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FILM COMMENT
March / April 2004
DOUBLE PLAY
Continually reinventing his career and eluding all categorization, Joseph Losey defied the axiom that there are no second acts.
by Richard Combs
Above: Mr. Klein
"To each his own Losey" is how the critic Tom Milne began his 1967 interview book with Joseph Losey. His tally of Loseys at that point was three: the Hollywood version (1948-52), the early British incarnation (1954-62), and the art-house auteur revealed in The Servant (63) and culminating in Accident (67). Immediately after that, of course, another one appeared, the internationalist and, for a while, fellow traveler of the Burton-Taylor jet set, the maker of weird, floating fables like Boom (68) and Figures in a Landscape (70). In 1975, a second exile turned him into a French filmmaker, with four films from Mr. Klein (76) to La Truite (82).
Other subdivisions might be possible, although five makes a neat number of Loseys, because each of them is anchored to particular cinematic provinces (if not countries) and production circumstances. But even so, the boundaries don't really stay in place: his collaboration with Harold Pinter, which largely defines the Sixties art-house period, and the supposed refinement it brought to Losey's style, ends four films into the international period with The Go-Between (71), and the international frolic Modesty Blaise (66) pops up after The Servant and King and Country (64), just prior to Accident. One could even argue that, in terms of stylistic attack, Losey's last American film is not The Big Night (51), barely finished before he fled the country and the blacklist, but The Damned (a.k.a. These Are The Damned) (62), which is also his seventh British film.
Crucially, the disruptions, the chopping and changing, don't just make up the pattern of his career but are at work in individual films-certainly in the best of them. Losey was never really a comfortable filmmaker in any of his national habitats, and, in his films, along with a focus on clashes of ego and energy goes an uneasy compacting of different styles and influences. In fact, the different Losey "periods" are best followed not in sequence but in a kind of crisscross through his work virtually from the word go - the word go being The Boy with Green Hair (48), an apparently naive morality tale with its own weird divergences of mood and style.
If the five Losey periods don't work as periods, then we can reconfigure them on a different principle - as arenas, perhaps, for defining encounters of the artist with his material, of characters with themselves and/or their significant others. As the cop (Stanley Baker) says in Blind Date (58) after the artist (Hardy Krüger) recounts how he met his lover, "That's not a meeting you described. That's a collision."
1. The Assassination of Trotsky
With Losey it's not necessary to begin at the beginning, or even with the most completely achieved films. The Assassination of Trotsky (72) comes from the international period, when the consensus was that Losey had lost his way, and it received some of the harshest reviews of his career. One scene attracted particular opprobrium: the visit by the mysterious assassin-to-be (Alain Delon) to a bullfight prior to his encounter with his victim (Richard Burton). However, the film is not, as was assumed, offering the bullfight as a metaphor for that encounter. The metaphor belongs to the assassin; he is trying to internalize it to explain his action and as a stimulus to performing it. After he and his girlfriend have fled the arena, the film remains to reveal the real outcome of that show: the dragging away of the dead bull and its dismemberment as meat. The bullfight has a double existence: as an assassin's metaphor and as a separate violent event in a world of violent events that will include the killing of Trotsky.
This self-actualizing of a protagonist may seem a fairly ordinary dramatic device, but in Losey it has a special play, leading, variously, to autonomy, inaccessibility, isolation, to individual - even Nietzschean - ambition that will touch off, paradoxically, an acute sense of social networks, of systems within systems, plots behind plots, schemers behind schemers. So many Losey films depend on the presence of these arch-schemers, and a mystery - or fuzziness - about their designs. Does The Servant conspire to take over his master? If so, when? If not, does it just happen out of the dynamic between them? When does the upper-class lover of the poor artist in Blind Date decide to implicate him in murder?
A striking example of the type appears in one of Losey's earliest films, The Prowler (51), in which resentful cop Van Heflin bases his self-actualization not on metaphor but on the complaint that the world depends on "pull," on getting the right breaks, and manipulates his well-off lover (Evelyn Keyes) into marriage after murdering her husband. Tracked to a ghost town hideout, he is shot down by police as he scrabbles up a hill of rock and shale - the most prosaic and concrete of climaxes and yet a metaphor for that unscalable vertical world he had envisaged.
2. The Boy with Green Hair
Losey's actual beginning, of course, looks like nothing else in his career: a parable, a children's story, a moral fable, a quasi-mystical message film, which he found constricting to shoot (on the RKO backlot) and that was twisted in the making when studio boss Howard Hughes tried to cross its pacifist message with lines declaring the need for readiness for war with the Russians. But even in its conception, The Boy with Green Hair isn't clear-cut, with at least two messages intersecting each other: the plight of the boy (Dean Stockwell), a war orphan whose hair turns green as a symbol of hope for life renewed in the midst of war, and the social prejudice this (then) unusual pigmentation excites. According to Losey, "It was not an antiwar picture as a concept, as a device - it was anti-racist."
Actually, and fortunately, the film's resonances don't stop with these two messages but extend into a realm of their own, which might be called quasi-mystical, or romantic, or magical-religious-existential. The film's opening image is one of the most stunning in all Losey's work: in a police station at night, three cops are grouped in the center (a distinctly Edward Hopper-ish image), firing questions - "All we want to know is your name," "If you'll just tell us what town you're from" - at someone we can't see. They then part to reveal the boy, his head now completely shaved. A child psychologist (Robert Ryan) is introduced to him - "This is Mr. Nobody, who lives no place" - and asks the boy to "begin at the beginning" of his troubles. "Okay then," says the boy defiantly, and echoing David Copperfield, "I was born."
Some of his dialogue turns up word for word (including the open sesame of "Let's begin at the beginning") 14 years later, on the rocky coast of Dorset, with a mystical fable neatly replaced by a science-fiction one in The Damned. Here, a group of children, irradiated by accident from birth, war orphans in their own right, are being nurtured in a secret government complex to become the "very seeds of life," radiation-proof, when the inevitable nuclear holocaust has destroyed everyone else (life itself is the affliction, the special distinction, which the boy's green hair symbolizes). The children, meanwhile, dream of a different outcome - "Our parents will come and open the magic door for us"-just as the young hero of The Go-Between uses magic to defend himself in a hostile adult environment.
"Who killed our children's hopes?" cries the gangland lawyer (Luther Adler) forced to defend a child murderer in M (51). The fourth of Losey's five Hollywood films is a remake of Fritz Lang that has always seemed - and usually been dismissed as - a freakish project, though it would fit well with the films above. It is undoubtedly one of Losey's mixed (or muddled) genre exercises, but it contains some extraordinary scenes, not least the confession of the killer (David Wayne), at bay before a lynch mob, of his own tormented childhood, and the defense of the corrupt, drunken lawyer, whose pleas ("Life's too much for him") finally lead to his blurring himself with the man ("My client is a drunkard"). As Raymond Durgnat summarized the dynamic of Losey's early scenarios and heroes: "They begin as reporters, prowlers, strangers on the prowl, and stumble, often too late, upon the fact that those whom they set out to observe, exploit, punish, or shrug off, were a possible end to their isolation."
