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STRANGER ON THE PROWL: THE FILMS OF JOSEPH LOSEY

May 7 - 31, 2004

left: Accident

Coincidentally or not, Wisconsin was the birthplace of three great American filmmakers: Nicholas Ray, Orson Welles and Joseph Losey.

But was Losey really an American filmmaker? The movies he made at MGM, before the blacklist forced him into a European exile, seem closer to the socially acute work done by European emigrés like Sirk, Lang and Ophüls than the work of an American-born director. His British films, with and without Harold Pinter, are like nothing else around at the time: restlessly dynamic, honing in on cultural and sexual tensions with a surgeon's precision. And the films he made in France, during the final period of his career, are densely concentrated works, once again vastly different from the majority of French cinema at the time. From start to finish, Losey was always swimming against the tide, the better to dive into suppressed currents of feeling that no one else even dared to approach.

This retrospective covers every period of Losey's career, and for those who know him only as the director of THE SERVANT and ACCIDENT, you have quite a few surprises in store - it's taking nothing away from those magnificent films to say that Losey did work just as good before and after. From the stunning noirs THE PROWLER and THE BIG NIGHT, through the rock- solid British films of the 50s and early 60s like THE CRIMINAL and the almost unbearably tense TIME WITHOUT PITY, to the elegant sexual intrigues of THE ROMANTIC ENGLISHWOMAN and SECRET CEREMONY and on to the brilliant and disturbingly ambiguous MR. KLEIN, the most powerfully oblique film ever made on the Holocaust, Losey's was one of the edgiest, most physically immediate and intellectually probing visions in cinema.

With generous support by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Please Note: The Walter Reade Theater tries to show the best film prints possible. Unfortunately, sometimes the only available print of an older film is in poor condition. Please check the film descriptions for print condition information

THE SERVANT
U.K., 1963; 115m
A breakthrough: a long, elegant swan dive into the intricacies of the British class system, with a tone unlike that of any other film before or since, at once urbane, nasty, cool and sinuously physical. Dirk Bogarde is Barrett, the servant hired by a lazy young aristocrat named Tony (James Fox) to manage his newly acquired Georgian townhouse. When Barrett realizes that Tony's upper-crust girlfriend (Wendy Craig) is a threat to his supremacy within the household, he sets his sluttish girlfriend (Sarah Miles) to work. By the end, the tables have turned, and master and servant have become equals on a field of loathing. It took quite a bit of doing for Losey, Pinter and Bogarde to get this adaptation of Robin Maugham's novel off the ground, but it was worth it: "The film still seems as fresh as a daisy to me," wrote Pinter, "whilst stinking of moral corruption."
Fri May 7: 2 & 6:30; Sun May 9: 5; Mon May 31: 1 pm and 6:15 pm
Mon May 10: 3:30

THE BIG NIGHT
U.S., 1953; 75min
Losey's final Hollywood film (he had to skip the country before editing was completed) is a revenge melodrama, featuring the young John Drew Barrymore as a confused teenager pounding the New York pavements looking for the men who beat up his father. The film now seems like a small miracle of B invention and, as always, sharp physicality. With Preston Foster as Barrymore's kindly father and Dorothy Comingore (the 2nd Mrs. Charles Foster Kane). The script was extensively revised by blacklisted writers Hugo Butler and Ring Lardner, Jr.
Fri May 7: 4:30; Sat May 8: 6:30
Mon May 10: 9

ACCIDENT
U.K., 1967; 105m
Summer in Oxford, and beneath the genteel surface there's a vast network of resentment and cruelty between two professors (Dirk Bogarde and Stanley Baker). They've both dallied with the same student, who's just been killed with her boyfriend in a car accident. Losey's second collaboration with Pinter is even bolder than THE SERVANT. The time shifts, the nuanced performances and the astonishing use of color and sound contribute to a quietly devastating experience. One of the boldest works of a bold era. With Michael York, Vivien Merchant, Jacqueline Sassard, Alexander Knox, Delphine Seyrig and Pinter himself as Bell. "[A] movie of real suffering that is clever, delicate and urbane with the most elegant infighting in acting between Dirk Bogarde and Stanley Baker" (Manny Farber). Archive 16mm - there will be a break between reels.
Fri May 7: 9; Sat May 8: 2

THE PROWLER
U.S., 1951; 92m
Let's turn the floor over to Manny Farber, who named THE PROWLER one of the best films of 1951: "A tabloid melodrama of sex and avarice in suburbia, out of [James M.] Cain by Joe Losey, featuring almost perfect acting by Evelyn Keyes as a hot, dumb, average American babe who, finding the attentions of her disc-jockey husband beginning to pall, takes up with an amoral rookie cop (nicely hammed up by Van Heflin). Sociologically sharp on stray and hitherto untouched items like motels, athletic nostalgia, the impact of nouveau riche furnishings on an ambitious ne'er-do-well, the potentially explosive boredom of the childless, uneducated, well-to-do housewife with too much time on her hands." All that's left to add is that Losey gets a visual lock on the world of the California bourgeoisie with the help of his DP Arthur Miller. Partly ghostwritten by soon-to-be-blacklisted Dalton Trumbo. Archive print.
Preceded by
A Gun in His Hand
U.S., 1945; 19m
A crisply directed short for MGM's Crime Doesn't Pay series, about a young man who puts his police academy training to his advantage when he joins a gang of thieves.
Sat May 8: 4:15 & 8:15; Mon May 10: 1

GALILEO
U.K., 1974; 143m
"Before Losey left Hollywood to escape the blacklist, he returned to the theater to direct the theatrical premiere of Bertolt Brecht's Galileo in 1947. His 1975 film version is as precise a rendering of the play, one of Brecht's greatest, as one could possibly hope for. In an ideal world, the lead would be played by Charles Laughton, who originated the role onstage, rather than the jolly Topol. However, the beauty of the production more than makes up for the actor's sometimes excessively life-affirming presence. With Edward Fox as the Inquisitor, Michel Lonsdale as the Pope, John Gielgud as the old Cardinal, John McEnery and Tom Conti as Galileo's erstwhile allies, and Margaret Leighton as a lady of the court. Mr. Losey knows exactly what kind of filmed theater he wants to achieve, and how to achieve it." - Vincent Canby New 35mm print.
Tue May 11: 3; Thurs May 13: 1; Sun May 16: 6; Mon May 31: 3:15

KING AND COUNTRY
U.K., 1964; 86m
osey followed the success of THE SERVANT with this quietly riveting and relatively straightforward adaptation of the John Wilson play Hamp. Tom Courtenay is Private Arthur Hamp, the shellshocked soldier who wanders away from his regiment during WWI and is subsequently arrested as a deserter. Dirk Bogarde is Captain Hargreaves, who defends Hamp during his court-martial. The real subject of KING AND COUNTRY is the tortured relationship between the lower-middle-class deserter and the upper-crust Hargreaves - as always with Losey, class distinctions matter deeply. Courtenay and Bogarde are nothing short of extraordinary. With Leo McKern and Barry Foster (the murderer in Hitchcock's Frenzy). The haunting harmonica score is by Larry Adler. Archive print.
Preceded by
Man on the Beach
U.K., 1955; 29m
Losey was finally able to sign his own name to this half-hour color short, about a wounded criminal on the run (Michael Medwin) finding refuge in a cottage owned by a blind man (Donald Wolfit).
Wed May 12: 4 & 8:30; Sat May 15: 2

FIGURES IN A LANDSCAPE
U.K., 1970; 110m
Malcolm McDowell and Robert Shaw (who wrote the adaptation of Barry England's novel) are Ansell and MacConnachie, two men on the run across an unidentified desert landscape, being chased by a black helicopter. Every time they slow down to take a rest, they tell each other little stories about their lives and their loved ones. But that relentless helicopter just keeps on coming. This small-scale allegory is beautifully shot by the great Henri Alekan (Beauty and the Beast, Wings of Desire), with Cronenberg regular Peter Suschitzky as his assistant. "Far from the stones and gargoyles of old Europe, the most visually ravishing moment that Losey, the celebrated metteur en décor, ever put onscreen may be the opalescent dawn of the first shot of FIGURES IN A LANDSCAPE." - Richard Combs Archive print.
Fri May 14: 1; Sat May 15: 6:30

THE LAWLESS
U.S., 1950; 83m
Losey's second feature is a tough, muckraking melodrama about a newspaper editor (MacDonald Carey) who becomes increasingly involved in a race war between the Mexican migrant workers and the white locals in a northern California town, which culminates in a horrific riot. Losey shot THE LAWLESS, written by Daniel Mainwaring (Out of the Past) under his customary pseudonym "John Homes," in less than three weeks, on location in Marysville and Grass Valley, and he used many local non-actors in featured and background roles. On paper, it's a fairly standard social protest B-movie (based on Mainwaring's own novel). On screen, under Losey's dynamic, whip-cracking direction, it's an explosive, insightful study of clashing social forces. With Lalo Rios (the acid-throwing nephew in Welles' Touch of Evil) and Mauricio Jara, both discovered by Losey, and the beautiful Gail Russell. Archive print, has French subtitles.
Preceded by
First on the Road
U.S., 1959; 12m
Losey made around 250 commercials in England during the 50s, including this 12-minute promotional film for Ford.
Fri May 14: 3 & 7

THE CRIMINAL aka THE CONCRETE JUNGLE
U.K., 1960; 97m
This diamond-hard movie, written by Alun Owen (he would later write A Hard Day's Night), is a work of tough, clear-eyed social observation in the form of a gangster/prison picture. Stanley Baker is Bannion, the hard-headed independent criminal with charisma, who sets up a racetrack heist the minute he gets out of prison and soon finds himself back in the slammer. Baker and Losey made a ferocious combination: this was the second of Baker's four films with Losey, and in many ways his best performance. Sam Wanamaker, who left America for England before the blacklist could get to him, is the two-faced gangster with the cigarette holder, and Kubrick regular Patrick Magee is the prison guard. The haunting score is by Johnny Dankworth, and that's Cleo Laine singing the haunting theme: "All my sadness, all my joy/Come from loving a thieving boy." Archive print.
Fri May 14: 5 & 9; Mon May 17: 2
Tue May 18: 9

EVA
U.K./France, 1962; 116m
This high-profile adaptation of the James Hadley Chase novel was allegedly Losey's bid for continental artistic respectability - which, it could be argued, he had already achieved with THE CRIMINAL. His producers, the Hakim Brothers, mangled his original 155-minute cut and deep-sixed his idea of a Miles Davis score. Which leaves EVA a compromised film, though hardly an unsatisfying one: every scene is touched with greatness. Stanley Baker, good as always, is Tyvian Jones, the Welsh novelist who's stolen his deceased brother's novel about his life as a coal miner and become an international sensation. On holiday in Venice, his life is turned upside down by the volatile, enigmatic Eva (Jeanne Moreau, who was never more demonically alluring). Right from the start, Losey had a penchant for integrating architecture into the action of his material. Here, he and cinematographer Henri Decäe take the city of Venice and turn it into the very embodiment of frozen eroticism. With Virna Lisi as Tyvian's wife, and a score by Michel Legrand. Watch for an appearance by Peggy Guggenheim. The only prints of the complete 2 hour film have Danish and Finnish subtitles.
Sat May 15: 4:15 & 8:30; Tue May 18: 1

FINGER OF GUILT aka INTIMATE STRANGER
U.S., 1956; 95m
Consciously or not, Losey found his way to many metaphors for the experience of the blacklist throughout his career, from the explorations in many of his Hollywood films to the strange currents of paranoia that ripple throughout the bulk of his European films. As in BLIND DATE, the blacklist metaphor is close to transparent in this taut, astringent thriller, which Losey made under the pseudonym "Joseph Walton" - and which was written by fellow blacklistee Howard W. Koch under the pseudonym "Peter Howard." Richard Basehart is a former American film editor working in a British film studio as a producer - his father-in-law, played by the great Roger Livesay (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death), is the studio chief. Basehart starts to receive incriminating letters from an unknown woman, which drive him to the brink of madness. The Pirandellian factor here (intrigue played out against the backdrop of moviemaking) is as formidable as it is in many of Losey's more expensive productions. With Faith Brook as Basehart's wife, and Constance Cummings as the neurotic star of his current production.
Sun May 16: 1:45; Wed May 19: 2:30 & 6:30

THE GO-BETWEEN
U.K., 1971; 118m
Michael Redgrave is Leo Colston, remembering back to 1900, when he was 13 (Dominic Guard plays Leo as a boy) and spent the summer at the Norfolk estate of his friend Marcus. Marcus's sister Marian (Julie Christie) takes a shine to Leo, and eventually starts asking him to take secret messages to their neighbor Ted (Alan Bates), behind the back of the man to whom she's engaged (Edward Fox). L.P. Hartley's novel is a modern classic, as powerful an inquiry into the nature of veiled motivations and emotions as Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier. In their final collaboration (unfortunately, their projected Proust adaptation never made it to the screen), Pinter and Losey crafted an acutely perceptive, quietly tragic film out of Hartley's classic. Thanks to their addition of a framing device with Redgrave as the older Leo, THE GO-BETWEEN ranks as one of the finest "memory films" ever made. "When I first read The Go-Between I burst into tears on the last page," Pinter admitted.
PLEASE NOTE: The print of “The Go Between” we are showing in the Losey series is faded and scratchy. It is the only print in existence!
Sun May 16: 3:30 & 8:45; Mon May 17: 4

BLIND DATE aka CHANCE MEETING
U.K., 1958; 90m
A carefree painter named Jan (Hardy Krüger, at his most ebulliently sinister) hops off a bus on a bright warm day in London and runs over to his girl's house to find only an envelope with a note for him and some money. The door opens. The police walk in, led by Stanley Baker's Inspector Morgan. As in Kafka's The Trial, it's unclear why they're there, what they want, why they want to keep Jan in custody. What develops, through an extended, tightly choreographed interrogation ("the cop probing the artist with questions about a crime that hasn't been revealed yet in a style that can only be called Pinter-before-the-fact" is the way Richard Combs puts it in an excellent Losey article in the current Film Comment), and a series of flashbacks, is another thriller with a sharp sense of the class structure. Perhaps the most beautifully crafted of Losey's early British films. Micheline Presle is the mysterious Jacqueline, and Gordon Jackson of Upstairs Downstairs fame is one of the policemen. Christopher Challis is the DP, and the excellent score is by Richard Rodney Bennett. NOTE: the print is in poor condition but we are unable to find another print.
Wed May 19: 4:30 &8:30
Thurs May 20: 2:30 & 6:30

STRANGER ON THE PROWL / IMBARCO A MEZZANOTTE
Italy, 1952; 82m
Losey's first film after his flight to Europe ("a Communist-Fascist co-production" according to Losey biographer David Caute) was credited to Andrea Forzano, the son of the man who owned the studio where the film was shot. He was clearly inspired by the landscapes of Tuscany as well as the example of neorealism when he shot this story of a hungry vagrant (Paul Muni) who murders a shop owner and goes on the lam with a boy (Vittorio Manunta) who has stolen a bottle of milk from the same store. Against all odds - an uncooperative Paul Muni, shooting conditions in post-war Italy, a questionable script, suspension of payment from the producers and a subsequent strike, not to mention the terrors of going into exile - this is a moving film of real force. This was Losey's first film shot by Henri Alekan. Archive 16mm - there will be a break between reels.
Thurs May 20: 4:30 & 8:30

THESE ARE THE DAMNED
U.S., 1962; 87m
This is one of Losey's very best and most disturbing films. MacDonald Carey falls in love with a local woman living in a dank British seaside town. Which incites the wrath of her loving brother King (played by a menacing young Oliver Reed), prompting him and his motorcycle gang to chase the couple down. They hide out in a cave, where they find a group of lonely, radioactive children, the sad result of scientist Alexander Knox's attempt to create a race of people able to withstand nuclear annihilation. Losey's customary physicality - everything is hard, tense, graphic - is in full force here. This is one sad, tough movie. You might just come out humming the motorcycle gang's theme song, "Black Leather Rock." Shot in "Hammerscope." Complete UK version.
Fri May 21: 1, 5 & 9; Mon May 24: 3

TIME WITHOUT PITY
U.K., 1957; 88m
A melodrama that goes hurtling across the screen at a breakneck pace, TIME WITHOUT PITY was criticized in its day for being "neo-baroque" - which seems right on the money. Michael Redgrave is the father with 24 hours to prove his son (a very young Alec McCowen) innocent of murder before he's put to death. Leo McKern is the real murderer (we're not giving anything away - Losey threw out the whodunit structure of Emlyn Williams's original play by revealing the killer's identity in the pre-credits sequence), a racecar-driving business magnate. Raymond Durgnat, one of Losey's greatest and most eloquent admirers, called this unstoppably and almost unbearably intense movie a "soul fight," and the description feels apt: Redgrave's brilliant performance is pitched at a level of desperation that is matched by the more interior desperation of the equally brilliant McKern, and it feels like a clash of the gods. The crisp, dynamic cinematography is by the great Freddie Francis. Archive print.
Fri May 21: 3 & 7; Mon May 24: 1; Fri May 28: 6:30

MR. KLEIN
France, 1976; 123m
Delon gives one of his finest performances in this searing indictment of emotional and political indifference in wartime France. One morning in 1942, art dealer Robert Klein (Delon) awakens to find on his doorstep a Jewish newspaper, with a subscription label addressed to him. Klein is puzzled - he's a Catholic Alsatian, and although he himself has nothing against Jews, being mistaken for Jewish in German-occupied Paris is at least inconvenient. So he decides to track down the source of the confusion, and soon is convinced that another, Jewish Robert Klein, is trying to take over his identity; he even appeals to the police, who think he's simply a Jew trying an elaborate camouflage with such a preposterous ruse. Klein's search becomes a descent into a Kafkaesque nightmare, brilliantly and coolly calibrated by Losey as all fixed points of reference gradually fade away. With a wonderful cameo by Jeanne Moreau.
Tue May 25: 3; Sun May 30: 4 & 8:45

BOOM!
U.K., 1968; 113m
Like The Sandpiper and Hammersmith Is Out, this impossible adaptation of Tennessee Williams's The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore is one of the linchpins of the Liz and Dick legend. Losey had been shopping around a version of Williams's play throughout the 60s, with Sean Connery and Simone Signoret in mind for the roles of Sissy Goforth and Chris Flanders. Once the First Couple of International Cinema signed on, with a massively expensive shoot on Capri (the Bloody Marys alone drove the film over budget), BOOM! was destined to join Skidoo, Casino Royale and Myra Breckenridge as one of the great So-Square-It's-Hip epics of the late 60s. But it's at once more elegant, better written and more fun than the rest of them. With Noel Coward as the witch (!).
Wed May 26: 1; Fri May 28: 8:30; Mon May 31: 8:30

SECRET CEREMONY
U.K., 1968; 109m
Losey's second film in one year with then-superstar Elizabeth Taylor is perhaps his most purely baroque. Taylor is a high-priced, not-so-happy hooker who is accosted on a bus by a young waif named Cenci (Mia Farrow), bearing a picture of her recently deceased, near look-alike mother. Taylor, in turn, is reminded of her own deceased daughter. The odd, Pirandellian tension is soon upped a notch with the appearance of Farrow's boorish stepfather, played by none other than Robert Mitchum. Gerry Fisher's camera obsessively covers every square foot of the impossibly ornate mansion where Cenci lives alone - as usual, the setting is both mirror and catalyst for the psychic disturbances between the principal characters. This may not be Losey's most restrained film, but in its own impossibly florid way it's as potent as his best work. With Peggy Ashcroft and Pamela Brown as the meddlesome aunts.
Wed May 26: 3:15; Sat May 29: 7:30
Sun May 30: 6:30

THE BOY WITH GREEN HAIR
U.S., 1942; 82m
Losey's debut is, as Richard Combs points out, "like nothing else in his career: a parable, a children's story, a moral fable, a quasi-mystical message film." A young Dean Stockwell is Peter, a war orphan whose hair suddenly turns green, setting off a wave of hysteria among the townspeople around him. According to Losey, the anti-war content of the film (muddled by RKO boss Howard Hughes) was nothing but a device to drive a film that was actually against racism. Combs again: "The film's opening image is one of the most stunning in all of Losey's work: in a police station at night, three cops are grouped in the center (a distinctly Edward Hopper-ish image), firing questions at someone we can't see. They then part to reveal the boy, his head now completely shaved." With Pat O'Brien as Peter's ex-vaudevillian keeper, Gramp. Archive print.
Preceded by
A Child Went Forth
U.S., 1941; 18m
Losey made many films for the Rockefeller Foundation during the 30s, including this poetic documentary about a progressive, interracial summer camp. Music by Hanns Eisler.
Thurs May 27: 7:30; Sun May 30: 2

M
U.S., 1951; 88m
To say that Losey's remake of Fritz Lang's revered original was underappreciated in its day is to put it mildly - in fact, it was more or less taken out of circulation for many years. Seen today, the film has a richness and integrity all of its own, not to mention a completely different visual orientation. Shot in less than three weeks on location in the old Bunker Hill section of Los Angeles, Losey's film is just as nocturnal as Lang's but less intricate: where the action in the Lang operates on a grid-like pattern, Losey makes brilliant use of the city itself, keying the pursuit of the psychopath to the haunted concrete landscape. David Wayne gives a haunting performance as the child murderer. The majority of the supporting cast - Luther Adler, Martin Gabel, Howard Da Silva and Karen Morley - would, like Losey, soon fall prey to the blacklist, as would co-screenwriter Waldo Salt. Archive print.
Thurs May 27: 9:30; Sat May 29: 2 & 9:40

DON GIOVANNI
France/Italy/Germany, 1980; 185m
It was a long-standing dream of Losey's to film Mozart's masterpiece, which he saw as "a piece of rebellion, a drama of social class." He finally got his chance in the late 70s, and the result was this magnificent adaptation, on par with Bergman's version of The Magic Flute. Losey transposed the action from Spain to northern Italy, to devastatingly baroque effect: the bulk of the action was shot in Andrea Palladio's Villa Rotunda (where Losey had wanted to shoot GALILEO), with additional shooting on Torcello and Murano (which also served as locations in EVE) and Palladio's unfinished Teatro Olimpico. Ruggero Raimondi, in splendid voice, is Don Giovanni, with Kiri Te Kanawa as Donna Elvira and José van Dam as Leporello. Cinematography by longtime Losey collaborator Gerry Fisher, production design by the one and only Alexandre Trauner. Conducted by Lorin Maazel.
Wed May 26: 7; Fri May 28: 3; Sat May 29: 4

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