3 - “An Extension of Reality”: The Servant

Summary

“While I was in Rome, working on Eve,” Losey told Michel Ciment, “Dirk Bogarde rang to tell me that there was in existence a Harold Pinter script from The Servant. … Actually, I had taken the novel The Servant [by Robin Maugham] to Dirk just ten years before. I got in touch with Harold whom I'd known before. It was a very uneven but absolutely brilliant script” (1985, 224). Rights to the Pinter script were purchased with funding arranged by Losey's agent Robin Fox, the father of James Fox, the young actor who subsequently gave an exceptional performance as the ill-fated Tony. (At the time of his original interest, Losey apparently had Bogarde in mind for Tony rather than the servant Barrett, the role he eventually played with such insinuating power.) The Servant proved to be the film that changed Losey's artistic life and reputation once and for all. “So with [Richard] MacDonald and Dirk Bogarde and with my various hurts and destructions,” he told Ciment, “I had a kind of rising from the ashes on The Servant” (179). A cool reception when the film premiered at the Venice festival was soon forgotten in the enthusiasm of its openings in New York and London and, a few months later, in Paris. Thus, at the age of fifty-four, with his fifteenth feature film, Losey had his first international success. More important, despite a contentious first meeting with Pinter, he had found his ideal collaborator as screenwriter.