For nearly all of his long and remarkably productive
career, Joseph Losey (1909-1984) was a filmmaker in
exile. Losey's brief yet promising Hollywood career was
abruptly derailed when his outspoken commitment to
leftist politics made him a choice target of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Threatened by almost
certain blacklisting and possible imprisonment, Losey
fled to Europe in search of work and political sanctuary.
Once abroad, he began to refine his more complex,
mature style and draw the attention of European critics –
especially the French, who first recognized him as an
important auteur. Although Losey remained deeply
contemptuous of the American film industry, he nevertheless
longed, in vain, to make another film in his native land.
Losey's difficult experience of the blacklist and the long,
wandering life of an expatriate indelibly marked his career,
shaping certain dominant motifs of his films – the
recurring figure of the outsider, the recasting of class and
gender roles into dark, ritualistic role-play, and the
pessimistic representation of mainstream society as a
world ruled by coldness, hypocrisy and implacable violence.
The extraordinary range of Losey's oeuvre is showcased in the HFA's once-in-a-lifetime complete retrospective. Beyond the bold, uncompromising political convictions that unite
Losey's work lies a rich and underappreciated experimental vein that alternately embraces the high camp of Boom! and Modesty Blaise, the sheer, wonderful weirdness of Secret
Ceremony and the sophisticated comedy of The Romantic Englishwoman. The seeming contradictions of Losey's oeuvre remain among its most fascinating aspects – its marriage
of mid-Western chastity with European decadence, of fierce political allegory with an obscure, operatic aesthetic and a restless searching for redemption and spirituality within the
worn and degraded. Losey's status as one of postwar America and Europe's most accomplished filmmakers rests in the rare and often uneasy balance found within all of his work
between complexity and lucidity, between profundity and shimmering, treacherously entrancing reflective surfaces.
Special thanks to Patricia Losey; Isa Cucinotta, Film Society of Lincoln Center; Pierre Jutras, Marco de Blois, Stéphanie Côté, Cinémathèque québécoise; Peter Conheim; Fleur Buckley, British
Film Institute; Bob McMinn, Lakeshore Entertainment; Carmen Accaputo, Cineteca di Bologna; Caroline Yeager Lee Ann Duggan, George Eastman House; Mark McElhatten; Mary Keene,
Film Department, Museum of Modern Art (New York); Marleen Labijt, Netherlands Filmmseum; May Haduong, Academy Film Archive; Christine Houard, Ministère des affaires étrangères;
Brigitte Bouvier, Consulate General of France, Boston; Delphine Selles-Alvarez, Cultural Services of the French Embassy (New York); Kathy Dunn, Boston Public Library; Monique Faulhaber,
Cinémathèque française; Sara Rubin, Boston Jewish Film Festival.
Directed by Joseph Losey.
US 1939, 35mm, color, 16 min.
Print courtesy of Cinémathèque Québéçoise
Despite Losey's involvement with leftist politics and culture in the 1930s, his first film was made, ironically, for the oil industry, to be shown at the Petroleum Building of the 1939 New York World's Fair. Pete Roleum explains the importance of oil for modern industry and manufacturing and warns of dire consequences should the world's supply run short. The stop-motion animation was done by Charley Bowers, the remarkable filmmaker (and slapstick comic) whose long-forgotten work has recently been rediscovered. Shot in color and 3-D, the film is now available only in 2-D and in an incomplete state, missing a few minutes of footage.
The Boy with Green HairDirected by Joseph Losey.
With Dean Stockwell, Pat O'Brien, Robert Ryan
US 1948, 35mm, color, 82 min.
Print courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art
Losey's remarkable debut feature combines the magical realism of a children's story with the bold, message-driven radicalism of the Depression-era proletariat theater where he received his first crucial training as a director. Dean Stockwell stars as the titular boy whose mysterious transformation awakens the fears and prejudices dormant in his small hometown. A cult favorite and among Losey's most enduring films, The Boy with Green Hair is also one of the more outspokenly Leftist films of the 1940s, a final vestige of Roosevelitan Hollywood on the eve of the Red Scare that would count Losey as one of its most prominent victims. This film has been preserved by The Museum of Modern Art with funding provided by The Film Foundation.
Directed by Joseph Losey.
UK 1960, 16mm, color, 12 min.
Print courtesy of the British Film Institute
During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Losey partially supported himself in Britain by making commercials for such products as Ponds Cold Cream and Rose's Lime Juice. One of Losey's longest commercials, this advertisement for Ford automobiles reveals his great acumen as an editor and his skill at discovering formal challenges even within his more mundane assignments.
The Criminal (aka The Concrete Jungle)Directed by Joseph Losey.
With Stanley Baker, Patrick Magee,
Sam Wanamaker
UK 1960, 35mm, b/w, 97 min.
Print courtesy of the British Film Institute
Losey paints a searing, stunning portrait of a corrupt
world in this dark crime film that contrasts
swinging
London with the stark theatricality of prison life and the
bleak winter landscapes gorgeously captured by master
cinematographer Robert Krasker (The Third Man).
Stanley Baker unleashes an intense performance as a
stylish ex-con whose ties to a crime syndicate draw him
into an ill-fated racetrack robbery and the hands of a
sadistic prison warden (Magee) determined, at all costs,
to find the hidden loot. The Criminal marks the first of
five collaborations between Losey, a passionate lover of
jazz, and the great British jazz composer John
Dankworth, whose wife Cleo Lain is heard singing the
haunting ballad "Thieving Boy."
The Romantic Englishwoman Directed by Joseph Losey.
With Michael Caine, Glenda Jackson,
Helmut Berger
UK 1975, 35mm, color, 116 min.
Print from the Harvard Film Archive Collection
At the end of his fruitful collaboration with Harold Pinter, Losey turned to British playwright Tom Stoppard for a notably different take on the taut dramas of entrapped bourgeois life so successfully explored in the Pinter- Losey films. The result is one of Losey's most endearing and genuinely funny films – a sophisticated comedy about writer's block and the perils of an overripe imagination. Featuring the wonderful pairing of Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson as a couple struck by mid-life crises, The Romantic Englishwoman follows the entrance of a mysterious stranger – a handsome young man who is either a poet or a gigolo, or both – who seems to answer both characters' desire for change.
Directed by Joseph Losey.
With Tom Trout, Richard Gaines, Anthony Caruso
US 1945, 35mm, b/w, 19 min.
Print courtesy of Academy Film Archive
The protagonist of this morality tale cum crime drama is a crooked cop who uses his insider knowledge to lead a gang of thieves. His criminal enterprise is complicated when a fellow police officer is gunned down during a heist. Part of the studio's Crime Doesn't Pay series, this crisply directed short dates from Losey's brief stint at MGM (where he directed Elizabeth Taylor's screen test for National Velvet).
MDirected by Joseph Losey.
With David Wayne, Howard da Silva,
Martin Gabel
US 1951, 35mm, b/w, 88 min.
Print courtesy of British Film Institute
As the Hollywood blacklist swung into high gear, Losey
found an ideal vehicle for his increasing
alienation from
the studio system in this striking and much admired
reinterpretation of Fritz Lang's classic tale of a tortured
child killer and the malignant society that is unable to
help him. Losey assembled many of his stellar cast from
the New York theater, including Howard da Silva,
Norman Lloyd and the talented David Wayne, who adds
a new level of perversity and poignant loneliness to his
portrayal of M's hunted psychopath. A key American film
of the early 1950s, Losey's M offers a dark cautionary tale
for the television age that sees the corrupt intertwining
of politics and media fanning the flames of mass hysteria.
Secret Ceremony Directed by Joseph Losey.
With Elizabeth Taylor, Robert Mitchum,
Mia Farrow
UK 1968, 35mm, color, 109 min.
Print from Universal Studios
Based on a script by radical Hungarian playwright and
screenwriter George Tabori, Secret Ceremony is a mysterious
film about vulgar characters caught up in an
obscure ritual that they can only dimly understand,
despite the fact that it controls their actions. All of the
baroque tendencies in Losey's cinema find full expression
in this lavish, star-studded production – Losey's second
film with Elizabeth Taylor – cast this time as a high-end
prostitute mourning the recent death of her daughter.
The impressive cast also includes Mia Farrow as the
waif who bears an uncanny resemblance to the dead girl
and Robert Mitchum as her strangely demanding stepfather.
The increasing complexity of staging and mise-enscène
in Losey's European films is clearly marked in
Secret Ceremony's moody and dramatic use of the
Art Noveau mansion which, much like the houses in
The Servant and The Go-Between, acts as a character in
the film.
The Servant Directed by Joseph Losey.
With Dirk Bogarde, James Fox, Sarah Miles
UK 1963, 35mm, b/w, 115 min.
Print courtesy of British Film Institute
Losey's first collaboration with Pinter resulted in the
director's best-known and certainly one his very best
films. The gradual entrapment of a wealthy layabout –
James Fox in his debut role – by his duplicitous
manservant, powerfully captured by Bogarde, offers an
allegory for the psycho-sexual perversity of the British
class system. The screenplay is pure Pinter, with dialogue
acting primarily as a ritualistic mask designed, yet
ultimately unable, to conceal the characters' misshaped
lives. One of the best of Losey's many collaborations
with artistic consultant Richard MacDonald, The Servant underscores the decadence of its subject with deliriously
extravagant cinematography and mise-en-scène, using
unexpected camera angles and frames-within-frames to
illustrate the story’s multiple layers of deception, roleplay
and power struggle.
The Assassination of TrotskyDirected by Joseph Losey.
With Richard Burton, Romy Schneider,
Alain Delon
Italy/France 1972, 35mm, color, 103 min.
English print with French subtitles
Print from Tamasa Distribution
Among Losey's more openly political works is his sober
and gripping reenactment of Leon Trotsky's murder in
Mexico
City on August 20, 1940 by an agent of Stalin.
Often read as a partial apology for his previously held
Stalinist
sympathies, The Assassination also returns to
the theme of the intruder central to Losey's cinema and
the dark implication that an intruder, like a vampire,
must always somehow be invited in. Alain Delon's sangfroid
portrait of Trotsky's killer projects both the nefariousness
and innocence that are templates for intruders
throughout Losey's cinema – although Delon's icy killer
remains focused on every detail of his mission, he is also
bewildered by the violence of the task assigned him.
Eva (aka Eve)Directed by Joseph Losey.
With Stanley Baker, Jeanne Moreau, Virna Lisi
UK/France 1962, 35mm, b/w, 103 min.
In English and Italian with Finnish subtitles
Print from Kino International
Losey made a bold gambit that his three hour version of Eva would become his most "important" work. Despite the removal of over one hour by its producers, Eva did, in fact, dramatically redefine Losey’s status as a director of European art films. At the heart of this surprisingly dark story of a bored and embittered author and his fatal tryst with a mod seductress are two riveting, careerdefining performances by Stanley Baker as a seedy, Welsh Hemingway figure and Jeanne Moreau as Eva – the cruelest of the many femmes fatales in Losey's cinema, and a fascinating epitome of frayed glamour. Something like an Antonionian film noir, Eva dispassionately observes a writer's total disintegration and defeat in the hands of a cold blooded temptress like a moth caught in a cat's deadly, idle game. With its crisply baroque camera work and mise-en-scène and a gorgeous score by nouvelle vague great Michel Legrand,Eva introduced a new note of eccentricity into Losey's work.
Directed by Joseph Losey.
US 1941, 35mm, b/w, 20 min.
Print courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art
An early expression of Losey's fascination with alternate perspectives of childhood, this rarely screened poetic documentary depicts life at a progressive camp where rote education is replaced by unsupervised interaction. A product of Losey's association with the seminal leftist film group Frontier Films, A Child Went Forth features the poignant music of noted composer Hans Eisler and the able photography of John Ferno (The Spanish Earth). Losey sold the film to the US government, who saw the short as an effective tool to prepare parents for the possible evacuation of children from cities to rural areas, should that become necessary during the upcoming World War, as it did in London during the Blitz.
The Big Night Directed by Joseph Losey.
With John Barrymore, Jr., Preston Foster,
Joan Lorring
US 1953, 35mm, b/w, 75 min.
Print courtesy of George Eastman House
Among Losey's most powerful and personal films are
those that deal, like The Big Night, with youth and the
difficult passage into the adult world. John Barrymore, Jr.
gives the performance of his tragically foreshortened
career in this story of a young man shaken to the core by
the sight of his father's humiliation at the hand of a
sadistic mobster. Wandering through seedy nightspots,
the boy encounters a frightening and fascinating nocturnal
world that he has never known. By carefully refusing
expected stereotypes, the refreshingly awkward and
unpredictable characters in The Big Night reveal the
complexity and nuance of character and motivation
that stands among the important achievements of
Losey's cinema.
GalileoDirected by Joseph Losey.
With Topol, Edward Fox, Michael Lonsdale
UK 1974, 35mm, color, 143 min.
Print from Kino International
As the first director of Bertolt Brecht's 1947 play Galileo (in which Charles Laughton played the lead
role), Losey
was the logical choice to helm the screen adaptation for
Ely Landau's American Film Theatre production. Written
and produced in the shadow of the anti-Communist
witch hunt that ultimately caused both Brecht and
Losey's permanent exit from the United States, this story
of the seventeenth-century Italian astronomer – forced
by the Catholic Church to recant the scientific discoveries
that ran counter to religious doxa – had an obvious timeliness.
But in typically Brechtian (and Loseyesque) fashion,
this Galileo is no hero. Oscillating between narcissism
and cowardice, Galileo instead illustrates the necessity,
and difficulty, of ethics – a problem as relevant in
1947/74 as 2008. The overtly theatrical nature of
performance, dialogue and mise-en-scene in Galileo combine to establish an aptly Brechtian frame between
screen and audience.
Time Without Pity Directed by Joseph Losey.
With Michael Redgrave, Alec McCowen,
Leo McKern
UK 1957, 35mm, b/w, 88 min.
Print courtesy of British Film Institute
One of Losey's best British genre films, Time Without
Pity is a tense thriller told largely in real time about a
recovering alcoholic who has only has twenty-four hours
to prove the innocence of his son, who has been
sentenced to death for the murder of his girlfriend.
Immediately deflecting the whodunit aspect of the plot
by revealing the killer in the pre-credit sequence, Losey
transforms the film into a furious and moving protest
against capital punishment. Time was both the first
feature since The Big Night for which Losey could
receive a directorial screen credit using his real name
and the film that launched his reputation in France as
an emerging talent.
Directed by Joseph Losey.
With Dirk Bogarde, Alexis Smith, Alexander Knox
UK 1954, 35mm, b/w, 89 min.
Print courtesy of British Film Institute
In his first British film, Losey maps the territory of sexually inflected power games, infidelity and simmering class tension that he would spend the rest of his UK career exploring. Dirk Bogarde debuts with Losey as a young tough whose attempt to mug a psychiatrist (Knox) lands him in the doctor's home as part of a social experiment in rehabilitation over punishment, a test that is complicated, inevitably, by the interests of his benefactor's wife (Smith). A fiercely energetic film that far transcends its limited budget and formulaic story, The Sleeping Tiger channeled the resourcefulness of form and performance that Losey learned on the stage and in the Hollywood studios.
Directed by Joseph Losey.
With Donald Wolfit, Michael Medwin,
Michael Ripper
UK 1955, 35mm, color, 29 min.
Print courtesy of British Film Institute
An injured thief – dressed in drag – is forced to take
refuge in a remote cabin inhabited by a blind poet in this
oddity directed by Losey for Hammer Studios. Although
Losey viewed A Man on the Beach primarily as a continuation
of the experimentation with color begun in The Boy
With Green Hair, this early British assignment also
continues his exploration of crime, sexual deviancy and
mercurial power relationships.
Directed by Joseph Losey.
With Yves Montand, Laurent Malet, Miou-Miou
France/Spain 1978, 35mm, color, 97 min. French with English subtitles
Print from Tamasa Distribution
Perhaps the most direct link between Losey and Alain
Resnais lies in this rarely screened political melodrama,
based on the sequel to the novel La Guerre est finie, which
Resnais filmed in 1966, with Yves Montand playing more
or less the same character in both films. Like The
Assassination of Trotsky and Resnais' film, Les Routes du
sud looks ruefully back, with reluctant maturity and bitter
clarity, at failed political idealism. Montand brings a
meditative world-weariness to the part of an exiled
Spanish screenwriter living in relative wealth in France but haunted both by Franco's victory and by his own
retreat from politics. A late life opportunity to reengage
with Spanish politics suddenly allows him to confront his
ambivalence about both his past and the son with whom
he has grown estranged.
The Prowler Directed by Joseph Losey.
With Van Heflin, Evelyn Keyes, John Maxwell
US 1951, 35mm, b/w, 92 min.
Print from the Harvard Film Archive Collection
Losey's personal favorite of his studio films offers a
brilliant critique of the blind careerism of middle-class
America. Van Heflin gives a revelatory performance as a
corrupt police officer who is both predator and
victim, the first in a long series of fractured, contradictory
protagonists that recur throughout Losey's films.
Co-written by uncredited blacklisted writers Hugo Butler
and Dalton Trumbo (who, in an inside joke, speaks the
role of the radio dj), The Prowler's jaundiced view of
structured family life is a quintessentially Loseyian
depiction of human relationships as a perverse and
sexually tainted game of power.
Directed by Joseph Losey.
With Richard Basehart, Roger Livesay,
Constance Cummings
UK 1956, 35mm, b/w, 95 min.
Print from the Harvard Film Archive Collection
The Intimate Stranger offers an ironic, sordid echo of the
situation faced by Losey and its blacklisted screenwriter
Howard Koch, best known for his co-authorship of
Casablanca. Koch's story substitutes sexual peccadillo for
politics as an American film editor, drummed out of
Hollywood by an unnamed sex scandal, finds success
in England by marrying a powerful producer's daughter.
The invitation of an American star – also the writer's
ex-girlfriend – brings disaster in the form of a string of
anonymous letters from a woman claiming to be another
of the writer's former lovers.
Don Giovanni Directed by Joseph Losey.
With Ruggero Raimondi, Kiri Te Kanawa, José
van Dam
Italy/France/Germany 1980, 35mm, color, 185 min. In Italian
Print from Gaumont
Mozart's opera version of the Don Juan legend proves a
perfect fit for Losey, with its dark story of an unrepentant
libertine – a rapist and murderer – pursued by the aristocrats
he has ruthlessly victimized. A summit of Losey's
complex mise-en-scène and meticulous attention to period
detail, Don Giovanni was shot in Palladian villas in and
around Venice and Vicenza. Although Losey cared far
more for jazz than opera, he nevertheless managed to
direct one of the great opera films, assembling an exquisite
cast of opera luminaries and drawing out the
Loseyian aspects of Mozart's tragedy of sexual cruelty,
infidelity and class conflict.
Figures in a Landscape Directed by Joseph Losey.
With Robert Shaw, Malcolm McDowell,
Henry Woolf
UK 1970, 35mm, color, 110 min.
Print courtesy of George Eastman House
Losey returned to his roots in genre filmmaking in this minimalist reinvention of the paranoid political
thriller so popular in the 1970s. Robert Shaw and Malcolm McDowell are two anonymous fugitives, just escaped from an unknown prison in an unnamed country and relentlessly pursued by a malevolent police helicopter. Despite their sympathy, the local population can do little to help the men and by the end it becomes clear that the two protagonists are playing out another of Losey's rituals of power and role-playing, albeit on a more ambitious scale than usual. Losey reportedly despised the gratuitous violence of the source material and enlisted Shaw's skill as a writer to craft a screenplay that would be a tough critique of militaristic violence. The result remains an intelligent and suspenseful film that powerfully uses the scenario of the chase as an existential metaphor.
AccidentDirected by Joseph Losey.
With Dirk Bogarde, Jacqueline Sassard,
Stanley Baker
UK 1967, 35mm, color, 105 min.
Print courtesy of the British Film Institute
Often held up as one of Losey's uncontested masterpieces,
Accident is a lucid and chilling summary
of his
pessimistic view of human relationships, a taut ensemble
piece about simmering mid-life dissatisfaction and
repression. Focusing on the tense rivalry between two
married Oxford dons over an attractive young Austrian
student, Accident boasts one of Pinter's finest screenplays,
revealing his incredible ability to make even the
simplest phrases shimmer with malice and unease.
Tracking back and forth from the titular accident, the film
unfolds a complex flashback structure that only gradually
reveals the labyrinthine relationships between a
professor and his colleagues and students. Accident's sophisticated time structure no doubt owes something to
Alain Resnais, who returned the favor by professing his
unmitigated admiration for the film.
Directed by Joseph Losey.
With Keith Michell, Melina Mercouri,
Flora Robson
UK 1958, 35mm, color, 107 min.
Print courtesy of the British Film Institute
Regency rake meets femme fatale in Losey's first
costume drama, set in early nineteenth-century England.
A mercenary wastrel enters into an arranged marriage
strictly to acquire the dowry, but just before the
wedding, he meets the gypsy of the title, played with
spirited intensity by Mercouri, in her first English-language
role. Full of mutual deceit and tempestuous passion,
their role-playing relationship echoes the power games of
The Prowler, Eva and The Servant. And like the title
characters in those films, Mercouri's gypsy embodies
the figure of the outsider, the intruder who awakens the
violence and sexuality concealed just below the surface of
a rigid social system.
Harvard Film Archive is a division of Fine Arts Library of the Harvard College Library.
Copyright ©
2009
President and Fellows of Harvard College..