Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #31311 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-02-25
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Black & White, PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 110 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
For anyone interested in voyeurism, role playing, class envy and sexual humiliation, The Servant is an essential buy. Directed by Joseph Losey, scripted by Harold Pinter, it probes away remorselessly at areas other British film-makers would not go near. Dirk Bogarde, the golden boy of 50s British cinema, is transformed into a scheming, unctuous butler, Barrett. Hired by dapper young toff Tony (James Fox), he proceeds gradually to take over his master's life. In one scene, he seduces Tony's fiancée (Wendy Craig). Tony is soon slavering over the voluptuous but vaguely sinister Vera (Sarah Miles), whom he has been told is his butler's sister (in fact, she's Barrett's mistress). Gradually, the lines between master and servant are blurred. Tony becomes beholden to his butler's every whim.

Nobody does queasy quite as well as Losey. The American-born director relishes the chance to disrupt the smooth workings of what seems a typical upper-class household. Compared to the bland comedies made at Pinewood in the late 50s, The Servant couldn't help but seem groundbreaking. Thanks to his performance, Bogarde, who'd starred in so many of those comedies, was at last taken seriously as more than a matinee idol. The critics adored the film, which was first released at around the time of the Profumo crisis. "Even if I make 10 better pictures in my lifetime", Losey observed, "I don't suppose one could expect to have such unanimous appreciation and approval again". --Geoffrey Macnab

Amazon.co.uk Review
The Servant marks the start of one of the most potent creative partnerships in 1960s British cinema, between ex-pat American director Joseph Losey and playwright-turned-screenwriter Harold Pinter--a teaming that also gave birth to Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1970). It was a key film for Dirk Bogarde, too, the first of four he made with Losey that let him make the transition from lightweight matinee idol ("I was the Loretta Young of my day") to seriously regarded actor.

The Servant--amazingly, Pinter's first screenplay--quivers with sexual and social tension and unspoken menace. Tony (ex-child actor James Fox in his first adult role), an affable but none too bright young man living in Chelsea, advertises for a manservant to keep his household in order. What he gets is Barrett (Bogarde), buttoned-up and porkpie-hatted, whose deferential courtesy barely conceals his lacerating contempt for Tony and everything he stands for. Steadily he proceeds to take over, ousting Tony's posh fiancée and installing his sluttish "sister" (Sarah Miles) to complete the hapless young man's downfall. Douglas Slocombe's insidious camera, sidling and lurking to catch unexpected angles as the mood darkens, subtly maps the shifts of the power relationship. Here, as in their two later films together, Losey's outsider viewpoint catches the nuances and cruelties of the English class system in a cool, beady-eyed stare, while Pinter's flair for the unstated meanings between and behind what's said sharpens the pitch-black comedy as it slides towards nightmare.

On the DVD: the only extra feature is the theatrical trailer, stylishly understated. The print's flagged as "widescreen", which is a bit overstated for 1.66:1 (the original ratio). No sign of remastering on either sound or vision, but it's a good clean transfer. --Philip Kemp

Special Features
English
Region 2

Customer Reviews

High psychological drama at its very best
I first saw this film quite by accident, switching on the television on a dismal sunday afternoon. I gather I missed the first half of the film but what I did see utterly ruined my day. The big, fat, weighty emotions on the screen litterally suffocated me, made me feel quite sick and all the time I knew there was something very powerful happening there: two people, marvelously acted, caught up in a web of ugly dependance, eating at each other, until only one is left, the other ultimately assimilated into an unhealthy symbiosis-subordination.

More recently, I had the chance of seeing "The Servant" on the big screen and my hopes were very highly set. I could at last see the whole of the film and understand what had lead to the situation I knew and expected.
My impressions were somewhat different this time. There is undoubtedly a difficult claustrophobic feel about the film, but there is also comedy - a dark, bleak and grotesque comedy - that makes this work all the more richer for the ambiguity it instores. One shifts between extremes, between the heaviness and unhealthiness of the interlocked lives of the protagonists, the staleness and decadence of the house, the perverse demonstration of strength throttling weakness, of the servant inversing roles and finally taking the upper hand against his master, who ends up crawling very low indeed; and on the other hand, the numerous comic dialogues, the very funny situations bred out of the master's ineptitudes to live independently...
The homosexual element is also of great (and grave) importance. It is constantly slipping about in undertones (one must not forget that homosexuality was not legal in Britain at the time), seeping in at the fringes and thriving at the very core of what is going on between the two characters.
Aesthetically, the film is perfect. The use of mirrors and inhabitual camera angles, the display of the house, the black-and-white media so well suited to the dark subject matter... All this combines to produce an impressive (if intimidating) whole that leaves you feeling quite unwell.

If you believe the role of movies is to entertain, this might not be a film for you; but if delving into the depths of human relationships (however horribly uncomfortable this may be) and leaving the film different for having seen it is what you expect from this form of high drama, then you simply must see "The Servant". But beware! You won't come out of it untouched.

A perfect story and movie
If you have not seen this, you must. This is the story of class warfare, naked and without euphamism. Perfect portrayals by all, and a perfect rendering of the story.

Really, I'm not kidding.

If you have any illusions or utopian visions of any good coming from the class struggle, no matter which side you're rooting for, you had better view this movie as soon as you can.