Have you ever been on the losing end of one of those "You've never seen (insert film here)?!?" conversations? And then the person stares at you in astonishment as they wonder how you've made it this many years without ever seeing their life-changing film, making you feel as if you're some sort of back-woods hillbilly who survives off of roadkill?
I hate when that happens.
Here's a DVD9 of The Servant in more languages than you'll ever need...
From filmint.:
It was Joseph Losey's 20 year working relationship with Dirk Bogarde which helped prompt the blossoming of his career. The quartet of films the two made together in the 1960’s, The Servant, King and Country, Modesty Blaise and Accident are in many ways the cornerstones of British high-brow film making in that decade. The Servant and Accident in particular, both starring Bogarde and both scripted by Harold Pinter created for the first time British intellectual film, utterly cool, utterly sophisticated and stylistically European.
It is The Servant which most consider to be the prime Losey cut and one of the most enigmatic films ever to be produced in the UK. It is rather predictably, slated as a kitchen sink drama, of the kind Alan Bates was making at the time. The valet (Bogarde) arriving in a fit of stutters and blushes, ultimately betraying his controlling tendencies, plying the young aristocratic Tony (Edward Fox) with ever stronger spirits, until he is a broken mess, his fiancee heading towards the door, and the house very much Barrett’s . Servitude reversed. This is however not before Barrett has endured the full force of the British upper classes’ sense of superiority, basically being treated as a second class citizen by Tony, before the tables slowly turn. Losey through his career is unremitting towards the upper classes, both here, in Accident and in The Go Between for which he won the Plame d’or in 1971, at the Cannes Film Festival.
But this is much more than a class war parable, it is, which marks it out among its 1960’s peers, a very gay film, with obvious homosexual overtones. The film made in 1963 four years before homosexuality was made legal in England and Wales, sees Bogarde camping up his performance, becoming a creepily obsessive control freak who tells Tony, “My only ambition is to serve you, you know that don’t you” before handing him a mysterious vial of liquid that he’s got from “a little man in Germain street” that pushes him ever deeper into his virtually comatose state. Tony becomes ever more reliant on Barrett and can barley function without him as the movie reaches its climax, which see’s Bogarde throwing Tony’s fiancée out of what is now Barrett’s house, Tony lying fractured out of his mind in the hallway.
Many people say that The Servant is a very simple class allegory, Barrett the man servant and Tony the upper class cad simply swap places. But look more closely and you realise that Barrett replaces Susan (Tony’s fiancée), who begs Tony to sack Bogarde, but ends up being removed from the house herself. Does Barrett replace Susan in Tony’s affections? That door is left very much open. One must remember that in the same year Bogarde made Doctor in Distress, a further installment in the Rank Organisation's Carry On style comedies, a million miles away from the subjects broached in The Servant, which fell away unnoticed on its original release, but set the critics raving.
From Senses of Cinema:
After Eve, Losey became embroiled with Harold Pinter, who wrote three screenplays for the director, the first of which was The Servant, a film that consolidated his reputation. Many critics have expressed confusion about the film, especially its ending, but to my mind it is fairly simple. From the moment the man-servant Barrett (Dirk Bogarde) sees Tony (James Fox) sleeping in his big opulent house, he wants to have him. Sexually? Most likely. But mainly he just wants to be his wife, a goal he achieves rather quickly. Barrett hates women, even if he is sexually drawn to them, as is demonstrated by a long scene in a telephone booth—some girls want to use the phone and he contemptuously looks at their legs while he is talking. “Hurry up!” mouths one of them. When he leaves the booth, he says, “Get out of my way you bitch,” nastily, for no apparent reason.
Losey had four wives, two of which he omitted entirely when talking to interviewers. Like Nicholas Ray, he was able to view both men and women sexually, to the benefit of his films. His bisexuality has been hinted at by people who knew him. Michael Sayers, a distinguished playwright and screenwriter, told me that he used to have Losey and Bogarde over for dinner in the '50s and that, to him, they were very definitely a couple. “Dirk was good for Joe, though he treated him badly in the end,” he reported. (5) If true, this relationship is key to Losey's use of Bogarde, especially in The Servant. It's clear that Barrett sleeps with tempting Vera (Sarah Miles), but his manner with her is light and casual, whereas with Tony he is as calculating and demanding as any woman who wants to trap a man. Barrett uses Vera and other women to keep Tony in check so that he can have him for himself.
In the final analysis, The Servant is a struggle between Bogarde's seedy valet Barrett and Wendy Craig's fiancée Susan over a passive love object, weak aristocrat Tony. At the end, when Susan kisses Barrett, the film reaches a nightmarish peak. The real climax, though, is when she slaps him, feebly, and he reacts with shame. The slap seems to chasten Barrett precisely because it is so ineffectual and defeated—a complicated exchange to put across, and easy to miss. The Servant is a murky theatrical dungeon traveling towards that brief moment of conscience which Barrett experiences after he is slapped. If this terrific movie is finally more Pinter than Losey, careful viewing results in a deeper understanding of the ambiguous sexuality Losey only hinted at in Eve.
Technical Information:
Title: The Servant
Year: 1963
Country: UK
Director: Joseph Losey
Source: DVD9 Retail
DVD Format: PAL
DVD Size: DVD9
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 25
Length: 1:50:54
Programs used:
Resolution: 720x576
Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1
Video: MPEG 1/2 @ ~5800 kb/s
Frame Rate: 25 fps
Audio 1: AC3 English @ 192 kb/s
Audio 2: AC3 German @ 192 kb/s
Audio 3: AC3 Spanish @ 192 kb/s
Audio 4: AC3 Italian @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: Czech, Danish, German, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese, Polish, Swedish, Finnish
Menu: untouched
Video: untouched
DVD Extras:
-film analysis by Ian Christie
-theatrical trailer
-filmographies
-photo gallery
Special thanks to x264 from 'Tik for the original upload!
A note to North American downloaders:
All Phillips branded DVD players play European PAL DVD's without a hitch, and it seems like a fair amount of the DVD's we post around here are in PAL, even though we're on your side of the pond. Just a head-up.
(Use JDownloader to automate downloading):
The Servant Megaupload Link