Joseph Losey(1909-1984)
- Director
- Producer
- Writer
Belonging to an important family clan in Wisconsin, Joseph Losey
studied philosophy but was always interested in theater and thus worked
together with Bertolt Brecht. After directing some shorts for MGM, he made his
first important film, The Boy with Green Hair (1948), for RKO. While he was filming The Prowler (1951) in
Italy he was summoned to testify before the House Un-American
Activities Committee, the congressional committee charged with "rooting
out" Communist "subversion" in the motion picture industry. Unwilling
to subject himself to the committee's well-known intimidation tactics,
Losey decided to seek exile in Great Britain. In the following years he
used a pseudonym--"Joseph Walton"--for his films, which were of minor
quality. He regained his prestige with the thrillers Chance Meeting (1959), The Concrete Jungle (1960)
and Eva (1962). From that point on his films varied between top-quality
work like Accident (1967) and much lower-quality projects such as Modesty Blaise (1966),
which was a box-office success, and Galileo (1975), which
wasn't.
