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The Servant 1963 123movies

The Servant 1963 123movies

A Terrifyingly Beautiful Motion Picture!Nov. 14, 1963116 Min.
Your rating: 0
7 1 vote

Synopsis

Watch: The Servant 1963 123movies, Full Movie Online – The aristocratic Tony (James Fox) moves to London and hires the servant Hugo Barrett (Sir Dirk Bogarde) for all services at home. Barrett seems to be a loyal and competent employee, but Tony’s girlfriend Susan (Wendy Craig) does not like him, and asks Tony to send him away. When Barrett brings his sister Vera (Sarah Miles) to work and live in the house, Tony has a brief hidden affair with her. After travelling with Susan and spending a couple of days in a friend’s house outside London, the couple unexpectedly returns and finds Barrett and Vera, who are actually lovers, in Tony’s room. They are fired and Susan breaks with Tony. Later, Tony meets Barrett alone in a pub and hires him back, and Barrett imposes his real dark intentions in the house, turning the table and switching position with his master..
Plot: Hugo Barrett is a servant in the Chelsea home of indolent aristocrat Tony. All seems to go well until the playboy’s girlfriend Susan takes a dislike to the efficient employee. Then Barrett persuades Tony to hire his sister Vera as a live-in maid, and matters take another turn for the worse…
Smart Tags: #homoeroticism #decadence #servant #repressed_homosexual #based_on_novel #london_england #england #united_kingdom #great_britain #homosexual_subtext #dysfunctional_relationship #sexual_repression #homoerotic_subtext #british_new_wave #gay_subtext #surrealism #sinister #sadomasochism #wealth #submission #role_reversal


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Ratings:

7.8/10 Votes: 12,454
90% | RottenTomatoes
94/100 | MetaCritic
N/A Votes: 257 Popularity: 7.687 | TMDB

Reviews:

THE SERVANT (Joseph Losey, 1963) ***1/2
I first watched Losey’s most famous work – but not quite his best, in my opinion – on the big-screen at London’s National Film Theatre in 1999, just a few months after star Dirk Bogarde’s death; it’s certainly one of the latter’s most significant roles (along with the homosexual composer of DEATH IN VENICE [1971], perhaps his most representative), though I still feel that VICTIM (1961) is the finest film he’s ever been associated with!

Even so, Bogarde’s performance (recipient of the BAFTA award) is understated most of the time – which rather suits his enigmatic title character, a self-described “gentleman’s gentleman” but actually harboring sinister ambitions. Interestingly, when Joseph Losey fell ill in mid-production, the directorial chores were thrust into the hands of the leading man until his recovery – who, amusingly, initially turned Losey down by saying that he “couldn’t direct a bus” if his life depended on it!

While he was still some years away from the deliberate formalism that virtually characterized all his later output, Losey’s style is here more controlled – for lack of a better word – than in, say, THE CRIMINAL (1960) or EVA (1962); this may have been due to the ‘failure’ of the latter (see my review elsewhere), or perhaps his collaboration with screenwriter (and influential playwright) Harold Pinter may have had more to do with this than anything else. Still, Douglas Slocombe’s sleek black-and-white cinematography (also a BAFTA award winner) of the gloomy London settings – abetted by Johnny Dankworth’s wistful score – is certainly among the film’s most notable assets.

James Fox’s fine performance as the usurped master of the house led him to short-lived stardom (and even copped the young actor the “Most Promising Newcomer” award at the BAFTAs); his career went on an extended hiatus some years later (which ended in the mid-Eighties) following his traumatic experience on the set of PERFORMANCE (1970), curiously enough a film dealing with a similar role-reversal situation! Though the women are subservient to the central relationship between Bogarde and Fox, both Sarah Miles and Wendy Craig serve their characters well; especially interesting is the battle of wits between the latter (as Fox’s upper-class girlfriend) and Bogarde, whom she mistrusts from the get-go and is obviously proved right beyond her wildest imagination!

For a two-hour dialogue-driven film, the plot is pretty sparse – typically of Pinter, dealing in symbolism rather than presenting a straightforward narrative (despite being based on a novel by Robin Maugham) – but the tension between the various characters holds the viewer’s attention all the way…though the final descent into depravity and degradation comes off as rather too abrupt and now seems more farcical than shocking (as it must have seemed at the time)! The cast also includes bit parts by two alumni of Losey’s THE CRIMINAL – co-star Patrick Magee and screenwriter Alun Owen, sparring amusingly as a couple of clergymen in a bar! – as well as Pinter himself (a former actor in his own right, appearing as a ‘society man’ in the same scene, actually one of the very few set outside Fox’s mansion).

There’s a hilarious scene in which James Fox goes with Wendy Craig to visit her “mummified” high society parents. This enables Bogarde and Miles to live it up at the house during their absence. However, they cut short their visit and catch them romping about in their master’s bedroom, whereupon he sacks them on the spot. This leads to the film’s best scene, in my opinion: the chance meeting in a bar between Bogarde and Fox (who has, in the interim, fallen on hard times) where the Mephistophelean Bogarde paints a pitiful picture of himself which, inevitably, leads the lonesome Fox to engage his services once more. The way Losey shoots this marvelous sequence is masterly – with a minimum of camera movement and the actors strategically placed within the frame.

Trivia note: I own a British periodical from the early 80s called “The Movie” – a collection of essays strung together more or less by theme and running for an impressive 158 volumes – in which THE SERVANT was among the films chosen for a two-page critical evaluation, accompanied by a detailed synopsis and illustrated by numerous stills; I’ve leafed through it and read the review (written by Derek Prouse) so many times that these images from the film have become fixed in my mind and, as I lay watching, I was actively looking out for each one of them!

Review By: Bunuel1976
A stunning achievement.
An intimately crafted psychological drama, The Servant is a remarkable film that deserves to be seen by all. Written by Harold Pinter, based on a novel by Robin Maugham, it is a stunningly intelligent dissection of two men, the upper crust Tony (James Fox) and his new servant, Hugo Barrett (Dirk Bogarde). Through these two characters, Pinter’s script unravels sharp ups and downs of class warfare and sexual games, as the two men constantly play a tug of war for power in all forms. When they first meet the two seem to hit it off quite well, falling comfortably into their positions of servant and master.

However, once Tony’s fiancée Susan (Wendy Craig) comes into the mix and disapproves of Barrett, things start to become more conflicted. Then, Barrett’s “sister” Vera (Sarah Miles) comes to move in and her true nature, as Barrett’s lover, throws an even stronger rift between the two and their class positioning. The intrusion of these women sets off a descent from their idyllic lifestyle and the two men spend the rest of the time clashing with one another, the walls slowly closing in on this gripping and powerful study.

Director Joseph Losey makes great work of his tools here, using a lot of unique camera techniques like splitting the focus and viewing the characters through reflective surfaces rather than directly, which all serve to heighten the already high tension. The structure is bizarre and the final act gets surprisingly dark and borderline surreal, as the two engage in a series of fascinating interactions to further dissect the state of their dynamic. The Servant would be absolutely nothing without the performances of it’s two men, and they both deliver in equal measures. The women are both superb as well, Craig being sharp and vicious, Miles being naive and sensual, but it’s the boys show all the way through.

Bogarde is breathtaking, convincingly portraying the “gentleman’s gentleman” of a butler at first but slowly turning more sinister and terrifying as time passes on. He plays all sides of this character with total life, always remaining a mystery to the audience as we are never sure whether he is fooling Tony and us or if he’s being sincere at any given moment. There’s a scene between him and Susan where she digs into him and the pain on his face, the emasculation, actually allows the viewer to feel deeply for what could have been a very unlikeable character.

Fox is no dull edge either, meeting Bogarde with a heartbreaking descent, falling from the mannered and composed young man we first meet into the shriveled and destroyed wreck by the end. The shifting dynamics between the two are always engaging, and Pinter embeds the film with just the right amount of emotion, comedy, terror and homoerotic subtext. It’s a shattering work, marvelously performed by everyone involved.

Review By: Rockwell_Cronenberg

Other Information:

Original Title The Servant
Release Date 1963-11-14
Release Year 1963

Original Language en
Runtime 1 hr 56 min (116 min)
Budget 0
Revenue 0
Status Released
Rated Unrated
Genre Drama
Director Joseph Losey
Writer Harold Pinter, Robin Maugham
Actors Dirk Bogarde, Sarah Miles, Wendy Craig
Country United Kingdom
Awards Won 3 BAFTA 8 wins & 10 nominations total
Production Company N/A
Website N/A


Technical Information:

Sound Mix Mono (Westrex Recording System)
Aspect Ratio 1.66 : 1
Camera N/A
Laboratory N/A
Film Length N/A
Negative Format 35 mm (Eastman Double-X 5222)
Cinematographic Process Spherical
Printed Film Format DCP Digital Cinema Package, 35 mm

The Servant 1963 123movies
The Servant 1963 123movies
The Servant 1963 123movies
The Servant 1963 123movies
Original title The Servant
TMDb Rating 7.6 257 votes

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