I’d forgotten how politically anticipatory…how wonderfully diseased and wickedly pleasurable Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter‘s The Servant, which I haven’t watched since the aughts…I’d forgotten what a low-key gem it is.
I’d forgotten how dryly funny it is without announcing a humorous intent. Commercially released a week before the JFK assassination but well before the social convulsions of the mid ’60s or any kind of “bawdy, explorational sexual promiscuity as revolutionary behavior” allusion or acknowledgment…a year or two before anyone was wearing even slightly longish hair…shot in the spring of ’63, when the Beatles hadn’t yet exploded (even in England) and well before the Dylan-goes-electric tremor or even a touch of that post-mods-vs.rockers, “things are getting sorta kinda trippy” London atmosphere in Antonioni‘s Blow-up…
None of that had kicked in, not really, and yet The Servant, oddly, seemed to have an inkling of what was just around the corner or, you know, coming down the pike in ’64 or ’65.
Wiki excerpt: “It was Losey who first showed Robin Maugham‘s novella, The Servant to Dirk Bogarde. Pinter stripped it of its first-person narrator, its yellow book snobbery, and the arguably antisemitic characterization of Barrett — oiliness, heavy lids — replacing them with an economical language that implied rather than stated the slippage of power relations away from Tony (James Fox) and towards Barrett (Bogarde).”