When the American Joseph Losey arrived in London in 1953 he left behind a career and a life as, in his own words, “an established, successful, theatre and film director…And now my earnings were almost nil, and I could not sign any of my works”. In a lengthy interview with the French film critic Michel Ciment[ii], the director described his personal situation: I was petrified. And I had physical attacks. I thought I was going to die. …it was just sheer, absolute panic, because I had nothing. I had no family: my wife had left me, my child was living in the United States in a boarding school, I had no lover, I had no money, I had no work.

 Self-induced panic was a trait of Losey’s throughout his career. He was a driven man. His relations with producers, financiers, writers and, most particularly, with dozens of women, were characterised by an edgy insecurity. This derived in part from his exile but also from the cold eye he brought to his personal relations, his place in a strange land and to the tasks to which he was occasionally reduced to make a living. To his early extreme left views he added a capacity for acid observation and extravagant expression. In his work for film and the theatre he sought to avoid cliché wherever possible. In Britain he always sought to transform the genre based subjects on offer from British producers. Throughout his career Losey rarely felt certain that the films he was making were worthy of his talent.

 The story of how Joseph Losey was able to resume his career as a film director, overcome much adversity, again sign his work with his own name and become one of the most admired film makers of his day is at the heart of this selection of his films.

 Background
Joseph Losey was born in Wisconsin in 1909. By 1953, in his own immodest summary, he had done twelve plays on Broadway, made educational films, three Government documentaries, directed five films in Hollywood and produced war relief shows, the 1946 Oscar ceremonies, the Living Newspaper, political cabaret and mass meetings. “And if I was a Communist then that was my right to be a Communist”[iii]. After finishing The Big Night (1951) Losey was told by his attorney that he had been “named” as a Communist. Three days later he left for Europe to direct a film in Italy. After completing the film (Imbarco a Mezzanotte/Stranger on the Prowl (1952) and some perambulations around Europe, he arrived in London broke and desperate.

 Anonymity
Losey was never lacking in self-esteem. He set out to re-establish himself in the film industry and to this end he gravitated towards fellow self-exiled blacklistees and was offered work fairly quickly. He was paid amounts of money he regarded as derisory and, was told that he would work anonymously. He believed he was being exploited. Nevertheless he did not make films merely for the money. His first British film The Sleeping Tiger (1954) was, in Losey’s words “a lousy, cheap story….a sort of bedtime reading for senile stags”. However, Losey’s dedication to the project can be judged from his dogged pursuit of Dirk Bogarde for the lead role of the cheap gangster. Bogarde was then the highest paid star of British cinema and his acceptance of a part in an ill-conceived thriller speaks wonders for Losey’s powers of persuasion. It was a fortuitous moment. The director and actor would work together again on The Servant (1963), King and Country (1964), Modesty Blaise (1966) and Accident (1967). Losey’s work with the actor transformed Bogarde’s career from that of a shallow leading man to an actor whose technique and skill would be sought by Visconti, Fassbinder, Tavernier, Resnais and other major film-makers of his time.

The Sleeping Tiger also enabled Losey to work with three others with whom he developed longterm working relationships: the production designer Richard MacDonald, the actor Alexander Knox and the editor Reginald Mills.

Losey made one more film that required that a pseudonym be used for the director’s credit,The Intimate Stranger (1956). Losey’s interest in the subject can be judged from his remark “I needed it. Even more I needed to work.”[iv] Losey is dismissive of the cheap little project, made in twelve days . But at least Losey was able to work again with Richard MacDonald whose designs became integral to Losey’s own visual sense. Together they formed a complimentary partnership that gave their films a distinctive “look”, often described as ‘baroque”. MacDonald’s particular genius is best found in the way that objects are placed in scenes (paintings, art works, musical instruments – what other petty Brit gangster other than other than one created by Losey would have a grand paino in his living room and a paiano tuner in attendance).

 The director’s penchant for MacDonald’s elaborate interior designs, costumes and objects, a feature of their work in even the most mundane and unpromising projects, caused him to be characterised as a stylist for whom the décor became another character in his films. This penchant reached its apotheosis in the delirium of Eve (1962).

 Assignments
By 1957, Losey was at least able again to put his name to his feature films. His next five films would provide the basis for his growing reputation. Each of them was someone else’s project and in each he worked under straitened circumstances. They are however the group of films which attest to his ambition to produce his best no matter what low motivation may have been behind each film’s conception. Losey was attached to some of them. Time Without Pity (1957) was personal. Losey felt considerable anger about capital punishment. With The Gypsy and the Gentleman (1958) Losey succumbed to the monetary blandishments of J. Arthur Rank and fell flat on his face to such an extent that he was fired from a three picture contract and did not work again, he claimed, for two and a half years.

 In terms of the years of his films’ releases, however, Losey was back by 1959 with Blind Date, a hurried assignment which Losey used to tell a love story in which one of his key themes, that of the fate of the exploited outsider, gets one of its best treatments. Blind Date was the first time that Losey directed Stanley Baker, another actor whose best work was done in the four films he made for the director. Losey loved Baker’s brute quality, his imposing physical presence. Where Bogarde played, in his dramatic parts, venal and slightly weak characters, Baker played men prepared to knock over whomever got in the way. Their only picture together was Accident (1967) in which they vied, each in their own way, for the attention and embrace of the Austrian princess Anna.

 The films of the late fifties suffered diverse commercial fates. Time Without Pity was a success in France and the basis for Losey’s revived reputation in that country. Gypsy flopped everywhere. Blind Date was a success in Britain and France but flopped in the US, a victim of the vestigial moments of the blacklist when Variety ran the headline, “Alleged REDS, in partnership with ex-Nazi sell BLIND DATE to PARAMOUNT”. A change of title to Chance Meeting did nothing for the film’s box office. In Australia the films came and went without trace or even notice until revived by the Melbourne and Sydney University Film Societies.

 Losey’s most remarkable films from this period were the prison cum robbery thriller The Criminal (1960) and the violent science fiction based The Damned (1961). By now Losey’s focus was strictly on his own new home. (He never worked again on a film in the USA.) The focus on class in Britain, a subject that had already begun to appear in Blind Date and Gypsy, now came to the forefront. The exile had developed a fascination for a society whose rulers kept secrets and closed ranks. There was as well a more personal fascination, one derived from a string of failed marriages and short term flings and affairs, with masochistic master/slave sexual relationships, often quite aberrant in their intensity. This is most notable in the brother/sister relationship in The Damned and it returns again in a more full blown form in Eve, The Servant (1963) and Secret Ceremony (1968).

By the early 60s Losey had acquired sufficient skill and authority as to be able to adapt the most banal would-be program fodder into something that justified prolonged critical attention. Losey disdained genre and ignored plot elements that simply served time. He overcame tired and cliché ridden ideas by abandoning much that was in the scripts submitted to him. To the long term collaborators whom he trusted, like Richard MacDonald, he added talented but inexperienced outsiders like the writers Alun Owen and Evan Jones and the musician John Dankworth. The skills acquired in a decade of working over the meanest of material had begun to payoff. With The Criminal he was offered a B-picture by Merton Park Studios, Britain’s poverty row. He tossed out the rubbisht script and, with Alun Owen, dared to draw a portrait of a complex man attracted to self-indulgence and sharing his time between two societies. The first is the structurally complex world inside prison where the rules are strictly enforced and a man as violently individualistic as Bannion is constantly chafed. Outside the prison, the violent individual also battles to adjust to a criminal demi-monde where genteel rules are replacing the old rough house tactics.

The Damned has a panoramic outlook, a dozen characters unsettled by a new society of the future where authoritarian science has replaced liberal humanism. Its origins at Hammer Studios are never far away but Losey, and Richard MacDonald, replace banality notably with a visual schema that contrasts the seedy run down British sea front and its lazy or decadent populace with gleaming hi-tech laboratories overlooked by brooding outdoor sculptures created by Elizabeth Frink.

 False Hopes
Then there was Eva. The story of Losey’s leap into glamorous European production and the post-production disappointments has been told endlessly[v]. For years Losey felt a distinct sense of hurt at what had been done to him by the now notorious Hakim Brothers who so ruthlessly chopped up his glittering paean to love and sex and lies and ambition. It set him back. Or did it. Within twelve months of the disasters of Eva Losey had finished The Servant (1963) and had returned in triumph to the Venice festival, both the setting of his previous film and the scene of his most acute embarrassment[vi].

 Adversity Overcome
It took Losey a decade to advance his career to the point where he had left off in the US. With The Servant he was again, at last, able to work on a subject of his own choosing. Though Pinter’s script had been commissioned by another producer, Losey began what was to prove his most fruitful long term collaboration. His work with Pinter on The Servant, Accident (1967) and The Go Between (1971) would become for both the high point of their film careers.

The success of the The Servant gave Losey the chance to choose more of his own material and allowed him to function as a producer. Some of his choices were ill-judged. Modesty Blaise (1966) was an exercise in camp self-indulgence, not a wise career move for a director with no great sense of humour. Richard MacDonald’s pop art décor and the performances of both Bogarde and Monica Vitti were redeeming features. It remains the director’s only attempt at comedy.

After Accident he was backed for a couple of films by a Hollywood studio. One of the two, Secret Ceremony (1968), was butchered for its release and has only recently been available for viewing here in the version Losey approved. He often gravitated towards high meaning international art films, but was reunited with Pinter for the truly English subject of The Go Between and won the Cannes Palme D’Or.

Eventually, in the twilight of a distinguished career characterised by enormous grit and determination punctuated by regular bouts of bitterness and maudlin self pity, he relocated to France where he made four films, only one of which Monsieur Klein (1976) added anything to his significant reputation.