THE SERVANT
UK, 1963, 115 minutes, Black and white.
Dirk Bogarde, James Fox, Sarah Miles, Wendy Craig.
Directed by Joseph Losey.
The Servant made a great impact at the time of its release. It immerses its audience in a strange and bizarre world of light and darkness, integrity and corruption, decadence and decay.
The Servant is like an old moral fable visualised before our eyes in modern dress, a play for power by one human being over another and the downfall of those who live within the ambit of this struggle. Director Joseph Losey had a mixed career up to the time of the making of The Servant. After this film he was praised for - King and Country; Accident; The Go -Between. Even when they are not critical successes, his films are always interesting to watch. In The Servant, as with Accident and The Go -Between, his screenwriter was Harold Pinter. The film offers one of Dirk Bogarde's best performances. James Fox was beginning his career as was Sarah Miles. This is an effective adult drama.
1. How important was the structure of the film?
2. Discuss the realism of the film, especially in the first part, and the underlying moral fable. It is suggested that The Servant is a modern version of the Faust and the Devil fable. Faust sells his soul to the devil for brief worldly pleasures. Do you agree with this interpretation of The Servant? How is it illustrated?
3. Comment on the impact of black and white photography, the quality and tone of the music for the film.
4. What do the four principal characters contribute to the film? Tony, as a weak gentleman? Barrett, as a servant?
Vera, as girlish, lower class? Susan, as prim, upper class, snobbish, possessive? What comments on English society did the hotel people make with their attitudes, their conversation?
5. The people at the orgy - what comment do they make on human behaviour?
6. Comment on Losey's techniques for showing relationships - persons intruding on others, the function of the stairs in the house, the composition of the frames of various scenes.
7. How powerful was the theme of mutual disintegration?
8. What other themes emerged from this film? Did it have insight, even though horrifying?
9. Details of characters:
a) Tony: the comment on the upper-class person, strength of will, dependent, relationship with Susan, values, intelligence; his reaction against his servant, awareness of his need, his search, the homosexual undertones, pleading with Barrett in the hotel, his reduction to being beneath the servant, his being pandered to by drugs, alcohol, sexuality; the orgy, the degeneration of his whole moral fibre, perversion, the corruption of a weak human being.
b) Barrett: lower class, his values, his reliance on forms and conventions, bitterness, despising of his master, a heartless domination of Tony, his relationship with Vera, his enmity with Susan, yet her fascination with him, the fascination with evil; did he win in the end, pandering to Tony, with Vera? Or was he below the servant even as he served him? Was Barrett equally destroyed at the end of the film as Tony was?
c) Vera: lower class, afloat, her relationship with Tony, her relationship with Barrett, how corrupt was she? Howl silly was she, wilful, sensual, instinctive? Was she in control of herself at the end or a servant to Barrett?
d) Susan: -snobbish, possessive, loving Tony? her attitude towards Barrett, to servants, her inability to understand? revulsion, interference, fascinated yet horrified? kissing Barrett and slapping him? The dramatic significance of this? How was her life destroyed by Barrett by the end of the film?
