The Servant

With England's noblesse oblige caught between frigid temperatures and torrid scandals, Joseph Losey cleans house. A London manor is not complete without a manservant, the dim aristocrat (James Fox) finds one in the immaculate proletarian raven (Dirk Bogarde), "a very good driller." Behind the valet's obsequious professionalism is a snorting smirk, chipping at the master's affairs with passive-aggressive slyness—his rival is Fox's suspicious fiancée (Wendy Craig), his weapon is the mini-skirted kitty posing as his sister (Sarah Miles). Familiarity into abasement into chaos. "Well, that's bloody inconvenient, isn't it?" A smooth, gliding surface eroded by a new tremor every minute, where every interaction is a power struggle: The placement of a vase of flowers, a midnight seduction underneath a kitchen lamp, curlicues of Harold Pinter's virtuosic venom overheard during some table-hopping at a restaurant. The camera tilts up from a street puddle and arches over barren trees in a recurring maneuver, later the upper-crust couple return home to find the bedroom raucously occupied, Bogarde's cigarette-dangling shadow looms at the top of the stairs as Fox sinks to the bottom of the banister. The house ("just a wall here and there, sir") is a dungeon in the making, a maze of cabinets grown cavernous and litter-strewn, its gloating eye a convex mirror on the living room wall. Bataille's servitude of the sovereign, The Fallen Idol's hide-and-seek game (servant skulking with gusto, master trembling behind shower curtains), dripping faucets and dormant clocks. A society erected on rituals of dominance and suppressed anxiety can only malignantly perpetuate itself, from the Blimpish tableau of Old Order complacency to the dead-eyed New Wave bacchanalia is less a matter of corrosion than of mutation. Losey's ripping comedy of breakdown, a master class in sinister mise en scène richly absorbed by Polanski and Roeg. Cinematography by Douglas Slocombe. With Catherine Lacey, Richard Vernon, Patrick Magee, Ann Firbank, and Alun Owen. In black and white.