Word: servants
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...Cover) It was a great party. After the French champagne and the Viennese waltzes came Bopha Devi, prima ballerina of the Royal Cambodian Ballet. Sinuous and shimmering, dressed in green and gold, she danced a ritual dance in bare feet. When she accidentally dropped her ring, a woman servant slithered across the parquet floor on her belly to pick it up lest Bopha bruise herself...
...which won Bogarde all sorts of praise. Then he groped floppishly through / Could go On Singing and The Mind Benders. Shaken, he signed to do another entrail opera, called Doctor in Distress (still unreleased in the U.S.). But he need not have panicked. He has since appeared in The Servant (TIME, March 20), and critics have given him the serious acceptance he was looking for. More over, just as The Servant opened in the U.S., he was scoring another success on U.S. television - opposite Julie Harris in the Hallmark Hall of Fame's remake of James Costigan...
...Servant, Bogarde plays a gentleman's gentleman who utterly corrupts his employer, using flattery, pimpery, booze, and impudence to turn things around and become, quite actually, his master's master. Bogarde acts so unassumingly that at times the part seems to be playing itself, but afterward, a viewer realizes that he has seen the whole man in Bogarde's face: deception, cruelty, cunning, cynicism, the smirk of testing self-assertion, the pustular hurt of the man who feels that his rights exceed his definable estate, the essential weakness of the citizen slave...
...consider himself liberal, conservative, Southerner, Westerner, or what? Responding with an I'm -glad -you - asked -that -question glance, the President replied: "I have often said that I was proud that I was a free man first and an American second, and a public servant third, and a Democrat fourth-in that order...
Even lacking total credibility, The Servant shakes the senses by wallowing in the triumph of evil over evil. But if Losey intends an all-out attack on Britain's caste system, he may have blundered into a paradox. Many a viewer will come away feeling that a world of candlelight and polished silver might be perfectly satisfactory-if only the hired help knew its place...