The Servant Problem

The Servant Problem
It is a curious fact that it is an American director, Joseph Losey, the creator of one of the essential films of British cinema of all time, The Servant, a film quitecontroversial in its time and that ‘permeated one’s cultural consciousness more profoundly tan any British film had done since Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’.
Losey's life was punctuated by thecontroversial, because he had to flee from the U. S due to persecution of Senator McCarthy, because the director was considered as a Communist or Communist sympathizer by the House Un-American ActivitiesCommittee. Losey was forced to be a fugitive and he used several pseudonyms, but his exile was fruitful because he made in England ​​his most important films, highlighting much The Servant.
This film is acriticism of British society of the time in many ways: the egocentric class system, its moral laxity, its mechanisms of power, etc. Losey uses the camera as if it were a scalpel, dissecting layer bylayer relationships of the various characters, exposing the miseries of a decadent society. Losey films the mansion detail, with a predilection for the frames bent and distorted mirrors to reflect themoral corruption and decadent universe where the characters move. This work also helps the magnificent screenplay by Harold Pinter, who draws the characters as products and victims of the class’ssystem. There is no salvation for the characters, who are prisoners of their condition.
The premiere of The Servant, was preceded by several sex scandals related to government ministers Harold McMillan, asthe Vassall affair, and especially the Profumo affair, war minister who had a brief relationship with a showgirl named Christine Keeler, who apparently had had intimate encounters with a known Sovietspy. Although Losey had no intention of linking the film with these scandals, the vision of perversion and sexual degradation of class, perfectly connected with these events. The orgy scene, which...