It’s been so long since I reviewed anything scripted by Nobel laureate Harold Pinter that I had to refresh my memory about the traits associated with the phrase “Pinteresque.”
Let’s see, an “atmosphere of menace,” suspense and tension heightened by the quiet of it all, underscored by pauses in the dialogue — long pauses — class conscious shifts in “control” and power and who has it.
That’s “The Servant” in a nutshell, a Pinter screen adaptation (for director Joseph Losey) of a novella written by W. Somerset Maugham’s nephew.
This 1963 black and white jewel is filled with exquisitely composed and lit images by legenadary cinematographer Douglas Slocumbe (“Hue and Cry,” “The Man in the White Suit,” “The Lavender Hill Mob,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark”). It’s beautifully acted thanks to actor’s director/Pinter-collaborator Losey (“The Go-Between”), with career-making performances by newcomers Sarah Miles and James Fox.
And it’s a movie that makes great use of the sinister side of co-star Dirk Bogarde, who truly shone in ambiguous “sketchy” roles in films like “Cast a Dark Shadow,” this film and others.
There’s something in the eyes that makes us wonder about this manservant Barrett (Bogarde) who’s shown up for a job at an empty, messy townhouse that trust fund baby Tony (Fox) has just bought. The tall, thin and privileged blond is a globe-trotting project developer, just in from Africa, experienced in India and talking big things about planned cities in Brazil.
Surely you can clean. But “can you cook?” And can you manage moving in and the “general looking after” that a gentleman requires from a “gentleman’s gentleman?”
Indeed he can. Barrett supervises the repainting and repairs and decorating as Tony moves in. But he’s barely settled before Barrett starts to rub Tony’s intended, Susan (Wendy Craig of TV’s “Butterflies”) the wrong way.
“Every time you open the door that man is there,” she gripes. She’s gotten the informal proposal and it’s just possible that she might see Barrett as an obstacle to her closing the deal. And he’s become good at anticipating the “general looking after” of his employer that she may seem supfluous.
Barrett? He keeps his cards close to his vest, but Bogarde lets us see the wheels turning behind those scheming eyes. When his suggestions that they need a housekeeper end in “my sister” coming in, the game’s afoot.
Miles plays Vera with all the naked guile she could manage at 22 — a young woman not really accustomed to “service,” but working those big, carefully made-up eyes for all that they’re worth. If Tony hasn’t noticed the length of her skirts, Barrett suggests “They worry me.”
If this is a honey trap, it’s well and surely set. But as Tony’s “Brazil” talk sounds and looks more and more like “big talk” and affairs under this stylish roof turn altogether more torrid and complicated, we’re allowed to wonder who is trapping whom?
Whatever the merits of the source material, Pinter and Losey look for ambiguities, intrigues and twists that suggest the story has reached its climax, when no, it hasn’t. Or maybe it has, and this is just one of the cinema’s great anti-climaxes following other anti-climaxes melodramas.
It’s worth recalling that Losey and Pinter pretty much invented the “flash forward” in cinema with their later collaboration, “The Go-Between.” Messing with narrative conventions was something the blacklisted stage and film director and playwright and sometime director or actor (look for Pinter as the dark-suited swell in the film’s famously brittle restaurant scene) brought out in each other.
Fox, the younger and much taller brother of accomplished character actor Edward Fox, holds his own here as an unchallenged young man completely in over his head, “besotted” with Vera but promised to the class-appropriate Susan and drinking entirely too much to keep it together.
Miles takes a giggling archetype and gives her “tart” enough edge to make us wonder just what she’s capable of beyond what we see her doing.
But Bogarde puts on his show-of-shows as Barrett, wearing the mask of crisp fealty as “The Servant,” letting that mask slip and then some in the later acts as the nature of relationships changes and the power dynamic shifts.
“The Servant” is rightly celebrated as a pungent Pinter piece and a performance showcase. But what pushes it over the top as a “classic” has to be its look. This is the dingy beginnings of “Swinging London,” jazz/dance clubs and folk/blues pubs, too much drinking and class distinctions that lingered even as they briefly stopped widening back to “Downton” era schisms. And capturing that, Slocumbe treats us to one stunningly lit and composed shot after another.
Take note of how the initial “scheme” is exposed — just Bogarde, naked in the shadows, smoking a cigarette and trying to figure out if his “gentleman” has returned and heard the romping he and Vera are carrying on upstairs, with Tony and Susan framed from downstairs, cowering in shocked silence.
It’s an image worth freeze-framing and hanging on a wall, and in this classic Pinter-adapted drama, it’s far from the only one.
Rating: unrated, implied sex. alcohol abuse, smoking
Cast: Dirk Bogarde, James Fox, Sarah Miles and Wendy Craig, with Patrick Magee and Richard Vernon.
Credits: Directed by Joseph Losey, scripted by Harold Pinter, based on a novel by Robin Maugham. A Warners/Pathe release on Tubi, other streamers
Running time: 1:56
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