or below). Barrett diminishes Tony by laughing him off, snortingly dismissing him as merely ‘funny’. Tony has become the object of an elaborate joke executed by Barrett. Tony has failed yet another test. In the boys’ game of hide and seek, Tony’s hiding place is betrayed to us before he is discovered by Barrett. We see him in profile, his nose distended, Pinocchio-like, as a curtain wafts to and fro. The countdown once completed, Barrett’s voice is cajoling then taunting: Hide and seek

87

Sargeant Ch2

88

20/6/11

2:06 pm

Page 88

BFI FILM CLASSICS

‘Puss pussy puss … you’re hiding … getting warm … you’ve got a guilty secret … I’m coming to get you … I can smell a rat … I … can … smell … a … rat.’ The scene ends with the shower curtain wrenched aside and Tony discovered in his ‘little lair’, an even smaller space within Tony’s smallest room. The bathroom walls have, by now, lost the spartan pallor of an earlier scene, an earlier test (in which Vera invades this private territory at Barrett’s instigation) failed, their darkness tokening more sybaritic pleasures. Water drips from the mouth of a fish-shaped tap, recalling the kitchen tap in Vera’s seduction of Tony. But, this time, a quaking Tony gnaws his hand in abject fear, intimidated in the privacy of his own house. Penelope Gilliatt, in her Observer review of The Servant, made an apposite comparison with James’ The Turn of the Screw: the child Miles’ crime is all the more horrific for remaining unnamed;67 we do not need to find out Tony’s secret. All we need to appreciate is his intense fear at its being found out. Barrett’s pandering to his every need and whim has rendered Barrett privy to Tony’s intimate ‘secrets’ – perhaps uncovered the secrets of childhood – and thereby rendered Tony vulnerable. It is in the stairwell that The Servant’s viewer is most forcefully made aware of the physical and strategic transformation of the house, in marked, successive stages. Slocombe’s lighting (increasingly looming shadows preceding and accompanying the boys’ games) was coupled to Macdonald’s decorative scheme: [Losey] was at great pains to describe the necessity for different moods in the picture to go with the different phases in the disintegration of the house: at the beginning it is an empty shell, it’s cold and has no personality; then it’s suddenly painted and beautified; then it gradually rots; and then at the end it takes on a completely new personality, it’s partially repainted, it has black ceilings and a gaudy, meretricious look in everything.68

Fresh flowers in bright cut glassware vases in the hallway, reflecting light from the window above the door (the second phase) are duly replaced by dull, dark, earthenware jars containing dry twigs (requiring

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:06 pm

Page 89

T H E S E RVA N T

little maintenance but nevertheless unmaintained), with Tony’s unanswered post accumulating on the hall floor (the third phase). Macdonald’s décor marks not only Tony’s decline (matched by the interior surfaces and fittings of the house) but also Barrett’s usurpation of his master’s privileges. At the second encounter, Tony (in a different city coat with matching waistcoat), leading Barrett (in the same lumpy coat plus ghastly nylon scarf as seen previously) through a tour of the estate, confidently voices a conservative preference for ‘white … with perhaps a touch of blue … but white Tony conclusively caged-in

89

Sargeant Ch2

90

20/6/11

2:06 pm

Page 90

BFI FILM CLASSICS

overall ’. Barrett counters with mandarin red and fuchsia ‘a very chic combination this year’, an affectation intended to suggest that he is au fait with current trends in polite circles (we can assume that he, like Susan, but perhaps for more ulterior ends, bothers to acquaint himself with Vogue and House and Garden – but neither is a disinterested party). Such ‘brilliant’ colours were, indeed, recommended to style aficionados in the early 1960s.69 Tony wobbles slightly – ‘but not all over, surely?’ – and Barrett, uninterruptedly continuing the conversation as Tony proceeds upwards, taps the handrail behind Tony’s back, as if acknowledging that only by compromise and patience will he get his own way – this time around. Superficially, this exchange reverses the relationship of Jeeves to Wooster, with the former forever encouraging conservatism against eccentricism and vagary in his young master’s risibly inappropriate choice of dress: Jeeves is the upholder of established decorum (the simple and classic) over Wooster’s idiosyncratic and wayward choices, which Wooster repeatedly and unsuccessfully attempts to retain as some vestige of independence. More significantly, this exchange in The Servant betrays, albeit momentarily, that Tony (like

Preliminary sketch for the drawing room: BFI Special Collections – Designs, Accession No. 21670

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:06 pm

Page 91

T H E S E RVA N T

Wooster) is susceptible to guidance and moulding. Jeeves exerts and sustains power over Wooster through his vetting and repression of his master’s wardrobe; Barrett through his influence over the decoration and furnishing of his master’s house. The darkness of the stair niches in the later phases of Macdonald’s décor suggest that, in The Servant, worse than mandarin red and fuchsia eventually hold sway. The stairwell outlines the film, from Barrett’s first enquiring upwards glance, leaning on the hallway newell post, to his final ascent (accompanied by a dissonant, tortured version of the opening theme) with his hand shown in close-up, lingeringly trailing a finger along the handrail’s smooth surface. The close-up creepily recalls the game of hide and seek: both menacing and seductive. This handrail was the subject of much concern in correspondence between Losey and Macdonald and was a tour de force for the Shepperton chippies and painters, who managed to sustain not only an even sweep carried Construction drawing for the staircase: BFI Special Collections – Designs, Accession No. 21674

91

Sargeant Ch2

92

20/6/11

2:06 pm

Page 92

BFI FILM CLASSICS

through curved landings but also to produce a finish which delivered the required impression of the longevity of the house: It must look like the most perfect Edwardian mahogany woodwork seasoned through many generations of polishing, even though it has only recently been restored. Nothing short of perfection in finishing is acceptable in this shot or any point where one is close in on the bannister.70

The uniformly darkly shining handrail defines the stairwell as a virtual single space, linking the house top to bottom. It stands as a

The return of Vera

Sargeant Ch2

20/6/11

2:06 pm

Page 93

T H E S E RVA N T

mute witness to Barrett’s antecedents, while the portraits in the drawing room may stand for Tony’s antecedents. Tony’s restoration of the house (his setting it in order) may also be construed as his setting it back. Once over the threshold himself, Barrett (performing the duties of Loam’s footman), becomes its guardian: ‘He’s got to lock up,’ says Tony to Susan, before Vera catastrophically (for Tony) fails to strike the bolts. Barrett resolutely, triumphantly slams the door with his back, after the altercation with Susan over the flowers. Again, the viewer is privy to information or implication of which Tony is unaware: Barrett’s sarcastic observation (‘the weather forecast’); his dismissal of Vera when she returns to plead with the master, her former lover. Barrett’s ‘Get back to your ponce’ is shouted from the hallway more for the benefit of Tony (offstage in the drawing room), than for Vera: Barrett’s arm wrapped around the door as a stop suggests that he may, indeed, be kissing her goodnight after handing her her rain-drenched hat. In other words, it may be that there are yet more conspiracies afoot. Susan’s final assault on Barrett is launched on the threshold, on the verge of the literal last ditch – as she is despatched over the moat of the house. This time, Barrett locks and bolts the door behind her, with Tony meanwhile collapsing onto his hands and knees on the landing carpet. Slocombe’s camera closes on a stopped clock.

93

Sargeant Ch3

94

20/6/11

2:13 pm

Page 94

BFI FILM CLASSICS

3 Post-production: The Film in Other Houses – Cinema and Beyond Douglas Slocombe was a veteran of Ealing, with credits for Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949), The Man in the White Suit (Alexander Mackendrick, 1951) and The Lavender Hill Mob (Charles Crichton, 1951). He came to Losey’s attention with The Lshaped Room (Bryan Forbes, 1962), similarly shot in monochrome. The Servant was nominated for a British Film Academy award for black-and-white cinematography, alongside Denys Coop for John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar!. Slocombe and Losey were as fastidious about the quality of the prints put into distribution as Macdonald and Losey were in supervising the construction of the house. In 1965, Slocombe sent a detailed memorandum to Pathé Laboratories, noting that a print he had recently seen screened was incorrectly graded and issued precise instructions for amendments: ‘I cannot stress too highly the importance both Mr Losey and I attach to getting this right as we both feel the retention of exactly the right mood to be essential to the overall pattern of this picture.’71 Losey, with Macdonald preparing a storyboard, insisted that the trailer shot for the film match the quality of Slocombe’s photography, Macdonald knowing ‘more about the picture in terms of its intention and image than any outside trailer specialist could know’.72 Losey complained to his American agent when publicity stills produced by Warners were ‘grey and gutless’ and when posters in Liverpool proved ‘amateur and sloppy’.73 Losey demanded approval of any cuts to be made for the release of The Servant abroad (in France, it may be noted, it was released uncut and without the X certificate it carried for domestic distribution), but was grateful to John Trevelyan, at the BBFC, for his sympathetic and respectful

Sargeant Ch3

20/6/11

2:13 pm

Page 95

T H E S E RVA N T

handling of the film, allowing it to be released as its director intended.74 Pinter, meanwhile, maintained an equally attentive eye on foreign subtitling, nominating his own translator as a guide to distributors of the film in Italy.75 In May 1963, Losey wrote to Leslie Grade, thanking him ‘now and everlastingly, whatever follows, for the unique opportunity in my life up to this time of making a film as I and my group of enthusiastic collaborators conceived it, without any interference whatsoever’. Losey then set out his ‘very positive ideas about how The Servant should be handled’: I am sure that it is a product which cannot be sold in the usual ways. Certainly the sales process cannot simply be churned out by factory methods along previously established patterns, and certainly its campaign has to be careful, take time and be thought out from scratch. What happens to the picture now is at least as important as the process of making it. It can determine whether it is a big, snowballing success or a disastrous failure, and the handling will require as much courage, consistency and freedom as you had the foresight to provide us, the film-makers, with up to this point.76

Losey’s recommendations to Grade included Macdonald as consultant for posters and billboards and the use of the film’s cast in promotion (Bogarde and Miles duly fronted campaigns in New York, joined by Fox in France). Above all else, Losey was concerned that the film not be misrepresented. Dissatisfied with earlier drafts, in July 1963 he produced his own synopsis for festival screenings. After the publication of the Isis issue devoted to The Servant in February 1964 this, too, was circulated to America and France. Losey’s synopsis concluded: It is about the changes that men wreak on this house, and about the claustrophobia and other malignant effects the house has on its inhabitants in our present era. The subtle changes that take place in the house itself in the course of the film are quite as important as the changes that take place

95

Sargeant Ch3

96

20/6/11

2:13 pm

Page 96

BFI FILM CLASSICS

in the characters who inhabit it. The film begins with the elegant square and the house, and ends with the same square and house. But what takes place behind the façade? Now for the story, if you still want to hear it: It is the story of Faust.77

As Alexander Walker subsequently observed, Losey regretted his reference to Faust almost at once. His regret was prompted partly by disappointment at the alacrity with which unimaginative critics seized upon this ‘handle’ on a film meriting more substantial and enquiring engagement.78 The historical figure, Johann Faustus of the University of Heidelberg, may have appealed to Losey as challenger (or at least an heretical affront) to orthodox opinion, as Galileo appealed to Bertolt Brecht for political appropriation. However, if Losey’s intention was to clarify matters for critics and audiences baffled by his ‘remarkable’ film, his invocation of the mythology of Faust proved inapposite. It has been rendered by various authors, in numerous dramatic texts themselves subject to a multitude of interpretations in successive stagings.79 David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, pursuing a scholarly examination of rival orthodox and heterodox commentaries on Christopher Marlowe’s c. 1588–9 elaboration of the myth, ably demonstrate that reading and performing this text alone (itself extant in two versions) is a far from straightforward procedure: All that is required of Faustus is that he believe and repent. But how can the sceptical mind will itself to believe? The play itself, through its endless uncertainties, re-enacts the mood of doubt and questioning that afflicts the mind of Faustus. In a sense he never really tries to repent, for he knows his own disposition too well. Curiositas is at once his bane and his most essential self. To accept things as they are would be to deny his very identity. Character is fate. Doctor Faustus is the biography of a man, perhaps like Marlowe, who has tasted the heady pleasures of heterodoxy and has then reconsidered the

Sargeant Ch3

20/6/11

2:13 pm

Page 97

T H E S E RVA N T

basic teachings of his Christian upbringing only to discover that its gifts are no longer open to him. … What is he to make of a God that has given him an inquisitive mind and grasping, acquisitive instinct only to punish him for being what he is?80

For Tony, a conceited indolence, one may suggest, is at once his bane and his essential self. Tony is unable to will himself to resist Barrett, even while he knows that Barrett is intent upon enticing him to his own destruction by way of heady and forbidden pleasures of the flesh. In Marlowe’s version of the myth, Faustus is offered a phial of ‘precious grace’; in The Servant, over tarot cards predicting Tony’s fate, Barrett pours from a phial of ‘something special’ and, quite possibly, illicit – Barrett still knows of little things to please him. Tony weakly suggests that they should both make more effort over the upkeep of the house. Barrett says that he has said as much already. His presumption to smack Tony’s cheek (not entirely chummily) passes unchecked. Can we simply read Susan as Tony’s Good Angel, ministering to him with her concerned and testing attention (the phone calls made, the phone call received from the pub where Tony is distracted by the girl in the corner, the unanswered note, the commonsensical advice advanced in the restaurant, the presents to Tony and ‘their’ house)? Susan, in a pale, brilliantly encrusted and beaded ensemble, certainly at the end of the film looks as good as an angel – and Tony, reverentially, cannot bring himself to lay his hand on her breast – for fear, perhaps, of polluting her: she doesn’t ‘want to be here’, he says. Susan declares that she loves him, loving the sinner while hating the sin. Is Richard in Maugham’s novella the equivalent of the Old Man in Marlowe’s rendition of the myth? Can we read Barrett as Tony’s Bad Angel, luring his master into the sins of gluttony and lechery? By this moralistic reading, Tony’s greatest sins would seem to me to be the sloth and pride that allow him to be so readily tempted. Politically, Barrett’s labour in the house justifies the comfort it affords him. It may be that Barrett’s ends are admirable while his means are

97

Sargeant Ch3

98

20/6/11

2:13 pm

Page 98

BFI FILM CLASSICS

despicable; it may be that his ends justify his means. In other words, I argue, Losey’s Faustian parallel muddies the waters of another already ambiguous text. Play Without Words (2002), Matthew Bourne’s adaptation of The Servant to dance, articulated the various successive couplings and triangulations implicit in Maugham’s novella and Losey’s film. It also explored the complications of the characters’ relationships with one another, emotionally, socially and, perhaps, morally. Furthermore, by casting multiple Susans and Veras, Tonys and Barretts, the conflict of simultaneous attraction and repulsion, Susan: Tony’s Angel?

Sargeant Ch3

20/6/11

2:13 pm

Page 99

T H E S E RVA N T

between characters or acting upon characters, was acted out. Bourne’s version is as much about emotional and sexual repression as the film is about servitude – or, we could say, Bourne rendered explicit a particular form of servitude previously rendered implicitly by Losey. Bourne expanded his presentation of British society of the early 1960s with reference to Victim and Look Back in Anger’s Jimmy Porter.81 1963 was a good year for British cinema, with Osborne’s adaptation of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (garnering Oscars for its director, Tony Richardson, and star, Albert Finney), Billy Liar! and Susan expelled from the house

99

Sargeant Ch3

100

20/6/11

2:13 pm

Page 100

BFI FILM CLASSICS

This Sporting Life (Lindsay Anderson). The Servant was nominated in seven categories at the annual British Film Awards, with Pinter winning for his first screenplay. Moreover, The Servant proved a critical success abroad, earning praise as an ‘English international film’.82 Jean-Louis Comolli, reviewing the film’s Venice festival premiere for Cahiers du Cinéma, in October 1963, betrayed the magazine’s routine prejudices against British cinema in general (Tom Jones: spoilt by excess; Billy Liar!: spoilt by excessive reserve) and in favour of auteurs and all things American. Comolli declared The Servant’s mise en scène entirely American and its story very Barrett both cultivates and despises Tony’s sloth

Sargeant Ch3

20/6/11

2:13 pm

Page 101

T H E S E RVA N T

Loseyan.83 Losey had been fêted with a season at the Cinémathèque in 1962. He also referred the film to Brecht, whose Galileo Losey had directed on stage, while still in America, in 1947, and directed on film, in 1974.84 Comolli, among many other contemporaneous reviewers, identified The Servant as a ‘virulent’ social critique, while noting that this was but an accessory to Losey’s principal concern with the process of degradation. Walker (for the Evening Standard), Phillip Oakes (for the Sunday Telegraph) and the Variety critic were among the reviewers in 1963 who found the last scene of the film – an orgy in which nothing happens – overwrought and superfluous.85 Losey courteously replied that it was necessary to pursue his theme to the end, even if this meant exposing the audience to material it may have preferred not to witness – going beyond a conventional Comedy of Manners to Susan’s traumatic submission and with the house transformed from a smooth-running piece of machinery to a squalid prison.86 It seems to me that this scene does have its purpose in terms of the range of relationships between characters hitherto explored. For sure, it marks Tony’s humiliation at the hands of Barrett. It also shows Vera reinstated. More significantly, I think, it returns us to the battle of wills fought by Susan and Barrett over Tony, as much as to Barrett’s easy exploitation of Tony’s lassitude. While Tony’s feeble displays of violence will get him nowhere (says Barrett), the visceral pain inflicted by Susan seemingly elicits admiration, even respect. Barrett both despises and desires servitude. The film is thus more complex psychologically than some reviewers might allow. Nor, I shall contend, can it be read as a simple political tract supporting a particular political interest. Walker subsequently observed how intervening events contrived in favour of tendentious reviews of the film as a comment and critique of ‘our present era’.87 Losey wrote his synopsis for The Servant’s release in the midst of Britain’s Profumo summer, with the country thrown into a temporary fit of morality (or, rather, a moral fit of a particular sort). John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War

101

Sargeant Ch3

102

20/6/11

2:13 pm

Page 102

BFI FILM CLASSICS

(whose family was based in deepest ‘Loamshire’), not only admitted that he had used a prostitute, Christine Keeler, whom he shared with a Russian attaché, but admitted that he had previously lied about the affair to the House. Vera in The Servant, superficially, passed for Keeler, in both looks and deployment, while Profumo had little in common with Tony other than the vaguest semblance of social superiority and attachment to some more general notion of what constituted ‘the establishment’ in 1963. Tony, born into the master class, exhibits no disposition towards public service. Profumo, arguably, was brought down more by the lie than the affair and the potential compromise of national security. Profumo’s misfortune, it could be said, was to be found out: ‘This is, of course, a standard of moral conduct which falls short of that which the public expects in its servants, though they may not demand it of themselves.’88 Certainly, on whatever count, Profumo spent the rest of his life in contrition, attempting to atone for his self-confessed betrayal of public trust by devoting his life to charity. In October 1963, the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan fell ill and resigned. After the ensuing General Election, the Daily Mirror, readers of which had supported Keeler as a working-class girl who had done well for herself, published a Franklin cartoon showing Macmillan as manservant to the public (before the election) then, comfortably ensconced in an armchair with the public (represented by Macmillan’s successor, Harold Wilson) cast as his bedraggled and beleaguered footstool, thereafter. The Servant was the official British entry to the first New York Film Festival in the autumn of 1963, prompting further plaudits and further circumstantial references to recent events in Britain: the New York Times commented on its warm reception, dubbing it ‘a sinister and symbolic exposé of the modern British class structure … The drama impressed viewers as much for its topicality as for its artistic quality.’89 Indeed, in January 1964, Losey’s American publicist asked Losey to supply a ‘penetrating comment on class values in the subject matter of the film’.90 Not only was the film read circumstantially by

Sargeant Ch3

20/6/11

2:13 pm

Page 103

T H E S E RVA N T

Stanley Franklin, Daily Mirror, 18 November 1963, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent

103

Sargeant Ch3

104

20/6/11

2:13 pm

Page 104

BFI FILM CLASSICS

critics, but expedient events were also seized upon as an opportunity for promotion. Carefully tailored (not least by Losey in his advice to Grade) for niche art house distribution in the first instance, circumstances fortuitously abetted The Servant’s wider box-office success.

Sargeant Conclusion

16/6/11

9:39 am

Page 105

T H E S E RVA N T

Conclusion: Pushing on an Open Door? Totally in command of his interview with Oxford University’s Isis, in 1964, Pinter resisted interpretation of the film and discussion of its characters’ motives: ‘They’ve stayed because they’ve stayed.’ With nimble wit, without skipping a beat, he trumped his interlocutor: ISIS

Things happen because they happen.

PINTER

You can say that again.91

It is what it is what it is. Notwithstanding Pinter’s stand against interpretation, the very ambiguity of The Servant screenplay (leaving much to the imagination), and the consequent film, invited critical commentary. What we are to make of the film depends very much on how we see the house and the characters who inhabit or visit it. Barrie’s pathologically loyal Crichton does what he does for the sake of ‘the house’. As Walker has observed, ‘it is commonplace to the point of banality for a house to symbolise the dissolution of society’.92 In Maugham’s novella, Barrett is presented as a peculiarly suspect and disgusting specimen. Early on, Tony’s girlfriend warns Richard that: ‘the house is clean and smart, but it’s somehow nasty. Perhaps it’s because of Barrett’; Richard, having found out for himself, shudderingly concludes: ‘It was like looking at a fantastically shaped log and knowing that its other side was swarming with lice.’93 In Losey’s film, Barrett is still manipulative, a liar (in word, in deed and betrayed by numerous surreptitious looks and smirks in the course of the action) and the house is left to decline into further troughs of ‘muck and slime’ after his assumption of authority. If we accept Losey’s designation of Tony as a representative ‘everyman’ for his class, what are we to make of Losey’s Barrett, similarly selfish in his pursuit of his personal interests? (Next page) Tony loses control of his house and his empire

105

Sargeant Conclusion

16/6/11

9:39 am

Page 106

Sargeant Conclusion

16/6/11

9:39 am

Page 107

Sargeant Conclusion

108

16/6/11

9:39 am

Page 108

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Tony’s house (as his empire) might have been retained had he been more prepared to govern it by example rather than by command: in other words, Tony has failed the classic imperialist test. Narrating the gradual decline of the Roman Empire through a series of rulers whose belief in their public infallibility was matched only by their susceptibility to indolence, ‘effeminate’ and lascivious behaviour, Edward Gibbon thereby accounted for a subsequent period of barbarism and warned that inheritance and succession could not be taken for granted.94 Rather than being carnivalesque, celebrating an epiphanous overturn of an established order, The Servant suggests to me, ultimately, that neither master (who is incapable) or servant (who is unwilling) can secure the house in good order. Comolli was impressed by Barrett’s force; I find myself more persuaded that Tony’s lethargy brought about his own demise. What is there to recommend Barrett’s seizure of the house, other than that he has taken it from Tony? It is difficult to appreciate Barrett’s overturning of the established order as genuinely vulgar, marking the succession of the house to common ownership; it is difficult to find anything liberating in the revolution he accomplishes. Furthermore, the means by which Barrett brings about the downfall of Tony seem to me to be entirely conventional and orthodox – as Eric Rhode aptly commented for The Listener in 1963: ‘Its moral – that servants should be kept in their places or revolutions follow – is reactionary, delightfully so. (And indeed, when one comes to think of it, so is its belief in evil.)’95 Losey invokes an ancient taboo concerning incest, and the same sins of Christian morality by which the mythological Faust was tempted. We are left with a sense of inertia rather than with the promise of progress. Despite the extraneous political circumstances surrounding the release of The Servant, close investigation of the evidence provided by the film itself fails to support a straightforwardly progressive reading. In retrospect, on the eve of political upheavals and momentous social reforms in the 1960s, The Servant was not very encouraging.

Sargeant Notes

16/6/11

9:40 am

Page 109

T H E S E RVA N T

Notes 1 J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan and Other Plays, (ed.) Peter Hollindale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 3. 2 Ibid., p. viii. 3 For a discussion of Warwickshire as Loamshire, see Carolyn Steedman, Dust (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press), 2002, p. 89. 4 See John Osborne, ‘The Revolutionary Moment’ [1959], in Damn You, England (London: Faber & Faber, 1994), pp. 7–10. The Chiltern Hundreds – a comparable ‘Loamshire’ play written by William Douglas Home (brother of the Conservative MP and temporary incumbent as PM) – was directed on film by John Paddy Carstairs and was a great success in 1949. 5 Pinter claimed not to have seen Maugham’s own adaptation of the novella: see Harold Pinter, The Servant and Other Screenplays [1971] (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), p. ix. 6 See Joseph Losey archive, BFI Special Materials, JWL/1/11/9. The 2004 National Portrait Gallery exhibition, Below Stairs: 400 Years of Servants’ Portraits, presented a more benign view of servant life, often presenting the large household as an extended family. However, this is not a view I intend to explore here. At time of writing, ITV’s Downton Abbey, a companion piece to ITV’s Upstairs, Downstairs, is proving enormously successful, with BBC TV duly launching its own remake of the 1971–5 series. 7 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class [1899] (New York: The Modern Library, 2001), pp. 62–5.

8 P. G. Wodehouse, Carry On, Jeeves! [1925] (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1976), p. 240. 9 Pinter, Collected Screenplays I, p. ix. For Losey’s side of the story, see Michel Ciment, Conversations with Losey (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 225–6 and 239–42. 10 John Coldstream (ed.), Ever, Dirk: the Bogarde Letters (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008), p. 29. Bogarde preferred parts to be written such that ‘an actor can hang his suit on a coat hanger rather than a nail’. 11 BFI Special Materials, JWL/1/11/1. 12 BFI Special Materials, JWL/1/11/9. 13 Letter from Losey to Sherrin, 26 March, BFI Special Materials, JWL/1/11/5: Losey had suggested a Millicent Martin song, preferably one written by Dankworth, as a suitable ‘anti-establisment barb’ to give edge to the sequence. See also Clive Irving, Ron Hall and Jeremy Wallington, Scandal ’63: A Study of the Profumo Affair (London: Heinemann, 1963), p. 86, re initial reports in Westminster Confidential of ‘That Was the Governement That Was!’. 14 BFI Special Materials, JWL/1/11/1. 15 Raymond Durgnat, A Mirror for England (London: Faber & Faber, 1970), p. 252. For a discussion of Blind Date, see Amy Sargeant, British Cinema: A Critical History (London: BFI, 2005), pp. 225–9. 16 Pinter similarly dispensed with narrators for The Pumpkin Eater, The GoBetween and Accident. In Maugham’s novella, Sally refuses Richard (the narrator) because she is still in love with Tony. 17 Coldstream, Ever, Dirk, p. 110.

109

Sargeant Notes

110

16/6/11

9:40 am

Page 110

BFI FILM CLASSICS

18 Lorne Campbell, The Fifteenth Century Netherlandish Schools (London: National Gallery Publications/Yale University Press, 1998)), pp. 174–205; p. 189. 19 Andrew Davies recent modern-dress version of Twelfth Night for television significantly deployed CCTV as a substitute for permeable hedges and curtains. 20 John L. Locke, Eavesdropping: An Intimate History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 3 and 182. Locke numbers the illustrations to his book as ‘exhibits’, complementing his discussion of potentially incriminating evidence stored by servants for use against their masters. 21 Martin Esslin, Pinter: A Study of His Plays [1970] (London: Eyre and Methuen, 1973), p. 26. See also John Russell Taylor in Sight & Sound vol. 33 no. 1, 1964, pp. 38–9, comparing The Servant to The Caretaker, noting that The Caretaker was the first British feature film capitalised in full by private individuals, and Esslin, Pinter: The Playwright [1970] (London: Methuen, 1992), pp. 186–7, comparing No Man’s Land (1975) – a procurement scenario reminiscent of William Somerset and Robin Maugham – with The Servant and The Go-Between. 22 The compliment was returned, indirectly, with Losey casting Coward in Boom! (1968). 23 BFI Special Materials, JWL/1/11/5. 24 For recent coverage of the Fox family as a theatrical institution, see Pip Clements, ‘The Fox Cub’, Evening Standard Magazine, 14 May 2010. 25 BFI Special Materials, JWL/1/17/14.

26 See Neil Bartlett, introduction to Robin Maugham, The Servant [1948] (London: Prion Books, 2000), p. x. The stage plays were submitted for licence in March 1956 and July 1966: see British Library LCP 1956/11 and LCP1966/34. Bartlett notes that, in the 1970s, Maugham ‘made repeated attempts to persuade Lionel Bart to set the story to music’. A BBC Radio 4 adaptation has since been broadcast. 27 Maugham reports in his autobiography, Escape From the Shadows (London: Robin Clark, 1981), pp. 179–84, that his parents had been upset by the publication of The Servant in 1948, not least on account of its homosexual undertow and the reminder thereby prompted of Robin’s flamboyantly homosexual uncle, the novelist William Somerset Maugham, who had ‘groomed’ Robin on holiday trips to the Riviera. Maugham also describes the prototype for Barrett, a servant who, intent on blackmail, presented his ‘nephew’ to Maugham. Maugham was the son of a Lord Chancellor and became 2nd Viscount Maugham of Hartfield: see letter from Losey to Grade, 5 May 1963, JWL/1/11/5. 28 Letter, Losey to Proctor, 28 January 1964, JWL/1/11/5. 29 See correspondence with Pierre Rissient, BFI Special Materials, JWL/1/11/5. 30 The Servant was 70 per cent financed by Elstree, an equally shared contribution from ABPC and Leslie Grade, who ensured Losey’s control of the film over possible censorship cuts. See JWL/1/11/5. See also David Caute,

Sargeant Notes

16/6/11

9:40 am

Page 111

T H E S E RVA N T

Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life (London; Faber & Faber, 1994), p. 382. 31 Nikolaus Pevsner and Bridget Cherry, The Buildings of England: London III (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 582; see also Annabel Walker and Peter Jackson, Kensington and Chelsea: A Social and Architectural History (London: Murray, 1987). 32 John Summerson, Georgian London [1945] (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1978), p. 67. 33 Ibid., quoting Louis Simond’s Journal of a Tour and Residence in Great Britain. 34 Ibid., p. 66; contrast Rachel Stewart, The Town House in Georgian London (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 124 and 193. 35 John Betjeman, Ghastly Good Taste [1933] (London: Anthony Blond, 1970), p. 57. 36 See Losey’s pencilled comment re ‘Everyman’, BFI Special Materials JWL/1/11/1. 37 See Charles Saumarez Smith, The Rise of Design and the Domestic Interior in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Pimlico, 2000), pp. 78–9, quoting a 1725 commentator re ‘moats’. 38 Esslin, Pinter: A Study of His Plays, p. 41. 39 P. G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit [1954] (London: Vintage, 1990), p. 158. 40 As a child, Willy (James) Fox had appeared in The Magnet (Charles Frend, 1950). For The Servant, ‘the goldenhaired boy’ was bleached blonder, to look more as he had as a child: see James Fox, Comeback: An Actor’s Direction

(London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1983), p. 60. 41 Losey pencilled the comment on his 1961 script: BFI Special Materials JWL/1/11/1; Pinter had refused National Service but seems acutely aware of what military discipline might entail. 42 John Coldstream (ed.), Dirk Bogarde: The Authorised Biography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004), p. 293. 43 See Dirk Bogarde interview in Picturegoer, 13 February 1954, p. 9. 44 See Peter York, quoted by Christopher Breward, Becky Conekin and Carline Cox in the introduction to their edited volume, The Englishness of English Dress (Oxford: Berg, 2002), pp. 6–7; also Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life [1959] (London: Penguin, 1990), pp. 32–3. 45 Maugham had lived in Tanganyika and may have had in mind the ill-fated Tanganyika Ground Nut scheme. 46 Dirk Bogarde, Snakes and Ladders (London: Chatto & Windus, 1978), pp. 143 and 234. 47 Ibid., p. 234, and Eric Rhode ‘Sans Culotte’, The Listener, 21 November 1963, p. 831. 48 Rhode, ‘Sans Culotte’, p. 831; contrast Kenneth Tynan’s strange failure to appreciate the film’s cruel subtlety, John Lahr (ed.), The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan (London: Bloomsbury, 2002), p. 70. 49 James Palmer and Michael Riley, The Films of Joseph Losey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 47; Pinter interview in Isis, February 1964, p. 19.

111

Sargeant Notes

112

16/6/11

9:40 am

Page 112

BFI FILM CLASSICS

50 See Elizabeth David, An Omelette and a Glass of Wine [1984] (London: Grub Street, 2009), p. 284, and Lisa Charney, Elizabeth David (London: Macmillan, 1998), p. 314. 51 See interview with MacDonald, Isis, 1 February 1964, pp. 21–2. 52 Letter Losey to Grade, 5 May 1964, JWL/1/11/5. In Britain, Dankworth became known also for his work on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960), Darling (John Schlesinger, 1965), Losey’s 1966 Modesty Blaise and, to an even wider public, for his theme tune for BBC TV’s Tomorrow’s World. 53 Misha Donat, ‘The Music’, Isis, 1 February 1964, p. 27. 54 This may be something of an ‘in’ joke. Among the numerous ads directed by Losey to sustain himself in the late 1950s and early 1960s between features were several for Horlicks: see Ciment, Conversations with Losey, pp. 422–3. 55 Letter Losey to Pinter, 14 March 1963, requesting lines for the restaurant as a companion piece to the Mounsets in its stylisation: JWL/1/11/5. 56 See Daniel Farson, Soho in the Fifties (London: Michael Joseph), 1987, p. 4. 57 Another candidate for the role was Anna Massey. Penelope Gilliatt, reviewing the film in 1963, thought Craig insufficiently ‘posh’ for the part (presumably referring to the betrayal of Craig’s regional roots in her vocal delivery), eliding class with accent. Losey subsequently echoed Gilliatt’s snootiness, dismissing Craig as a ‘television’ actress. See Ciment, Conversations with Losey, pp. 226–7. Nevertheless, both Craig (who had been

cast in a minor role in Jack Clayton’s 1959 Room At the Top) and Fox were nominated for most promising newcomer award at the 1963 BFA Awards. 58 Barrie, Peter Pan and Other Plays, 3.1. We might also choose to refer the action to Brecht’s notion of Gestus: see Meg Mumford, Bertolt Brecht (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 53–4. 59 See Milton Schulman (whose wife recommended Elizabeth David in ‘Shops’), ‘Theatre’, in Len Deighton’s London Dossier (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), pp. 2612; see also Nick Tomalin ‘Home’, re Chelsea. Re Quant’s skirts (and boots), see James Laver, ‘Boots, Boots Boots’, The Listener, 21 November 1963, and Christopher Breward, Fashioning London (Oxford: Berg, 2004), pp. 151–9. Miles has commented that she was wearing skirts much shorter in the early 1960s than the skirt she wore as Vera. 60 Sarah Miles, Serves Me Right (London: Macmillan, 1994), p. 83: ‘England was bursting at the seams with FOs.’ 61 Beatriz Colomina, ‘The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism’, in Colomina (ed.), Sexuality and Space (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), pp. 73–128. 62 Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 244. 63 Gainsborough’s portrait of Mr and Mrs Andrews (now in the National Gallery) was in the news in 1960, put up for sale by Sothebys in Suffolk: see Vogue, mid-March 1960, p. 134. The current visitors’ guidebook to Chiswick

Sargeant Notes

16/6/11

9:40 am

Page 113

T H E S E RVA N T

House gives the statues in the niches as Venus, Mercury, Apollo and a Muse. 64 See Vogue, early February, 1960, pp. 90–3 and 117; also Charles Jencks, Modern Movements in Architecture (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 304 for Lucio Costa’s 1956 plan for Brasilia. 65 Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan [1914] (New York: Dover, 1960), VI:V, p. 181. 66 See Julian Norridge, Can We Have Our Balls Back, Please? (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 298, and Fox, Comeback, p. 31. 67 Penelope Gilliatt, review in Observer, JWL/1/11/9. See also Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space [1958] (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp. 5–8. 68 See interview with Slocombe, Isis, 1 February 1964, p. 23. 69 A G-Plan furniture ad in Vogue, early March 1960, pp. 172–3, advocated ‘mandarin and fuchsia accessories’ and Peter Coats in ‘Fashions in Living’ in Vogue, October 1961, pp. 131–44, declared ‘there’s a new feeling of blazing colours in decorating’, with suggestions of ‘sizzling red, orange or yellow slipovers for furniture’ from David Bishop (once employed by Terence Conran, now with David Hicks). See also House and Garden, April 1961, p.10, re pink and red with black as ballast: ‘offbeat colour can be very successful’ and, further warming to this theme, House and Garden, June and July 1961 issues. 70 Losey notes to shooting script, February 1963, BFI Special Materials JWL/1/11/3. Julian Barnes, husband of Bogarde’s literary agent and friend Pat

Kavanagh, subsequently commented on Losey’s ‘caressing shots of banisters and staircases’: Before She Met Me (London: Picador, 1986), p. 78. See also Summerson, Georgian London, p. 81, re sourcing and use of mahogany. 71 Letter Slocombe to Bombank, 11 November 1965, JWL/1/11/5. 72 See letters, Losey to Grade, 5 May 1963; to Robin Fox, 10 December 1963; and Robin Fox to David Jones at ABPC, 10 December, JWL/1/11/5. Macdonald, like Losey, had much experience of working on ads and advertising. 73 Letters, Losey to Al Shute, ad manager at Warner-Pathé, 6 December 1963 (praising excellent London poster); 26 February 1964; and to Ely Landau, 12 December 1963, JWL/1/11/5. 74 Losey letters to Robin Fox, 4 December 1963 and 7 December 1963; also note 1 March 1964, JWL/1/11/5. 75 Letter, Losey to Proctor, 24 January 1964, JWL/1/11/5. 76 Letter, Losey to Grade, 5 May 1963, JWL/1/11/5. 77 Losey synopsis, 2 July 1963, JWL/1/11/5. 78 Letter, Losey to Proctor, 18 January 1964, JWL/1/11/5, re ‘a comment intended somewhat facetiously’ being taken up by American reviewers; it was equally seized upon in France and Italy. See also, Alexander Walker, Hollywood, England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties (London: Harrap, 1974), pp. 212–13, and Dilys Powell’s November 1963 Sunday Times review, in George Perry (ed.), Dilys Powell: The Golden Screen (London: Pavilion, 1989), p. 199: ‘The battle isn’t between evil and good but

113

Sargeant Notes

114

16/6/11

9:40 am

Page 114

BFI FILM CLASSICS

between an active, malevolently resentful class and an inert class unaware of its own decay.’ 79 For instance, in 2010, the Young Vic in London hosted a ‘rock’ version by Vesturport of Goethe’s Faust, while ENO presented Gunod. 80 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 30. 81 For further discussion of Bourne’s Play Without Words, see Amy Sargeant, ‘Adventures in Motion Pictures: The Story So Far’, in Alicia Auletina (ed.), Narrating the Film (Udine: Forum, 2006), pp. 505–13. 82 JWL/1/11/9. 83 Jean-Louis Comolli, ‘Les Films’, Cahiers du cinéma no. 148, October 1963, pp. 26–7; for routine complaints from this quarter, see Sargeant, British Cinema, p. 217. 84 For Losey’s acknowledgment of the influence of Brecht, see Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 42. 85 Losey letters 24 November 1963, in reply to Walker and Oakes reviews, JWL/1/11/5; also ‘The Servant’, Variety, 11 September 1963, and David Wilson, ‘The Servant’, The Oxford Magazine, 30 January 1964, p. 167. 86 See Paul Mayersberg and Mark Shivas, ‘Nouvel entretien avec Joseph

Losey’, Cahiers du cinéma vol. 26 no. 153, March 1964, pp. 1–10, p. 6; see also, Michel Delahaye, ‘Les premiers degres’, Cahiers du cinéma no. 156, June 1964, pp. 40–4. 87 See Walker, Hollywood, England, pp. 205–8. 88 Irving, Hall and Wallington, Scandal ’63, p. 108. Like Walker, the authors refer also to the 1962 Vassall case, delineating the social and political context into which The Servant was released. 89 JWL/1/11/5 and JWL/1/11/9. 90 See Proctor to Losey, 17 December 1963 and 11 January 1964, JWL 1/11/5. 91 Interview with Harold Pinter, Isis, 1 February 1962, p. 20. Pinter later complained, in no uncertain terms, at Mill’s editing of repetitions in Pinter’s Servant script. 92 Walker, Hollywood, England, p. 213. Charles Barr’s discussion of Mrs Wilberforce’s house in Alexander Mackendrick’s 1955 The Ladykillers, in Ealing Studios (London: Studio Vista, 1993), pp. 171–2, is a useful case in point. 93 Maugham, The Servant, pp. 42–3. 94 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire II [1776] (London: Cadell and Davies, 1802), p. 193. 95 Rhode, ‘Sans Culotte’; see also ‘Super-cinema?’, p. 820.

Sargeant Credits

16/6/11

9:41 am

Page 115

T H E S E RVA N T

Credits The Servant UK 1963 Director Joseph Losey First Assistant Director Roy Stevens Second Assistant Director Bryan Coates Third Assistant Director Michael Stevenson Director’s Secretary Patricia Tolusso Producers Joseph Losey Norman Priggen Producer’s Secretary Valerie Howard Production Manager Teresa Bolland Production Secretary Vivienne Eden Production Accountant Arthur Cleaver Cashier Robert Blues Screenplay Harold Pinter Cinematographer Douglas Slocombe Camera Chic Waterston Sound Camera Operator Jimmy Dooley Focus Puller Robin Vidgeon Clapper/Loader Brian Harris Grip F. Howard Rigger P. McCann

Sound John Cox Sound Mixer Buster Ambler Boom Operator Peter Dukelow Maintenance Fred Stoneham Editor Reginald Mills Continuity Pamela Davies and Doris Martin Designer Richard Macdonald Art Director Ted Clements Assistant Art Director Bill Alexander Draughtsman George Lack Buyer Sidney Valentine Props Ernie Kell Danny Cullen Charles Bacon Carpenter S. Noble Stagehand J. Taylor Plasterer J. Lear Painter C. Sleep Costume Designer Beatrice Dawson Wardrobe Mistress Evelyn Gibbs Make-up Bob Lawrence Hairdresser Joyce James

Original Music John Dankworth Publicist Theo Cowan Stills Camera Norman Hargood CAST Dirk Bogarde Barrett James Fox Tony Wendy Craig Susan Sarah Miles Vera Richard Vernon Lord Mounset Catherine Lacey Lady Mounset Patrick Magee Bishop Alun Owen Curate Harold Pinter society man Ann Firbank society woman Doris Knox older woman Jill Melford younger woman Brian Phelan man in pub Alison Seebohm girl in pub Hazel Terry woman in bedroom Philippa Hare girl in bedroom Running Time 115 mins Certificate X

115

Sargeant Biblio

116

16/6/11

9:42 am

Page 116

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Bibliography Barrie, J. M., Peter Pan and Other Plays, ed. by Peter Hollindale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Bogarde, Dirk, Snakes and Ladders (London: Chatto & Windus, 1978). Caute, David, Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life (London: Faber & Faber, 1994). Ciment, Michel, Conversations with Losey, (London and New York: Methuen, 1985). Coldstream, John (ed.), Dirk Bogarde: The Authorised Biography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004). Coldstream, John (ed.), Ever, Dirk: The Bogarde Letters (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008). Colomina, Beatriz (ed.), Sexuality and Space (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992). David, Elizabeth, An Omelette and a Glass of Wine [1984] (London: Grub Street, 2009). Deighton, Len (ed.), Len Deighton’s London Dossier (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967).

Durgnat, Raymond, A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence (London: Faber & Faber, 1970). Esslin, Martin, Pinter: A Study of His Plays [1970] (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973). Fox, James, Comeback: An Actor’s Direction (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1983). Gardner, Colin, Joseph Losey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). Gillman, Peter (ed.), Isis, 1 February 1964. Maugham, Robin, The Servant [1948] (London: Prion, 2000). Miles, Sarah, Serves Me Right (London: Macmillan, 1994). Palmer, James and Riley, Michael, The Films of Joseph Losey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Pinter, Harold, Collected Screenplays I [1971] (London: Faber & Faber, 2000). Walker, Alexander, Hollywood, England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties (London: Harrap, 1974).

Sargeant Biblio

16/6/11

9:42 am

Page 117

Sargeant Biblio

16/6/11

9:42 am

Page 118