Word: losey
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...films of Director Joseph Losey, truth is not so much disclosed as inflicted. His characters stagger under the impact of selfdiscovery; sometimes they are destroyed by it. Losey shares with Playwright Harold Pinter, one of his most frequent collaborators, a fascination with the surfaces of illusion, with the means by which people delude themselves, and with the mechanics of their inevitable undoing. In earlier Losey-Pinter films, the catalysts of doom were generally characters of a certain ambiguous authority, like the gentleman's gentleman in The Servant or the young girl at Oxford in Accident. In their new film...
...Between thus represents something of a departure for both Director Losey and Scenarist Pinter. It is a film of formal, almost sculpted elegance, of precise, leisurely beauty permeated by melancholy. Watching it is very much like reading a long, old-fashioned novel, for its virtues are as much literary as visual: a strong sense of plot, nuances of character shrewdly observed, a delicate sense of theme and dialogue. It is an extraordinarily pleasurable and successful movie in a minor...
...foreign country," says the narrator, over a shot of an English manor house. "They do things differently there." Immediately the film plunges into a splendid reconstruction of the Edwardian era, all etiquette and innuendo, cascading lace and carriages, mirrors and staircases (the last two, familiar obsessions from other Losey films). Leo Colston (Dominic Guard) is a twelve-year-old schoolboy come to pass a luxurious summer holiday with a wealthy classmate. Leo is more than a little out of place. He swelters in his woolen Norfolk jacket until his friend's elder sister Marian (Julie Christie) volunteers to take...
...Losey periodically cuts startlingly from the Norfolk estate in 1900 to a graying figure being chauffeured across the same countryside decades later. This, too, is Leo (now played by Michael Redgrave in an exceptional performance). The adult Leo retraces and remembers his past, returning after all this time to deliver a final message. What the message is-and to whom-is the kind of 19th century plot flourish that is spoiled by revelation. It is also too facile and hollow a device, which Losey and Pinter chose to retain from the original L.P. Hartley novel. One can feel affectionate toward...
...Both Losey and Hall have requested-with success-that their names be removed from their films. Now Losey has started agitating with the Directors Guild for protection against future alteration. Tighter contracts are obviously called for. "This is a frightening precedent," he says. "Once they begin on this kind of thing, where will...