Losey, Joseph

LOSEY, JOSEPH (1909-1984). Arguably the most skilled of the Hollywood Blacklistee directors and likewise the most mordant, Losey may be said to have overcome the hold of melodrama on popular film. In his films, especially in the later decades of his career, avant-garde theater took flight on celluloid, thanks to his masterful touch. It is interesting to note that his first wife was Elizabeth Hawes, a foremost radical designer of clothing and left-wing analyst of fashion trends.

Born and raised in the insular urban Midwest of La Crosse, Wisconsin, a prominent lawyer’s son, young Joseph Walton Losey went off to Dartmouth and then to Harvard University. Beginning medical school, he encountered the 1930s Left and became a Marxist, but also a proponent of serious theater in popular form: the “Living Newspaper,” a theatrical method that he learned first-hand from studying the work of Vsevelod Meyerhold in Moscow of 1935. He shared a special sense of modern drama with Berthold Brecht, although the two would not meet until the later 1940s. Through the two artists—Brecht was vastly more famous, but Losey managed to work in film for decades— the Meyerholdian impulse, the method of capturing the “grotesque” as the logic of capitalist society, came alive. It admirably suited Losey’s later cinematic work.

Losey had already achieved a modest fame in the 1930s with his direction of Living Newspaper plays, escaping the stylization of leftwing sentiment evident even in the work of Clifford Odets. He traveled to Hollywood with mixed feelings. His first feature, The Boy with Green Hair (1947), is mostly a propagandistic opposition to the emerging Cold War temperament, with its atomic weaponry and fallout from testing (thus the green hair). Losey was better suited, despite his own artistic sentiments, to the melodramatic mood. For lovers of the Hollywood Left’s final films before the Blacklist, Lawless (1950) and The Prowler (1951) offer a close look, respectively, at racism (against Mexican Americans amidst agricultural strikes) and authoritarian figures (the bad cop), twin totems of the American darkness, then or now.

Fleeing abroad, Losey placed himself in British cinema, engaging in struggles to make his films socially significant, artistic, and successful. These Are the Damned (1962) is a tantalizing low-budget SciFi film with children locked in an underground vault and poisoned by radiation. They are saved by a left-winger on the run, an allegorical reference that might be taken for Losey’s own efforts. A second film within the film has British teenagers in a motorcycle gang, unable to find a proper target for their frustrations. With Eve (1962), Losey had come to his success with the leftwing actor Stanley Baker, in a jazz-framed saga about the brother of a Welsh miner-become-novelist. But some of Losey’s best work had already begun, most especially employing the skills of actor Dirk Bogarde first in The Sleeping Tiger (1954), then The Servant (1963), and Accident (1967). In these as well as in other films, Losey may be understood as depicting disgust for the social lies of contemporary bourgeois society. Sexuality, time and again, brings out the otherwise hidden truths of the grotesque.

Losey did not usually deal directly with politics, but King and Country (1964) offers a searing assault on patriotism, giving him room to make his sentiments felt in film. Monsieur Klein (1976) ponders the day in 1942 in Occupied France when Nazis rounded up Jews. Roads to the South (1978), treats the last days of Franco dictatorship and the very last resistance fighter to die—a brave French Communist woman, disguising from herself the disillusionment with Stalinism widespread across most of Western Europe. Losey also filmed the Mozart opera Don Giovanni (1979), considered among the most radical of all operatic works.

Collaboration with leftwing playwright Harold Pinter, an autodidact son of immigrants, raised both artists upward to new heights. The Servant and Accident but above all The Go-Between (1971), starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates, adapting Thomas Hardy’s novel, reached the goal of a grand and popular film most memorably. Losey had successes and failures thereafter, the most prominent of the latter surely The Assassination of Trotsky (1972). Experimenting to the end, he came at last to the minor feminist classic Steaming (1984), a filmed theater piece not especially successful in itself but a tribute to revolutionary expression, in every sense. A hard-line Communist in his own terms, he had never given up the aspiration of overthrowing capitalism and its social relations.

Buhle, Paul and Dave Wagner. Hide in Plain Sight: the Hollywood Blacklistees, 1950-2002. New York: Palgrave, 2003.

Buhle, Paul and Dave Wagner. Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story of America’s Favorite Movies. New York: The New Press, 2002.

Caute,David, Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life. London: Faber and Faber, 1994.

Ciment, Michel. Conversations with Losey. New York: Metheun, 1985.

Joseph Losey. Filmography. Internet Archive. https://web.archive.org/web/20121023062415/http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/individual/82342?view=credit