Charles Marsden-Smedley recommends The Servant by Joseph Losey

Joseph Losey’s The Servant (1963), with a script by Harold Pinter, will captivate you from beginning to end. Dirk Bogarde plays a vengeful, cruel servant who ruins his master’s life and turns the British class system on it’s head.

The Servant
Joseph Losey
1963

If the mark of a great film is that it sticks in your mind forevermore, that you can watch it countless times without being bored by it, and that even the minor characters give memorable performances, then this 1963 Joseph Losey drama fits the bill. Set in a townhouse in Chelsea, just off the mecca of the decade, the King's Road, The Servant brilliantly depicts a master/servant relationship. The servant, Hugo (Dirk Bogarde), is manipulative and mysterious. His master, Tony (James Fox), is upper-class, weak, and naive. The film charts Tony's descent from a model of social acceptability into decadence. He is engaged to Susan (Wendy Craig), a nice girl from the country, but by the film's end, she has left to go back home and Tony's house is full of prostitutes-a decline into debauchery wholly engineered by his scheming servant, Hugo.

The film includes one of the most erotic moments ever filmed. Hugo convinces Tony that he needs more help in the house and finds a young girl, Vera (Sarah Miles), to be a maid. The first time Tony sets eyes on her, she is in the kitchen. He gets no farther than the door. Vera is a '60s cutie: big hair, huge eyes, striped jumper accentuating her ample curves. Their eyes meet. Nothing is said for a while. It's summer. She's not wearing shoes. She shuffles her weight nervously from one hip to the other. "It's hot in here," she says. The erotic tension is palpable-the silence broken only by a faucet dripping in the kitchen sink.

Two days before writing this piece, I was staying with some friends and mentioned that I had chosen to write about this scene. They asked me if I remembered who had played the maid. When I told them Sarah Miles, they exclaimed, "She's our next door neighbor, and she's coming to dinner!" Over dinner we talked about the film and Sarah remembered her parents visiting London shortly after the film's release. They only said two things: "You have sullied the family name" and  "The servants will leave." Hugo would have enjoyed that.

Charles Marsden-Smedley
Museum and exhibition designer based in London.