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“The Servant” is a noir, a horror film, an “Upstairs/Downstairs” satire, a thriller about power, a romantic comedy for a long middle stretch, a pair of terse love triangles, a survival melodrama at the end when at its most Brechtian. It’s a frightening and funny film, a low story told in high style. It’s an expressionistic psychological piece in which the troubled souls of its central quartet are manifested in the still air of an ever-constricting interior and the frigid air of an English winter on the outside. Tony and Susan are pale, and Hugo and Vera are swarthy: one side, the masters of the universe; the other, the barbarians at the gate. Our allegiances shift between each of them in turn. Tony is pathetic but institutionally powerful. Susan is an intolerant monster, but she’s right to be wary. Hugo is opportunistic and deceptive but is humiliated in his work, and Vera is licentious and rapacious but free in her sexuality and powerful for it.
Every element of “The Servant,” from its direction to photography, script, and performance, is unimpeachable. It is one of the modern classics of world cinema, to be enjoyed as a surface entertainment or dissected as a satire as lacerating as Luis Buñuel’s “Viridiana” (1961) or “The Exterminating Angel” (1962) from the year before. More often than I’d like to admit, I think about Susan’s sigh of disgust when Tony, after the jig is well and surely up, asks Susan to sleep with him in the same bed recently vacated by Hugo and Vera. In just one moment, the existential exhaustion of Losey’s entire career is expressed by her animal grunt of exasperation, dismay, and offense. I’ve made that noise myself too often in the last few years when promises of meaningful revolution are dangled by obviously compromised people for whom change would bring no profit. Tell it to someone else; I’m tired.
Pinter often reminds me of Jean-Paul Sarte, and “The Servant” is the best unofficial adaptation of the revulsion of others and the self of Sarte’s Nausea I’ve ever seen. If it’s not the best Joseph Losey film, it’s in the conversation as the best with “The Accident” and “The Go-Between.” Taken together, this Losey/Pinter trilogy is like a lepidopterist’s needle, crucifying human pretensions to the flickering screen like a butterfly specimen to a card, carefully notated with details of taxonomy and date of collection. “The Servant” turns 60 this year. It hasn’t aged a day.
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