“He may be a servant, but he’s also a human”

These words occur at a crucial moment in The Servant, the first of three collaborations between acclaimed playwright Harold Pinter and exiled American director Joseph Losey. They may appear to be an obvious, perhaps even painfully gauche, sentiment – but they happen almost concurrently to the events that would be the turning point of this exceptionally strange and immediately compelling work of social commentary. The master-servant relationship has been a mainstay of British artistic expression for centuries, mainly taking the form of the “upstairs-downstairs” dichotomy that has established itself as a feasible way of exploring power dynamic between different groups, based on the class system that strives to keep everyone within the confines of their socio-economic bracket. Having considered these aspects, it’s easy to see the many reasons why The Servant is one of the finest films produced in the 1960s, flourishing into a poignant combination of harrowing psychological thriller, acidic dark comedy and brilliantly perverted social drama that blurs well-conceived boundaries of reality in its endeavour to eviscerate more than just the class system by putting the blissfully-ignorant upper-class in direct conflict with the angry, ferocious working-class. Losey and Pinter reach an apex in their creative careers with this film, perhaps not being the definitive work of either’s artistic life (a statement less on the quality of this film, and more on their long, storied careers in their respective industries) and manage to construct one of the bleakest social dramas ever committed to film – and along the way manage to comment on a variety of peripheral subjects that all converge into this delightfully terrifying disembowelment of the sacred class system and all its adherents.

There has been a certain sub-genre of storytelling that has been omnipotent in literature for about as long as it has existed, that of the “servant” narrative. Entries into this small but fascinating category are normally centred around someone put under the employment of another person, normally of much higher status and wealth, and through their involvement in the lives of this individual, the servant becomes privy to many of their routines, as well as the underlying secrets. The Servant is one of the definitive texts in this regard, especially considering it focuses on many of the same concepts that other works are normally built upon. The construction of the servant is normally done by positioning an ordinary, working-class individual in the position of a passive domestic or professional assistant, calm and mannered, but also deeply loyal to their employer. It’s not unknown for these works to feature the principle of a good servant being present physically, but absent psychologically – their function in their particular position is to be omnipotent but invisible. This creates a sense of voyeurism, with the character normally taking on the part of a quiet observer, watching the lives of his or her employer progress while they remain stagnant, just an active ornament under the guidance of someone who is positioned as their master or mistress. The Servant certainly starts out as such – a simple but elegant drama of a polite man coming under the employment of a bourgeois socialite, who hails from a wealthy family and thus can afford to have a “gentleman’s gentleman” to cater to his every whim. However, the film does then take quite a drastic turn in provoking the idea of this narrow but sacred boundary being crossed, where unspoken social principles of the master-servant relationship are broken in favour of a more subversive, and often quite unsettling, portrayal of unconventional power dynamic – and the moment it does, The Servant reaches a dizzying peak that it relishes in exploring with the sardonic rage only capable from a set of artists intent on making a statement as potently as they possibly could, while still providing some insightful commentary on other issues as well.

The Servant is quite a cynical film, and it makes the fact that it holds umbrage for far more than just the class system very clear from the first moments. You could easily classify this as one of the few truly bleak satires, whereby a sour sense of darkly comical humour is employed, not as a means to entertain the viewer, but to indicate the inherent social flaws that the film is seeking to not only dismantle but destroy entirely. Losey and Pinter go to overwhelming lengths to deconstruct the very fabric of social order, creating a stark portrait of humanity through the lens of the interactions between individuals in a context the vast majority of us will not have much experience with witnessing first-hand. There’s a sense of amorality persistent throughout this film, both in the characters depicted and their various actions that drive the plot. The film doesn’t consist of a narrative in the traditional sense, insofar as there is a general storyline that flows through the film, but it rather functions as a series of moments that slowly grow in hostility and tension, until reaching a breaking point, from which the film rapidly descends into pure anarchy, and in the process takes some of the most sacrosanct traditions along with it, which is quite a daring approach to something that is initially constructed as a haunting but otherwise elegant portrayal of the class system. The brilliance of The Servant is that the viewer can’t ever be prepared for the chaos that lurks beneath this film – inherently deceptive, the film leads you to believe that, as dark as it may get, it will always maintain a strict sense of order, conducting itself in a way that may be highly-subversive, but still retaining some semblance of order. Gradually, this erodes until we’re left with one of the most brilliantly deranged portrayals of social inequality ever filmed, a work of pure, unadulterated narrative anarchy that may stay graceful until the last moments, but not without staking its claim as a demented masterpiece that lingers on in the viewer’s mind long after the final haunting moments have faded from the consciousness.

At the centre of The Servant, and undeniably the main reason for its resounding success is Dirk Bogarde, an actor I will always maintain is one of the finest to ever work in the medium, and who consistently gave some of the most brilliant performances recorded on film. This particular role is often considered amongst his very best for a number of reasons. Some of his more notable work, such as Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice and Alain Resnais’ Providence saw him take on reserved, straight-laced characters that are far more complex than they appear – Bogarde essentially made a career from such roles, and was exceptionally good at playing any kind of character. However, Hugo Barrett is a much bigger challenge, mainly since it requires the actor to take on a much more difficult character that can’t ever quite be pinned down, which is the antithesis of many of the actor’s more distinctive performances. He may be the central character, but Hugo is immediately established as an enigmatic bundle of curiosities and contradictions that prevent the audience from ever fully embracing him. His closely-guarded personality is gradually revealed through the process of the veneer that conceals it slowly eroding, revealing one of cinema’s most terrifying villains. His character unravels almost concurrently to the film, positioning Bogarde’s titular servant as a malevolent force of otherworldly evil, grounded in a very naturalistic and often bitterly sardonic performance that only Bogarde could convincingly give – and while we are repulsed by Hugo throughout, we simply can’t resist his sinister charms. Taking on a role like this requires the actor to adopt a predatory state of mind, as this is essentially the governing aspect of the performance, with the theme of dominance being omnipotent in the character and the film as a whole. Bogarde is perpetually on the prowl, going from meek, overly polite milquetoast to terrifying villains in a way that isn’t a radical shift, but rather the result of a slow deconstruction of our initial perceptions – his gait gradually changes, his clothes become more casual, his accent slipping from Received Pronunciation to a more working-class dialect, and his entire demeanour changing from invisible servant to unstoppable force of destruction. Yet, in the midst of all of this, Bogarde remains so elegant and understated, with a simmering complexity underpinning his performance that is rarely glimpsed here, with the actor demonstrating the right balance of careful restraint and glorious excess, depending on what the scene in question calls for. Bogarde has played devilish character before, but this was one of the few times he was truly the embodiment of pure madness and malice, and the film is all the better for it.

It’s illogical to talk about The Servant as a piece of drama that has no underlying message or ulterior motives, since everything about the film, while initially presenting itself as a simple portrayal of a particular employer’s relationship with his most recent employee, centring around a set of themes that slowly encroach on the premise. Losey and Pinter made a film that takes aim at the idea of masculinity, positioning two different characters in the central roles, and having the entire film focus on their relationship, and how the dynamic between the two of them work. James Fox is a terrific scene-partner for Bogarde and his mighty performance, and truly brings out the nuance in an otherwise bland character that was intentionally void of much personality specifically to allow the film to comment on the concept of the mediocre, upper-class twits that Fox is portraying here, and how their blindness to the system that has benefitted them can be catastrophic if they find themselves being taken the victim of someone ready to exploit them and take control. Fragile masculinity has often been a subject of a large portion of literature, but The Servant is one of the most harrowing cinematic portrayals of it, a disquieting voyage into the complex relationship between two men who find themselves manipulating the other in an effort to assert their dominance and take charge of the situation. It’s incredibly compelling, especially when the film slowly begins to venture into exploring the homoerotic subtext that lurks just beneath the two main character’s relationship. Not necessarily a film about sexuality in the traditional sense, it rather makes use of these nearly perverted, psychosexual overtures, as a means of exploring the most prominent theme: power. It only makes sense that there would be some form of investigation through the lens of toxic masculinity, with both character representing people on different ends of the socio-cultural spectrum, forced into close proximity for long enough, until the seemingly well-maintained cultural divisions between them begin to shatter as they grow increasingly hostile in their individual quest for power, making The Servant a film that was remarkably ahead of its time, particularly in exploring some underlying social themes that were unheard of for the time in which they were portrayed here.

In conclusion, The Servant is an astonishing film that earns its rightful place in the canon of essential works of drama from the 1960s, an incredible intelligent but profoundly settling film that presents audiences with a kind of dark, deceptive narrative chaos that no one would expect from a film that initially establishes itself as an elegant work of poised fiction. There are innumerable factors at play in this film, with dozens of different concepts being woven into the fabric of the film, but the best way to look at it in a general sense is to consider this film as primarily being about seduction and desire – not necessarily sexually (even if this is a prominent theme in the film), but for more abstract concepts such as wealth, status and, most importantly, infallible power. The Servant centres almost entirely around the characters and their various attempts to assert power on others, shown either through broad strokes of the master/servant dynamic, or the far more interesting, insidious demonstration of the perverted mind-games played between these characters, all of which entails a kind of psychological seduction that coalesces in an incredibly disturbing comedy of manners. From beginning to end, The Servant is a brilliantly sinister work, with Losey even using the visual composition as a means to create a sense of brooding claustrophobia, and the persistently foreboding tone signifying the descent into the realm of pure malice. This is a social drama made is if it were a menacing horror film, with the only difference being that this time, the monster lurks in plain sight, and is far more difficult to get rid of, since he’s inextricably woven himself into the life of the protagonist, to the point where we begin to question who the titular servant actually is by the end of it. This is an incredibly disturbing, but compulsively fascinating, work of fiction that offers a penetrating glimpse into the human condition and distorts reality in an unquestionably compelling way that reveals the inner evils of our nature, and manages to be so insightful into a series of concepts that we may have never even thought could be fashioned into such a dastardly, wholly unforgettable, work of unhinged social terror.