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The Servant (1963)
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Overview
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Release Date:
16 March 1964 (USA)
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Plot:
The aristocratic Tony moves to London and hires the servant Hugo Barrett for all services at home. Barrett seems to be a loyal and competent employee...
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Awards:
Won 3 BAFTA Film Awards.
Another 5 wins
&
6 nominations
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Interiors
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Cast
(Cast overview, first billed only) | Dirk Bogarde | ... | Hugo Barrett |
 | Sarah Miles | ... | Vera |
| Wendy Craig | ... | Susan |
| James Fox | ... | Tony |
| Catherine Lacey | ... | Lady Mounset |
| Richard Vernon | ... | Lord Mounset |
| Ann Firbank | ... | Society Woman |
| Doris Knox | ... | Older Woman |
| Patrick Magee | ... | Bishop |
| Jill Melford | ... | Younger Woman |
| Alun Owen | ... | Curate |
| Harold Pinter | ... | Society Man |
| Derek Tansley | ... | Head Waiter |
| Brian Phelan | ... | Man in Pub |
| Hazel Terry | ... | Woman in Bedroom |
Additional Details
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Runtime:
112 min
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Aspect Ratio:
1.66 : 1 more
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Trivia:
When Joseph Losey was hospitalized for two weeks during this shoot, Dirk Bogarde continued filming assisted by minute, daily instructions over the phone from Losey's hospital bed. When Losey returned to the set he did not re-shoot any of the script, much to the relief of cast and crew.
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Goofs:
Continuity: when the two main characters play in the stair, the servant shots a vase with the ball, it falls down and breaks on the floor. The next shot, you can see the bottom of the wrecked vase on the shelf it was on the first place (the rest of the vase is downstairs).
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Soundtrack:
All Gone
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The first of three successful collaborations of the playwright Harold Pinter with director Joseph Losey, "The Servant", from a story by Robin Maugham, is an elegant, chilly chamber piece featuring a career-defining performance from Dirk Bogarde. Tony (James Fox) has just moved into a large London townhouse and employs Barrett (Bogarde) to be his 'manservant', somebody to look after the house, cook for him, do the cleaning, just about everything in fact. Tony has money but, despite vague talk of a big project in South America, very little motivation for work of any kind. He's ripe for corruption, and that's exactly what the insidious Barrett sets about doing, with a little help from his 'sister' Vera (a kitten-ish Sarah Miles).
At the start of the film Tony is luxuriating in the empty house. It is yet to be decorated or furnished. It is like the house in the Biblical parable, swept clean and in order, but vulnerable to a demonic infestation worse than anything that has gone before. In fact we know little of what has gone before in Tony's life, but he's clearly led something of a playboy existence and seems on the surface to be serious about settling down with his latest flame Susan (Wendy Craig, British TV sitcom queen, not quite convincing as an insecure ice queen here). But it's Tony's essential insouciance, his lack of moral engagement, that makes him so vulnerable to the amoral Barrett.
Pinter's screenplay is characteristically terse and laced with menace. The movie has an avant garde quality which rears up periodically, in particular in a downright weird scene in a restaurant in which we catch bizarre snatches of conversation from the other diners (including Pinter himself in a cameo appearance) that evidently have nothing to do with the actual plot, but effectively ratchet up the sense of unease and displacement that the audience is already experiencing. Losey's visual compositions are throughout quite exceptional. He makes stunning use of the interior space of what is, in the end, a fairly ordinary house, with shadows and light, open and half-open doorways and stark camera angles providing an ever-shifting perspective on events. The house seems to be involved in an ongoing transformation of itself, so that it never looks quite the same from one sequence to the next. It may be just an illusion, but I was never entirely sure what door would open onto what room or hallway. Cinematographer Douglas Slocombe's contribution is hard to overestimate, his black and white imagery quite masterly.
In the end, however, "The Servant" is very much Bogarde's film. Quite unrecognisable from the dashing young hero of postwar British popular cinema, he imbues Barrett with a malevolent campness that conceals a seething bitterness and rage. Fox, in his first major role, is a superb foil as his uncomprehending victim. The one question not to ask about what happens in "The Servant" is 'why?' A satire on the class system in which the tables are turned on the complacent rich by the angry working class, it unfolds like a pre-determined morality play, each character fulfilling an archetypal function that seems to transcend purely rational analysis.