Gay sexuality is everywhere and nowhere in The Servant: the relationship with Vera in fact heterosexualises an actual event in the life of Robin Maugham, author of the original novel, when his own manservant offered to introduce him to a teenage boy described as his “nephew”. Then Barrett asks if his sister Vera (Sarah Miles) can come as the live-in maid, and the sexy Vera entrances Tony – who gets weaker, more reliant on drink and hopelessly submissive in the face of Barrett’s controlling mind games. Barrett soon makes himself indispensable, parasitically reducing the already lazy Tony to a state of infantilised torpor, becoming a kind of wife to him, to the irritation of Tony’s actual fiancee Susan (Wendy Craig). He is hired as a live-in valet by Tony (Fox), a spoilt and indolent young man on a private income who lives in a handsome London townhouse. The film was first considered unreleasably upsetting and weird, and notoriously gathered dust for a year on the shelf while Bogarde was humiliatingly forced to make another of the cheesy Doctor comedies he was trying to put behind him – Doctor in Distress – to pay off a tax bill.īogarde plays Barrett, a professional manservant whose manner is sometimes self-effacingly blank, sometimes ingratiating, camp and cunning. Dirk Bogarde stars as the sinister manservant who gradually gains psychological control over his weak-willed master played by James Fox. J oseph Losey’s monochrome psycho-horror satire from 1963 is now re-released it took an expatriate American to orchestrate this very English festival of class, fear, sex and shame with its menacing screenplay by Harold Pinter.
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