Joseph Losey (review)

Self-Conscious Bravura

British filmgoers have good reason to be grateful to Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities; without them, Joseph Losey might never have fled his native America and given his adopted country some of its most distinctive films. Colin Gardner's publishers claim that this book is "the first full-length critical analysis of Losey's British films in the context of his entire career", and its great strength is that it shows both the range and the significance of that output. For, whether he was making a genre thriller like Blind Date (1959) or an art-house product like Eve (1962), the director was always pushing the boundaries in some way, revealing the dishonesties of class, the tyranny of money, and the paranoia and violence that lay beneath his hosts' taut exteriors. In other words, he was a man of vision, and not many of them have ever gotten into Pinewood or Shepperton.

Given his background, it is hardly surprising that Losey was so successful at getting beneath the British skin; his American youth had been a political apprenticeship in ideological commitment and class-consciousness. He had started his career in the 1930s during the Soviet-friendly days of the Federal Theatre Project and the Living Newspaper; in 1947, he went further down the radical road when he directed the New York and Los Angeles stage productions of Bertolt Brecht's Galileo. These experiences meant that he knew all about the agitprop, the Brechtian Epic Theatre and the Marxist dialectics that were to have such a lasting influence on his Hollywood and British work and that Gardner applies, rather hectically, throughout.

Yet, as this book also shows, it was the dislocation of exile that affected Losey the most. It taught him paranoia, the need to relish ruptures in time and history, and, above all, the importance of a self-conscious bravura style with the camera. Gardner quotes Edward Said: "wilfulness, exaggeration, overstatement...are characteristic styles of being an exile, methods of compelling the world to accept your vision." In time, this led Losey into what the study calls a "baroque" method of filmmaking. During his early years, though, a living had to be earned, and this meant grinding out British genre films.

The 1950s saw Losey turn his hand to almost anything that got bread on the table, but he was never a hack; he brought something new to his thrillers, Gainsborough-style melodramas, and science fiction. In The Criminal (1960), for example, he tells the story of a habitual crook (Stanley Baker) who leaves prison and pulls off a big job only to find himself up against a powerful crime syndicate, which has no time for old-fashioned little men like him. Gardner reveals how Losey (and his screenwriter, Alun Owen) turned this humdrum plot into a powerful tale of prison corruption and corporate greed in which the characters are dehumanised by the god of money and Marx's "exchange value"; the world outside the prison walls is as restricted as the one within.

By contrast, The Gypsy and the Gentleman (1957), a Regency bodice-ripper jam-packed with leering landowners and over-sexed wenches, is said to be an astute analysis of a class system in transition. Still, this may be a case of auteurism being in the eye of the beholder; Gardner even sees significance in what sounds like a run-of-the-mill coach chase: "This [a pan from left to right] establishes—as a clever variation on Eisenstein—a kinaesthetic, dialectical juxtaposition, not between shots or sequences as in Potemkin, but within the spatio-integral integrity of the discreet take." (The director might have raised an eyebrow at this loquacity; he said that the film was "largely a piece of junk and I'd just as soon nobody saw it again".)

For many viewers, however, Losey...