This is the second essay in a series of pieces for an imagined series of screenings to complement Parasite. The first was Chameleon Street, the second Harry He’s Here to Help.
A man crosses a square. He’s perfectly turned out, his sharp lapels seeming to herald his lacquered face. He looks every part the gentleman, except he’s not, for reasons that are both inscrutable and bedrock. He hesitates before the door of a townhouse, his knock meeting no resistance and causing the door to yawn open. He haunts each room of the deserted house. It’s unclear whether this emptiness – stains where dressers used to be, vast expanses of unsettling wallpaper, crumpled newspaper balled like a tumbleweed – is the end of something quite tragic or the moment before the curtain rise on something new. In an upstairs room he finds a man asleep across two deck chairs, as secure in his sleep as he would be in the alabaster of his family’s tomb. Disturbed by the other man’s presence, he awakes.
The opening scene of The Servant (1963; streaming on MUBI’s new Library service) is not so much a cold open as an invitation into an impossible space. What we’re about to see exists only as a dynamic between its two main characters, and even the space itself seems without a reason to exist before Barrett (Dirk Bogarde) steps into it. Before the cuckoo has made its nest, who are these two? Barrett is a shadow in need of a light to expose himself, and he’s found just the chap in Tony (James Fox).
Having just returned from ‘Africa’, Tony – a member of the unassailable upper class – has taken residency in Chelsea. He’s got an eye on starting three new cities in Brazil to populate with people from ‘Asia Minor’, but for now he’s in need of a manservant. Breezing through Tony’s interview, Barrett quickly makes himself indispensable. Tony’s girlfriend-verging-on-fiancée Susan (Wendy Craig) is more suspicious, not comfortable with a familiar who is so overfamiliar. Before long, Barrett is suggesting that his sister comes to help with the other household chores with Vera (Sarah Miles) proving a temptation to Tony. Then ensues a long dance of increasingly testing Tony’s will (perfectly fitting the DENNIS system). Susan and Tony reconcile their differences, returning early to town from a weekender to uncover Barratt and Vera in flagrante. Far from his sister, Vera is revealed to be Barratt’s fiancée, putting Barratt and Tony rather ‘in the same boat’. This revelation sees Susan and Tony uncoupled and Vera and Barrett on the street.
It’s at this point that we expect the tale to wrap up: what was hidden has been revealed. It’s where Parasite rightly reaches its climax. Harold Pinter’s script (adapted from Robin Maugham’s novel) demonstrates his mastery of potential, the desire for the audience to know what the constellation of unsettling details ultimately means. The tale is leading to this unmasking from the off, from the moment Barrett’s face darkens when he panics that Tony may have a personal connection to one of his references (only to be relieved as he realises the proxy is deceased). This is not the end of the tale though. What we’re allowed to see after the legitimate arc of this tale is something unpleasant, modern and disavowed by other stories. It’s two men, living in a kind of sin.
Joseph Losey’s film is well outside of the hard realism that was reshaping British cinema in the early sixties. Far from Angry Young Men or the Kitchen Sink, Losey – like all the best outsiders, able to put their finger on truths invisible to those within them – looked to tales untold looking in the class direction. Yet what the trilogy of films he made scripted by Harold Pinter (Accidentand The Go-Between, both also streaming on MUBI and very worth your time) share with the films of Karel Reisz, Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson et al is a focus on the power of sex to disrupt the social order. On a night without his servants, we see Tony pay a trip to a Troubadour-style coffee house, with a Bob Dylan-wannabe amplifying his beard and cardigan with deep authenticity. Tony, dipping his toe in the milieu, quickly leaves. For all his modish shirts and nods to a loosening grip on his domestics’ lives, he is bewildered by the modern world, and quickly wants to retire to his brandy balloon and his cigar. Yet sex is tapping at the window, inviting him to shake off the White Man’s Burden. Initially this takes the form of Tony’s affair with Vera, diverting him from his rightful place with society woman Susan. Tony isn’t able to wield power as he should, and is unable to follow his privilege to cast aside Vera as generations of his forebears have.
Yet the film’s true sexual disruption only occurs in its final third. In many ways, the film’s two female love interests operate as exculpation, a fig leaf for the homoeroticism that follows. Swinging between prissy domesticity (‘It's a bit salty.’ ‘No, no, it's marvellous.’ ‘It's nice to know it's appreciated. It makes all the difference.’) to surreal childishness (there’s a terrific game of hide and seek that promises to end carnally until they’re interrupted by the return of Vera), Tony and Barrett’s domestic set-up is both an Eden of classless egalitarian living and a fantasy of class retribution. They can live together for a time, but ultimately Barratt wants to suck Tony dry, leaving him a husk on the floor. Without power, he serves no purpose.
Although Bogarde remained closeted throughout his life (hiding his decades-long relationship with his manager Anthony Forwood) and James Fox retreated into Christianity for many years, both actors flirted with gay-coded or sexually-fluid roles that have their culmination in The Servant. Although Fox’s most extensive queer-baiting role (immediately before his long hiatus from acting) is delivered as gender-fluid hallucinogen-embracing gangster Chas in Nicolas Roeg’s Performance, there’s a clear line between his role here and the bisexual finance director Fox plays in Sexy Beast. Whatever broken state we see him in at the film’s conclusion, one can easily imagine Tony dusting himself off, making use of the upper class’s right to a second, third and fourth act and finding himself at the high society orgy we see him lording it up at in Jonathan Glazer’s film.
Meanwhile, Bogarde had been more explicit in his gay roles before, starring in 1961’s Victim, one of the few ‘socially important’ films that remain genuinely engaging viewing. Yet that film, while plotting a course to 1968’s eventual decriminalisation, sticks to societal attitudes about homosexuality as a curse, a cureless sickness, struggling to imagine a reality in which two men could live together in a kind of happiness. Bogarde was the perfect star for these kinds of coded roles. A fairly stagey actor (though unable to pursue the stage because of the emotional toll it placed on him), in queer roles this hints at a superficial veneer he must put on his life. That’s amplified here through two kinds of playing: first of the British class system and secondly of his sexuality. Throughout his roles leading up to this period, there’s a hinted elision between Bogarde’s sexuality and criminality. In Losey’s The Sleeping Tiger (1954), he plays a delinquent whose eventual embrace of vulnerability via psychology frees him; in 1955’s Cast a Dark Shadow, he’s a Bluebeard husband pointedly disinterested in straight sex; in 1956’s The Spanish Gardener, playing (apologies to every Spaniard in the world) Jose, he wins the affections of a British diplomat’s child through his kindness and deviation from British reserve. Setting aside camp treats like The Singer Not the Song and Modesty Blaise, Bogarde knew that burning his star power was useful kindling to launch production he described as ‘obscure, obscene, too complicated, too dark, too slow, and naturally too uncommercial.’ Although the return of the repressed of class antagonism ultimately consumes their relationship, the scenes of giddy childishness, queer indulgence and domestic stability are a zone of unique sexual and class freedom in British cinema of the era that’s unseen in any of Bogarde’s roles.
Given that this is the film’s ultimate destination, it would have been easy to make Susan into a side-character or caricature, an obstacle to Tony’s true desires. Yet she exists within her own desires, reasserting the class distinctions. Aware that Tony is never going to address Barrett directly, she descends unannounced on the servant, demands he make her lunch, put her coat away, arrange her flowers. Having been praised for his decorating skills and asked where he acquired his talent by Tony, Susan marks her territory and puts Barratt back in his place: not a creator of spaces but another convenience within it (‘Do you think you go very well with the colour scheme?’). ‘What do you think of the cushions?’ she asks. ‘The truth is, I don't give a tinker's gob what you think.’ In a question that is left hanging, but leaves us in no doubt that she has a clear eye on Barratt, she enquires ‘What do you want from this house?’ Barratt, able to feign what place he should hold (no wants, no needs, an obsequious mist that achieves tasks), replies, ‘I’m the servant miss.’ Barratt’s relationship with Tony exposes the truth behind this labour, especially the infantilism of the upper classes (as well as passing Tony the brandy as though it were a suckling nipple, at one point Barratt coddles Tony with a foot bath. ‘You're too skinny to be a nanny, Barrett.’). The Servant brings this to the foreground, that these are men who are charged with city-building but who are unable to attend to their own home. Maintaining this invisibility is crucial to avoiding the criminal truths of working class servitude and upper class ineptitude (this glinting possibility of this exposure is at the heart of Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day).
Losey bends this haunted thought around the shadowed corners of Tony’s home. Seemingly encouraged by the first collaboration with Pinter (whose surrealism is often overlooked in broad accounts of his virtues) into pursuing a mannerist version of the drawing room cinematography, the shooting of the house has much in common with Robert Wise’s The Haunting. Lensed by Douglas Slocombe – Ealing stalwart, Spielberg’s Indiana Jones partner and the man behind Dead of Night’s distinctly unsettling visuals – it’s a masterclass of how to shoot two people within space, compositions isolating and uncanny scales mocking characters. A kind of soft surrealism pervades, hinting at the near-breaking of the storm of madness of the British class system. At Susan’s parents (where we also glimpse a servant as he should be, a silent object), where we are closest to this psychic load, we find a De Chirico-style Sphinx on the lawn and the family in a contorted tableau, within an eye’s blink of both Buñuel and Brian Yuzna’s Society. While Bogarde would dig deeper into the ‘come dressed as the sick soul of Europe’ in Death in Venice, Losey’s never made such a gossamer fine critique of the British class system.
Recommendations
If you have a good deal of affection for sounds and thoughts around the roots of UK dance music, then Octo Octa’s album from last year Resonant Body is full of sounds that are terrifically fun and nostalgic without being backwards-facing.
The BBC have added a lot of RKO films to the iPlayer. There’s some big hitters in the mix (if you’ve never seen Citizen Kane because of the heavy weight of ‘best film ever’ accolades, slough off that veneer and discover something very fun). As well as some great Cary Grant screwballs (including the underseen Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House and My Favorite Husband) there’s also Val Lewton-produced Cat People and The Curse of the Cat People. Probably there’s never been two films that are ostensibly sequels to each other that are so divergent in genre and approach. Cat People, a classic of slow-build suspense was followed by Curse of the Cat People, a strange tale of a childhood imaginary friend that is generically hard to place and all the better for it. Best of all, neither film tops 70 minutes.
If you’re in the house drinking way more coffee than you should, why not get some beans from Redemption Roasters who help offenders learn coffee roasting skills in prison and then help them get jobs on the outside.