The Big Screen (59 page)

Perhaps stricken artists did make the movies. That would help account for why the pictures were not the same anymore. Ingmar Bergman had breakdowns. Alfred Hitchcock was expected, and himself expected, to preside over a series of successes and offer his famous dry remarks, like, “It's only a movie!” Which was the easier path?

Hitchcock sounded English still in the 1960s, but he took America for granted as a place to work. Still, England was becoming attractive, or necessary, to several American filmmakers. Although American visitors might not appreciate this, it was only in the late 1950s that Britain began to regain prosperity and confidence after the war. That money would let young people buy records of the new music—the Beatles, the Stones—and it ran over into design, clothes, sex, drugs, and moviemaking. The look of the country changed in the early 1960s. Clothes suddenly lost their uniform drabness. And filmmakers notice such things. There was also a wave of new writers in the theater, and even on television: John Osborne, Harold Pinter, John Hopkins, Dennis Potter. Sometimes they were called “angry young men,” and the anger was directed at the remnants of an archaic England, but it was full of high spirits and new ideas, too. To Americans, increasingly disenchanted with their own country, this vigor and candor was very appealing in a Britain that could still seem safe, pretty, and cheap.

Some Americans had had a tougher time. Joseph Losey had a lengthy period in London. He married Englishwomen and had English children. But he had not really arrived of his own volition. Born in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in 1909, Losey attended Dartmouth and Harvard before working for ten years in the theater. He traveled in the Soviet Union and the rest of Europe and became a Communist. Having directed Clifford Odets's
Waiting for Lefty
in Moscow in 1935, he came back to America and helped with the Living Newspaper project and a scheme called Political Cabaret. Losey was in the line of educated, creative liberals in the 1930s when communism seemed a natural response to the threat of fascism.

Then he served in the Signal Corps in the war and afterward, at close to forty, he started to direct films in Hollywood:
The Boy with Green Hair
(1948),
The Prowler
(1951), a remake of
M
—small but adventurous films.
The Prowler
, say, is apparently a standard noir story about a creepy cop (Van Heflin) who preys on a woman who has reported a prowler. It turns into a downcast love story with intimations of a sick society. The remake of
M
(1951), set in Los Angeles, with David Wayne in the Peter Lorre role, was attacked as being opportunistic. But it is a worthy picture and one of those noir movies aimed at the real corruption of America.

Then, in the early 1950s, Losey had to get out of America because of the blacklist. He ended up in London and struggled to survive. He worked in theater, and doing television commercials; he made a couple of pictures under pseudonyms; and he began to gain a more critical awareness of Britain. He collected a few sympathetic people—a production designer Richard MacDonald, the jazz musician Johnny Dankworth, the actors Stanley Baker and Dirk Bogarde. Losey was proposed to direct a Bogarde picture in 1954,
The Sleeping Tiger
. The actor was wary, but then he looked at
The Prowler
, and a friendship began. Losey's films became more personal and uneasy—
Blind Date
(1959),
The Criminal
(1960)—and he directed
Eve
(1962), in Italy, with Baker and Jeanne Moreau. But
The Servant
was the picture that made it clear how much was changing.

Robin Maugham's novella of
The Servant
had been published in 1948. Its portrait of a servant taking over his master was said to be too shocking for a movie then. But around 1960, Harold Pinter, just beginning his career, was asked to try a script by the director Michael Anderson. That plan fell through, but then Dirk Bogarde wired Losey (in Venice for
Eve
) and said the script was intriguing. Losey looked at it and started writing notes.

“There was a meeting,” Losey would say later,

The venture nearly came apart that night at the Connaught. But Losey and Pinter were made for each other: the new screenwriter and the director ready to get his teeth into the meat of English society, with Dirk Bogarde reckoning to preserve his cover but eager to show his range as an actor, something not permitted in his prolonged run of British war heroes or as Simon Sparrow in the popular
Doctor in the House
movies. Losey and Pinter worked on the script. They brought it up to date: as recently as 1959, in the trial of Penguin Books for obscenity in publishing an unexpurgated text of
Lady Chatterley's Lover
, the prosecuting lawyer had raised laughter in court when he'd asked the jury whether this was a book they'd let their wife or servants read. There were still servants in Britain, but there was growing mockery of the old class privileges and a new, young voice abroad—you got it at the BBC, at Penguin Books, the Royal Court Theatre, in the
Manchester Guardian
newspaper and in
Private Eye
(started in 1961), and at the new English universities, the “redbrick” schools that were not “Oxbridge.” (The universities of Sussex, Warwick, East Anglia, York, and the Open University were all started in the 1960s.)

The film of
The Servant
is about sexual confusion, raw power, and intimidation, but it's also a critique of a society that was passing away and an early event in what would soon be known as “the sixties.” Leslie Grade put up about £140,000 for the movie (Losey got £15,000 and Pinter £3,000) and it was shot at Shepperton Studios, where MacDonald did a series of elaborate adjoining sets—the rooms in the Chelsea house—so that space and décor could be explored in the filming. Later on, the critic Penelope Gilliatt would say the film made the house “almost malignant.” The young man, Tony, was James Fox; Bogarde was Barrett, the manservant; and Sarah Miles was the “sister” brought down to town to help destroy Tony.

When
The Servant
was finished, the money people were scared: Bogarde had never dared be this nasty or perverse. The sex was palpable, and class was viewed as a rotting carcass in a Francis Bacon painting. The film played at the Venice and New York festivals and it opened in London on November 14, 1963 (just months after John Profumo had admitted lying to the House of Commons in the Christine Keeler affair). Philip Oakes in the
Sunday Telegraph
called it “the best film of the best director now working in Britain,” and it was hard to separate its attitude from the impending end of Tory rule (after thirteen years).

The Servant
was not isolated. In 1958 the playwright John Osborne and the director Tony Richardson had formed Woodfall Film Productions, and their films included two Osborne plays—
Look Back in Anger
(1959, with Richard Burton as Jimmy Porter) and Laurence Olivier in
The Entertainer
(1960)—and
A Taste of Honey
(1961, with Rita Tushingham),
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
(1962, with Tom Courtenay), rising toward
Tom Jones
(1963), which won the Best Picture Oscar for 1963, made a star of Albert Finney, and sent a few people back to read Henry Fielding.

Olivier doing Archie Rice was the kind of audacious “slumming” that had pushed Bogarde into risking
The Servant
. The upper class of English actors was feeling the temptation of new material: by 1975, John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson would open in Pinter's
No Man's Land
. Just as important was the strain of new young actors and voices, many of them provincial and “uncouth” to old ears. John Schlesinger did
A Kind of Loving
(1962),
Billy Liar
(1963), and
Darling
(1965, an uneasy teaming of Bogarde, Laurence Harvey, and Julie Christie), not a fluent film now but judged a marvel in its day. Lindsay Anderson made
This Sporting Life
(1963, with Richard Harris), and Karel Reisz made
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
(1960, with Finney).

These were grittier films than Britain had had before, working-class stories often, with darker visions of life and its prospects. When most of the films were successful on both sides of the Atlantic, it only made British ideas and London talent attractive to Hollywood money. Many of those talents would go to America, sooner or later, but another American, Richard Lester, in London to do advertising films and some shorts with Peter Sellers, became the director of two inevitable smash hits: the Beatles films
A Hard Day's Night
and
Help!

There was another, momentous American landing in Britain. Stanley Kubrick was born in 1928 in the Bronx. He was a brilliant kid and a precocious still photographer who was contributing work to
Look
magazine by his late teens. He started making his own movies in the 1950s, doing nearly every job on them, and he graduated to
Fear and Desire
(1953), a mini-epic on combat;
Killer's Kiss
(1955), a rather maudlin story about a boxer in love with a beautiful but unreliable blonde; and
The Killing
, an immaculately precise account of a racetrack robbery, just eighty-three minutes, and a big influence later on Quentin Tarantino. Then, for actor-producer Kirk Douglas, he made
Paths of Glory
(1957), a stylish First World War story as pitiless as it is handsome. Because of Douglas, he got to do
Spartacus
(1960, replacing Anthony Mann), but everyone knew that hymn to freed slaves was Kirk's special property.

At which point the New York and Hollywood man determined to film Vladimir Nabokov's
Lolita
, but resolved to make that heartfelt elegy to Americana in England—and thus, Home Counties roads vanishing in the mist stand in for the bright West of all that driving and motels where Lo takes Humbert, so long as he thinks he's taking her.

Why did they do
Lolita
when it was impossible? One answer could be that James Mason and Shelley Winters were merely perfect as Humbert and Charlotte, while Sue Lyon was a very cool sixteen-year-old (fourteen in fact during the shooting), instead of the twelve-year-old Nabokov had written.

But why did Nabokov do it? His book had sold fourteen million copies in the world, the publishers said. It was in July 1959 that Nabokov had been approached by Kubrick and his associate James Harris about writing a screenplay from the novel to which they had acquired the movie rights a year earlier. They had paid $150,000 for the book and promised Nabokov 15 percent of the producers' profits. There were prolonged discussions and a meeting during which Kubrick told the novelist that the venture might be less risky if Humbert and Lolita were actually married.