1 - “Pictures of Provocation”

Summary

The expatriate American director Joseph Losey (1909–84) claimed his place among important filmmakers with such rich films as The Servant (1963), King and Country (1964), Accident (1967), The Go-Between (1971), and The Romantic Englishwoman (1975). His reputation, however, remains unjustifiably problematic. For some he is an allegorist detached from his characters, for others principally a stylist with a penchant for the gothic. Admittedly the body of his work includes both great achievements and failed aspirations; masterful films stand amid misbegotten efforts such as Modesty Blaise (1966) and Boom! (1968). Moreover, critics have disagreed radically about the very nature and characteristics of his work. The French critic Gilles Jacob, for example, writes of Losey's “unshakable faith in human nature” (1966, 64), whereas Foster Hirsch concludes that the “world-view” in his films is “essentially negative, their sense of the possibilities of human nature and society deeply pessimistic” (1980, 220). The effort to see Losey's achievement whole has been further complicated by the drama of his personal history and the several ways of dividing his filmmaking career. After only five feature films in the United States, in the years 1948–51, he was blacklisted and moved to England, never making another film in his own country although he expressed the desire to do so and, on at least one occasion, nearly succeeded. Given the blacklist and Losey's subsequent exile, the most obvious division of his films is between those produced in Hollywood and those after.