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, JOSEPH LOSEY DEFIED THE AXIOM THAT THERE ARE NO SECOND ACTS. BY RICHARD COMBS "To each his own Losey" is how The Servant the and King and Country (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. The Boy with Green Hair "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.