London, 1967.
Notice the eyes. Tired, curved down at the edges, and he rubs them a lot. Joseph Losey’s eyes tell the story of a life of hard knocks, a man without a flag and a career applauded everywhere but home, where it matters most.
The name, in Europe, is golden. No Losey film here is just another movie. King and Country and The Servant both won film festival awards, and The Damned won the Trieste science-fiction festival award. For the second time in three years a “Joseph Losey Season” has been held in London for two months this year at the National Film Theatre. The British Film Institute thinks so much of his work that it recently held a special festival just for the showing of his TV commercials. Ironically, he even received the Best Foreign Director award from America’s foreign film importers.
Why is it ironic? Because he’s not a foreigner at all. He was born in Wisconsin and while he has little taste for America (and no taste at all for most American films) he is still as American as a hamburger. His feelings are understandable. Seldom has there been a case of a native talent treated so badly by the industry that bred him. Educated at Dartmouth and Harvard, he worked as a roving reporter for Variety, stage-managed the first Radio City Music Hall show, directed 13 plays on Broadway in the 1930’s, and landed an MGM contract in 1938. One of his documentaries won an Oscar nomination, the movie industry began to sit up and take notice, and a series of films resulted which were years before their time. One of these was The Boy with Green Hair, which was produced by Adrian Scott, one of the original 19 blacklisted by the film industry during the infamous McCarthy witch-hunts.
The film is now considered a classic (It’s still almost impossible to find in America, but the Cinematheque Francaise shows it regularly in Paris to standing room only). At the time it was made, however, Scott served a year in jail. Losey was called a Communist and blacklisted too. (Incredible as it may seem, that’s the way we used to do things in America, folks.) Losey couldn’t get the jobs he deserved, so he directed the late Louis Calhern in The Wooden Dish at the Phoenix in New York, and in 1954, he just plain gave up. Gave up trying to sell educated and hard-hitting film suggestions to an ignorant coterie of Hollywood label-fixers who were too frightened to take a chance with a man who had been associated with the word “Commie.”
Accident, his 18th film, is now being made the way he makes all of his films in Europe: quietly. A visit to the set in the glimmering green Indian summer of a peaceful Queen Anne farmhouse near London does, in fact, give little indication that a movie is being made at all. Losey likes it that way. The budget is almost invisible. Interiors are being shot at Twickenham, a tiny powder-box studio with three sound stages six miles from London. Accident occupies two stages and a murder mystery on a train takes up the third. There is nothing to remind you of Hollywood. No air-conditioned trailers; the stars change in the farmhouse john and the makeup department consists of a wooden table with a hand mirror. Everyone eats on card tables under a cow shed and the film’s one luxury (a secretary for Losey) rides a bicycle from the house to wherever her boss is working in the nearby woods.
“We do it the way most of my films are done,” says Losey, taking a tea break, “for almost nothing.” The actors working that day, Dirk Bogarde and Stanley Baker, sat on the grass with their shirts off, playing with the farmer’s kids. “They’ll never get rich in my films, but they keep coming back. Dirk has done five, Stanley three. Dirk turned down a Hollywood film worth ten times as much to do this one. He can afford it now. But then there’s my continuity girl, who gave up the biggest chance of her career on a picture with a $10 million budget for this. My cutter runs a pub to support his family so he can work with me. I try to surround myself with people who think “we” instead of “they,” but I make pictures so selectively that I can’t afford to pay them while they hang on waiting. Unusual people with creative ideas get ahead in England. This is where everything’s happening in films. People are more informed, more enlightened, freer to do things that say something. Of course that’s only half of the film group here. The other half is the same as in America—union men interested only in overtime, and men who want to make a fast buck on a cheap investment.”
The sun was hot and the tea with honey heady, so Losey wrapped it up for the day. In the car on the way back to London, more talk about the film and his life in Europe. Unlike the cars owned by most movie directors, it had a straight shift, most of the dashboard had been ripped out and instead of a chauffeur it was driven by a little old man in rolled-up sleeves and denim pants. Losey, worn by the day’s shooting, cupped his head in his hands, then massaged his temples. “Working like this over the years, sacrificing the big juicy jobs for the things I believe in, and doing it with no money and little encouragement—it’s been exhausting. This one is turning out well. Harold Pinter did the script, so you know it’s extraordinary. I think it’s the best thing he’s done since The Servant. I loathe films with too much dialogue. It’s 100 pages long and only about 60 pages of that is talk, so there’s room for the visual things.”
What’s it about? “Well, Dirk and Stanley are two dons at Oxford. They represent people with double lives—academic, dull, defeated, custodians of knowledge who suddenly find themselves in the same impasses as the men in the street. Into the lives of these men, their wives and a young male student comes an Austrian girl who brings out the best and the worst in them all. She is the catalyst, the accident-maker. At one point, they all play the war game, which is the rage on TV here, and it suddenly becomes so real that they attack each other physically. Everyone lusts after the girl. Finally, at one point in the highway driving from Oxford to the farm, everyone’s life changes. The boy—Michael York, who just did Taming of the Shrew with the Burtons—is killed, the girl simply packs and leaves, and the others are left to face their own guilts. I guess it’s really about how civilized and courteous people can often be as vicious underneath as the lower classes. In some way, everyone affects everyone else in life. Sometimes we have the most powerful effect on others when we least suspect. The cast is really first-rate. Jacqueline Sassard, a French actress, plays the girl, Delphine Seyrig is Baker’s wife, and Dirk’s wife is Vivien Merchant, one of the most brilliant actresses in England. She’s really Pinter’s wife. Pinter’s in it, too. He started out as an actor, you know.
“I hate working in color but you have to now. Without it you get only half as much for the TV sale. I tried it with Modesty Blaise and some of the critics said it was the best use of color they’d ever seen, but even after two years of working out the lighting, the rushes were better than any final print I ever saw of it. I’ve got the same cameraman, so we’ll do something low-key—blue-black with splashes of yellow spilling out of a house at night, violent splashes of red blood against sterile white for the accident, lots of mustard and rust at Oxford. Nobody does anything interesting with color these days. I was impressed with Red Desert’s color, but the film was so pretentious and boring it put me to sleep. I think the best color in ages was in Muriel.”
The mention of Modesty Blaise seemed to set his juices flowing. In England it is considered a masterpiece by some, a mistake by others. In America, some of the hardest-to-please critics think it’s one of the year’s best. Others think it’s hogwash. “It was meant to be the last and final word on the subject of camp, a film to extinguish forever—hopefully—the forces behind the garbage-can syndrome of movies Hollywood is turning out now. The fact that people are taking it seriously and complaining because it doesn’t make sense is proof of what I was trying to say. They’ve been brainwashed by the same kind of movie I’m putting down. As a result, I’m frustrated again. I’ve had letters from America saying it was degrading for me to have my name on it. Quite the contrary. It was made for a reason. Now the film is being thrown away by idiots who haven’t the slightest idea what it is about. Darryl Zanuck loved it, but he allowed his advertising department to destroy it by playing it up as a female James Bond. Sure, the picture has its flaws—I never did get the color I wanted, Monica Vitti had no sense of humor, Terry Stamp hadn’t the slightest clue to what I was getting at, and their performances show it. Still, it would’ve had a chance of finding its audience if it had been sold simply, stylishly, with an op-art design that told nothing about the plot, a teaser with taste—no nudity, no secret-agent stuff. It should have opened in an art house until they knew what they had, then sent out on the circuit. One theatre manager told me, ‘The picture’s a flop.’ ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, watching the lines outside waiting to get in. ‘For every 2,000 admissions, we’ve had about five complaints,’ he said. ‘What the hell does that mean?’ I asked. ‘Normally, we don’t get any.’”
Would he ever work in America again? “Only if all the conditions were right. In England, I can make the kind of film I want to make. They may get badly distributed, but they’re the ones that interest me. I don’t need X millions of dollars and big-name stars, but I must control the advertising and distribution. The film must be mine. When Eva was released in New York I didn’t even recognize it. Jeanne Moreau and Stanley Baker and I drew up a petition to have our names taken off it. A film must bear the director’s stamp, or it’s nothing. I’d rather see a bad film with one really distinct style of badness than a film with 50 different kinds of badness.
“Life is OK here. I’m not rolling in money; last week I had to direct a vodka commercial. But I’ve just taken a house for the rest of my life. I lecture at cinema clubs, do TV panels and film symposiums, and there’s a new book coming out on me in France. There’s another Losey festival this fall at Eton College in Windsor and a retrospective of my films in Australia. I’m doing a musical on the London stage in January with John Barry music and Sean Kenny sets and a script by another American expatriate, Lucas Heller. I’ve had lots of wives and although I’m presently married emotionally but not legally I’ve got a 9-year-old son named Josh and another grown son, Gavrik, who is a production manager for one of the London film studios. Not everybody needs America, you know. Some of us hold our heads up pretty well over here.” The car pulled up to an intersection on Brompton Road. Losey waved goodbye. He was off to see the rushes. Alone. (Nobody gets invited to see the rushes on a Losey film.) When the car pulled away, he was still rubbing his eyes.