DOUBLE PLAY Author(s): RICHARD COMBS Source: Film Comment, Vol. 40, No. 2 (MARCH/APRIL 2004), pp. 44-49 Published by: Film Society of Lincoln Center Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43456680 Accessed: 15-04-2020 08:52 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

Film Society of Lincoln Center is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film Comment

This content downloaded from 95.183.180.42 on Wed, 15 Apr 2020 08:52:50 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ÜÜUiJLS

44

This content downloaded from 95.183.180.42 on Wed, 15 Apr 2020 08:52:50 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms LAY CONTINUALLY REINVENTING HIS CAREER AND ELUDING ALL CATEGORIZATION, DEFIED THE AXIOM THAT THERE ARE NO SECOND ACTS. BY RICHARD COMBS

"To each his own Losey" is how The Servant the and (64), critic Tom Milne began his 1967 just inter-prior to Accident . One could even aigue view book with Joseph Losey. that,His intally terms of stylistic attack, Losey's of Loseys at that point was three: last the American Hol- film is not The Big Night lywood version (1948-52), the (51), early barely finished before he fled the British incarnation (1954-62), andcountry the and the blacklist, but The Damned art-house auteur revealed in The (a.k.a.Servant These Are the Damned) (62), which (63) and culminating in Accident is also (67).his seventh British film. Immediately after that, of course, anotherCrucially, the disruptions, the chop- one appeared, the internationalist ping andand, changing, don't just make up the for a while, fellow traveler of the pattern Burton- of his career but are at work in indi- Taylor jet set, the maker of weird, vidual float- films - certainly in the best of ing fables like Boom (68) and Figures them. Losey in was never really a com- 1 a Landscape (70). In 1975, afortable second filmmaker in any of his national exile turned him into a French film- habitats, and, in his films, along with a prior to his encounter with his victim maker, with four films from Mr. Klein (76) focus on clashes of ego and energy goes (Richard Burton). However, the film is not, to La Truite (82). an uneasy compacting of different styles as was assumed, offering the bullfight as Other subdivisions might be possible, and influences. In fact, the different a metaphor for that encounter. The although five makes a neat number of Losey "periods" are best followed not in metaphor belongs to the assassin; he is sequence but in a kind of crisscross trying to internalize it to explain his through his work virtually from the word action and as a stimulus to performing it. go - the word go being The Boy with After he and his girlfriend have fled the Green Hair (48), an apparently naive arena, the film remains to reveal the morality tale with its own weird divergences real outcome of that show: the dragging of mood and style. away of the dead bull and its dismem- If the five Losey periods don't work as periods, then we can reconfigure them on a different principle - as arenas, per- A retrospective of haps, for defining encounters of the artist Joseph Losey's films with his material, of characters with themselves and/or their significant oth- will be presented at ers. As the cop (Stanley Baker) says in the Walter Reade Blind Date (58) after the artist (Hardy Krüger) recounts how he met his lover, Theater May 12-27. "That's not a meeting you described. That's a collision." berment as meat. The bullfight has a double existence: as an assassin's metaphor Loseys, because each of them is anchored 1 .The Assassination of Ttotsky and as a separate violent event in a to particular cinematic provinces (if not With Losey it's not necessary to begin at world of violent events that will include countries) and production circumstances. the beginning, or even with the most the killing of Trotsky. But even so, the boundaries don't really completely achieved films. The Assassi- This self-actualizing of a protagonist stay in place: his collaboration with nation of Trotsky (72) comes from the inter- may seem a fairly ordinary dramatic Harold Pinter, which largely defines the national period, when the consensus device, but in Losey it has a special Sixties art-house period, and the supposed was that Losey had lost his way, and it play, leading, variously, to autonomy, refinement it brought to Losey's style, ends received some of the harshest reviews of inaccessibility, isolation, to individual - four films into the international period with his career. One scene attracted particu- even Nietzschean - ambition that will The Go-Between (71), and the international lar opprobrium: the visit by the mysterious touch off, paradoxically, an acute sense of frolic Modesty Blaise (66) pops up after assassin-to-be (Alain Delon) to a bullfight social networks, of systems within systems,

FÎLMCOMMENT 45

This content downloaded from 95.183.180.42 on Wed, 15 Apr 2020 08:52:50 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms /';-=09 )(8* =-0/']

This content downloaded from 95.183.180.42 on Wed, 15 Apr 2020 08:52:50 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ļ i rm ii M [īļi īļ iHu īvi 1 1 1 »Tłn i i«ivi 1 1 1* ļ ļ 1 1 ^3 fl mikm »TT PkT^^j tm TkTTM ļļ|ļ 1 1 [ļ i A^ļ i T'ļ M Km'j ļ i ļ h 'Tyļ 31t i 1 1 i m W 1 1 W PWf/^WnyTQ^pTTTj

plots behind plots, schemers behind pigmentation excites. According to Losey, fession of the killer (David Wayne), at bay schemers. So many Losey films depend "It on was not an antiwar picture as a con- before a lynch mob, of his own tormented the presence of these arch-schemers, cept,and as a device - it was anti-racist." childhood, and the defense of the corrupt, a mystery - or fuzziness - about their Actually, and fortunately, the film's res- drunken lawyer, whose pleas ("Life's too designs. Does the servant conspire onances to don't stop with these two messages much for him") finally lead to his blurring take over his master? If so, when? If butnot, extend into a realm of their own, himself with the man ("My client is a does it just happen out of the dynamic which might be called quasi-mystical, or drunkard"). As Raymond Durgnat sum- between them? When does the upper-class romantic, or magical-religious-existential. marized the dynamic of Losey's early lover of the poor artist in Blind DateThe film's opening image is one of the most scenarios and heroes: "They begin as decide to implicate him in murder? stunning in all Losey's work: in a police reporters, prowlers, strangers on the A striking example of the type appears station at night, three cops are grouped prowl, and stumble, often too late, upon in one of Losey's earliest films, The Prowler in the center (a distinctly Edward Hop- the fact that those whom they set out to (51), in which resentful cop Van Heflin basesper-ish image), firing questions - "All we observe, exploit, punish, or shrug off, his self-actualization not on metaphor want to know is your name," "If you'll just were a possible end to their isolation." but on the complaint that the world tell us what town you're from" - at some- depends on "pull," on getting the right one we can't see. They then part to reveal 3. Eve breaks, and manipulates his well-off loverthe boy, his head now completely shaved. Eve (62) was Losey's watershed, or Water- (Evelyn Keyes) into marriage after mur- A child psychologist (Robert Ryan) is intro- loo, the film where he tried to break with dering her husband. Tracked to a ghost townduced to him - "This is Mr. Nobody, who his past as a jobbing director in the U.S. hideout, he is shot down by police as lives he no place" - and asks the boy to scrabbles up a hill of rock and shale - "beginthe at the beginning" of his troubles. most prosaic and concrete of climaxes "Okay and then," says the boy defiantly, and yet a metaphor for that unscalable verti- echoing David Copperfield, "I was born." cal world he had envisaged. Some of his dialogue turns up word for word (including the open sesame of 2. "Let's begin at the beginning") 14 years Losey's actual beginning, of course, later, on the rocky coast of Dorset, with looks like nothing else in his careen a para- a mystical fable neatly replaced by a ble, a children's story, a moral fable, science-fictiona one in The Damned. quasi-mystical message film, which he Here, a group of children, irradiated by found constricting to shoot (on the RKO accident from birth, war orphans in their backlot) and that was twisted in the own right, are being nurtured in a secret making when studio boss Howard Hughes government complex to become the "very tried to cross its pacifist message with lines seeds of life," radiation-proof, when theand U.K. film industries and produce declaring the need for readiness for war inevitable nuclear holocaust has destroyed both a personal testament ("It was a film with the Russians. But even in its con- everyone else (life itself is the afflic- in which I was not only working out my sex- ception, The Boy with Green Hair isn't tion, the special distinction, which the boy's ual, personal relationships, but also work- clear-cut, with at least two messages green hair symbolizes). The children, ing out my exile") and his most elaborate intersecting each other: the plight of the meanwhile, dream of a different out- exercise in style. The relationship between boy (), a war orphan come - "Our parents will come and open callous, high-class prostitute Eve (Jeanne whose hair turns green as a symbol of hope the magic door for us" - just as theMoreau) and insecure Welsh writer Tyvian for life renewed in the midst of war, and young hero of The Go-Between uses Jones (Stanley Baker) is wedded to the decor the social prejudice this (then) unusual magic to defend himself in a hostile and architecture of Venice and Rome, adult environment. which in turn is wedded to a vision of the "Who killed our children's hopes?" cries bourgeois, materialist prison Tyvian and the gangland lawyer (Luther Adler) forced Eve inhabit. to defend a child murderer in M (51). The In the end, Losey's testament was fourth of Losey's five Hollywood films severely is cut in a highly publicized row with a remake of Fritz Lang that has always the producers. But the very purity of seemed - and usually been dismissed statement and style that he was trying for as - a freakish project, though it would mayfit have been the real misdirection. well with the films above. It is undoubt- Impurity was the circumstance in which edly one of Losey's mixed (or muddled) Losey's art had flourished in the past: the genre exercises, but it contains some hybrid genres, the melodramatic plots, the extraordinary scenes, not least the con- pulp sources (Eve shares that much,

47

This content downloaded from 95.183.180.42 on Wed, 15 Apr 2020 08:52:50 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms being based on a James Hadley Chase pot- Losey's career in the theater is another Figures in a Landscape. The distant boiler). Losey's camera drifting after his important arena, both a specific period speck of a helicopter hovers at the heroine through the frozen stone landscape and a background to everything he did point where this wash deepens into the of the Piazza San Marco was seen as a bid in film. It also makes nonsense of the blue of the sea; in the next shot, two sil- to join the modernist cinema of Antonioni assumption that the first collaboration with houetted men are running, their hands (detached, ambiguous, alienated). But Pinter, on The Servant , was a revolu- tied behind their backs, along the equally dense, tactile, and disturbing tion for Losey, taming his excesses and seashore. For a while, without dialogue (and perhaps even more alienating) is the indulgences, and that their three films or explanation, the camera magnifi- emphasis on decor, on stone, rock, and, together consititute a special, elevated cently maps out this corrida. Close of course, a myriad of mirrors, that had plateau in his work. In fact, The Servant tracking shots follow the men as they already featured in films as diverse as is so rich because it incorporates the Pin- crash through a forest; seen from inside, The Prowler , The Criminal (60), and ter idiom with many of the tensions of pre- the helicopter sweeps down valleys The Damned. Sixties Losey, while Accident and The and up cliff faces, scattering birds and Losey has said (in his interview book Go-Between are more attenuated exercises flushing out a herd of horses (the wildlife with Michel Ciment) that Eve also sprang in the idiom. one would never associate with Losey from his love of Venice: "It immediately Part of the richness of The Servant is made visually specific all my preoccu- the indeterminability of its subject (even pations with mirror vision, left-hand- Losey couldn't say what, exactly, it was edness, sexual reversals, the fragmentation about). Is the master-servant reversal of water." But splitting, reversals, and an incident in the class war, or something ambidextrousness had always been part more spiritual, mystical, ghostly? Durgnat of Losey, creating a riot of doubleness more says: "Thinking he has bought Barrett's entertaining than the hieratic posing of soul, Tony loses his own," and that in his Eve . There are the teddy boys of The overweening desire to please, "Barrett Damned , with leader Oliver Reed's rolled gives his master his soul - and exchange umbrella and arch slang ("Forward into is no robbery." The master (James Fox) battle, dear chaps"), grouped around a is Mr. Nobody, the servant () unicorn statue in the town center. The is Mr. Know-It- All - a relation of house- romantic or magic reversals of The Boy holder to intruder that The Assassination with Green Hair are also never far away of Trotsky reverses. In Accident , one in Losey. might note the unexpected magic of There are the two proletarians of the night of the accident: a white horse Blind Date , one who has become a hard- (not a unicorn) beneath a full moon boiled cop and the other who's a naive and the princess (Jacqueline Sassard) artist (a miner's son, no less; an unneu- asleep amidst a froth of ostrich feathers but that has a kind of underbrush pres- rotic Tyvian Jones). And there's a strik- in the death car. ence throughout his films). ingly double dramatic structure in this Michel Ciment suggested to Losey film: the first part is anchored in the flat 4. Figures in a Landscape that many of his films are fables in the of the dead prostitute/lover, with the Far from the stones and gargoyles of AmericanOld tradition, "Manichaean, Puri- cop probing the artist with questions Europe, the most visually ravishing tan-inspired . . . creating allegories like about a crime that hasn't been revealed moment that Losey, the celebrated met- Moby Dick or The Scarlet Letter." Losey yet in a style that can only be called Pin- teur en décor , ever put onscreen may agreed be but found this "a weakness ter-before-the-fact. the opalescent dawn of the first shot because of it's a way of evading," com-

4 S

This content downloaded from 95.183.180.42 on Wed, 15 Apr 2020 08:52:50 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms From left, Van Heflin and Evelyn Keyes in The Prowler ; Dirk Bogarde and Wendy Craig in The Servant ; Luther Adler and David Wayne in M; These Are the Damned; Miche- line Presle and Hardy Krüger in Blind Date. pared to realist psychological traditions. of a psychiatrist's office as if it were an commitment" ink- that "took on a religious His three films between the Pinter book- blot test of personality. Jan, the young bent." artist From which it has found its way ends oí Accident and The Go-Between - of Blind Date , identifies a small picture back to the heavily religious iconography Boom , (68), and Figures ("It's 17th century, a study for a oflarger his films: the great stone angels that in a Landscape - offer themselves most portrait, probably Van Dyck") flythat's through Eve and Secret Ceremony ; clearly as fables. With its cycle of care- plucked from the less high-toned thebric- bells that can be relied on to toll in less parenting/cursed childhood, Secret a-brac of a murder scene and will Venice,point Oxford, and Mexico City. Ceremony could belong with the "blighted to the identity (or at least the social It's all significantly Catholic, perhaps hopes" dramas of M and The Damned. milieu) of the real murderer. a sublimation-within-repudiation of Losey's Dealing the least in explanation, Figures A similar trail, or research with Episcopalianmore upbringing. But Lenora is the most fabulous. psychic reverberations, is followed through () in the confessional And, again, perhaps, it is only Losey's Mr. Klein. Klein is first seen haggling box of Secret Ceremony also complains: "For theater background that makes all three over "a portrait of a Dutch gentleman" three by years, I've been wandering from possible, because where language enters Adriaen Van Ostade. It is 1942, and his it must be hyperbolic, specifying char- client is a Jew, desperate to leave Paris acter while at the same time ridiculing before the imminent roundup of the Jew- it, rendering the notion of self-suffi- ish population. The deal is done, and cient, psychologically "real" characters from that moment Klein finds himself absurd. Figures is the riskiest proposi- being mysteriously mirrored by another Mr. tion, with a Pinteresque screenplay by Klein, a Jewish version, whose mail is redi- one of its stars, Robert Shaw (also a rected to him and whose identity is steadily dramatist and novelist). It plays out the foisted onto him. As he tries to unpick this conflict between the older fugitive (Shaw) mystery, Klein discovers a "nostalgia" and the younger (Malcolm McDowell) in for his own origins, leading to the revelation all the Pinter registers of class, genera- of "another race" of Kleins in Holland. As tional, and sexual paranoia, but completely his world collapses around him, he begins detached from his social landscape. It is clutching the Van Ostade portrait as an Losey's most experimental film, and it emblem of identity. His pursuit of the excitingly adumbrates an even more other Klein finally takes him, blindly, to experimental one, made entirely in the the stockades of the roundup and a cat- place to place like a Jew," which is where, style of its opening sequences. tle car to the concentration camps. through the other Mr. Klein, she might meet The art that begins as a commercial the exiled Losey. "Politically, I was per- 5. Mr. Klein commodity (and the art market goes secuted, a Jew, so to speak," he told Mr. Klein (Alain Delon), the hero multinational of in La Truite [82]) becomes Michael Ciment. Jew, Catholic, and Epis- Losey's greatest (and last great) film identity's after last holding point and a conduit copalian - there's mirror vision and left- The Servant , is also a kind of repository to wider identifications. Neither stream handedness here, too, perhaps. More of his career. Klein is an art dealer; excludes he the other, it's as if there is a con- fragmentation in the water. brings together all those signs of status,stant cycling process, a cycle of subli- The author is indebted to David Thomp- icons of identity, even clues to policier mation, mys- which could take in other son for invaluable assistance in the prepa- teries that have proliferated through sublimations the as well. Losey has said ration of this article. preceding three decades. In Losey's that first the effort of repudiating his reli- British film, (54),gious aupbringing, and the guilt sur- Richard Combs is a regular contributor police inspector peers at a Miró on the rounding wall that, found "an outlet in political to Film Comment.

49

This content downloaded from 95.183.180.42 on Wed, 15 Apr 2020 08:52:50 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms