Accident

Joseph Losey directed ‘The Servant’ from a script by Harold Pinter based on a novel by Robin (nephew of W. Somerset) Maugham. Likewise, ‘Accident’ re-teamed Losey and Pinter for an adaptation of a novel by Nicholas (son of Oswald) Moseley. And, of course, Dirk Bogarde was back in the fold: between ‘The Servant’ and ‘Accident’, he and Losey had made ‘King and Country’ and ‘Modesty Blaise’ together.

‘Modesty Blaise’ is the odd-man-out of their films, a lightweight bit of fluff: fun but forgettable). ‘King and Country’, however, was a shattering anti-war film comparable to Kubrick’s ‘Paths of Glory’, in which Bogarde plays an officer who defends Tom Courtenay’s simpleton private in a court martial for desertion, an offence punishable by execution. As such, Losey’s pre-occupation with class, society and hypocrisy are again to the fore, Losey’s cinematic microcosm being the trenches of the First World War.

‘Accident’, the final Losey/Bogarde picture, is again about class. But the microcosm here is the groves of academe. The dreaming spires of Oxford. Granted, it’s the perfect milieu for an examination of repression, thwarted ambition, staid traditionalism and social hypocrisy, dark emotions lurking behind the leisurely punts down the river, the elegant soirées and the endless games of cricket or tennis … but compared to the more explicit portrayal of social degeneracy and power games in ‘The Servant’ or the brutal backdrop of wartime suffering in ‘King and Country’, ‘Accident’ suffers from the worst affliction that can befall a motion picture (I use this cornball term advisedly: motion = movement; picture = visual): inertia.

Everything about ‘Accident’ is sluggish. With the titular accident happening offscreen, the ‘action’ is limited to book-lined rooms, manicured lawns and the sun-dappled river. Gerry Fisher’s colour-saturated cinematography prettifies everything when the script calls for the starkness of Douglas Slocombe’s crisp black-and-white lensing on ‘The Servant’. Pinter’s script, typically oblique, is heavy with pregnant pauses. Elsewhere in his ouevre this is hugely effective – small pockets of silence which hidden meanings and suggestions seep into – but here they drag on to the point of … well, we’re back at that word again: inertia.

Fortunately, a cluster of great performances hold the attention: Bogarde gives a finely nuanced turn as Stephen, an Oxford don going through a mid-life crisis; Stanley Baker is ruggedly effective as Stephen’s colleague Charley, whose success as an academic, novelist, TV pundit and womaniser throws into sharp relief Stephen’s sense of self-doubt; Vivien Merchant anchors the film as Stephen’s homely wife; and Jacqueline Sassard is luminous as Anna, the student Stephen lusts after.

Two scenes remain in the mind long after the rest of the film has faded: a dinner party which ends in drunken embarrassment, the veneer of Stephen’s home life cracking apart to reveal his desperate insecurities; and Stephen’s less-than-proper attentions towards Anna as she drifts in an out of consciousness following the accident, a scene so suggestive and ambiguous that it finally – at the last post – lifts the film into the realms of the memorable.

The Servant

You can see why ‘The Servant’, with its themes of class hypocrisy, sexual politics, role reversal and power games, shocked audiences of 1963 … but with Bogarde in the lead role they should have seen it coming. From the delinquent gunning down George Dixon in ‘The Blue Lamp’ to the tortured Melville Farr in ‘Victim’, the man had already established himself as British cinema’s dark horse, no matter how many ‘Doctor’ films might have persuaded a swooning female fanbase to the contrary.

‘The Servant’ opens with Hugo Barrett (Bogarde) crossing a busy street on his way to a job interview with layabout toff Tony (Edward Fox). Behind him, framed so that it occupies the top third of the screen, is a sign reading ‘Thomas Crapper’ – the business premises of the company named after the sanitation magnate. A popular misconception is that Thomas Crapper invented the flush toilet, the word ‘crap’ deriving from his surname. Both were in use before Crapper’s prominence in his chosen profession. But these are asides. Losey may have included the shot to trade on these misconceptions. If so, then it works well. Barrett is a decidedly unsanitary character.

Arriving for his appointment, Barrett finds his prospective employer napping. “Too many beers at lunchtime,” Tony says candidly. Again, a first impression that gets to the heart of the character. Tony’s drinking worsens as the film progresses and his icy society girlfriend Susan (Wendy Craig) leaves him.

The events leading up to said split occupy the first half of the film, Barrett happily running Tony’s bachelor pad until Susan moves in and threatens his centrality to Tony’s lifestyle. By this point, Barrett has prevailed upon Tony to employ as maid a woman, Vera (Sarah Miles), whom he introduces as his sister. Tony carries on a dalliance with Vera behind Susan’s back.

So far, so sleazy. And ‘The Servant’ could easily have unfolded as an examination of louche, degenerate upper-middle class habits … except that Barrett, against whose working class pretentions Tony’s weak-willed aristocracy is contrasted, is every bit as degenerate himself.

Arriving back early from a weekend away, Tony and Susan find Barrett and Vera in the proverbial compromising position. “She’s your sister, you bastard!” an outraged Tony declares. Barrett swiftly robs him of the moral high-ground: “She’s my fiancée, sir, which sort of puts us in the same boat, doesn’t it?” At which point Tony throws the pair of them out; a case of too little too late as Susan gives him the elbow on the spot.

This, remember, is just the first half of the film. Barrett then inveigles his way back into the (now Susan-less) household, claiming that Vera has left him and taken his money (“she did us both, sir”). What follows is as if scriptwriter Harold Pinter (in the first of several collaborations with Losey) had pre-supposed ‘The Odd Couple’ but with all the New Yoik humour stripped away and laced instead with a dark, perverse, bitter strain of social satire.

Scenes between Barrett and Tony take the form of verbal battlegrounds. Bogarde and Fox strike sparks off each other. A homo-erotic subtext bubbles towards the surface. There’s a reference to shared experiences in the army. Both men have slept with Vera. Come the uber-cynical final scene, Susan and Vera have re-appeared, only to be herded out by Barrett, his dominance over Tony now complete. The last scene is of Barrett and a spectacularly wasted Tony alone together, no women between them anymore.

Lindsay Anderson’s ‘If…’ has famously been described as “a hand-grenade of a film” (Evening News). ‘The Servant’ is a letter-bomb, dropping through the front door of well-heeled society and blasting away the veer of good breeding and elegant manners. “I’m a gentleman’s gentleman – and you’re no bloody gentleman!” Barrett yells at one point, a standout line in a literate, intelligent and acerbic script. Losey’s direction and Douglas Slocombe’s cinematography are perfectly matched, particularly in the never-bettered use of mirrored images, a perfect visual encapsulation of the film’s sense of distortion, duplicity and reversal.

‘The Servant’ is taut, gripping and rewards repeated viewings. Next to ‘Death in Venice’, it is arguably Bogarde’s finest hour.