5/22/2023 0 Comments The Servant by Robin Maugham![]() ![]() The camera pans across a tree-laden Chelsea street before closing in on the shopfront of Thomas Crapper (“By Appointment To The Late King George V Sanitary Engineers”). You could tell that Losey meant mischief right from the opening shot. As scripted by Harold Pinter from a novella by Robin Maugham, The Servant played like a twisted, homoerotic 1960s version of one of PG Wodehouse's Jeeves stories. True, British cinema had its own “new wave” of sorts led by Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz, making gritty new films in the north of England, but Losey's movie wasn't anything like The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner or Saturday Night And Sunday Morning. The early 1960s was still an era of Norman Wisdom comedies like A Stitch In Time (also released in 1963 and a huge box office hit) and of rip-roaring war movies like 633 Squadron (1964). Fifty years after The Servant (1963) was first released, it's easy to forget quite how creepy and transgressive Joseph Losey's film once seemed. ![]()
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