Joseph Losey

Joseph Walton Losey (January 14, 1909, La Crosse, Wisconsin – June 22, 1984, London) was an American theater and film director. After studying in Germany with Bertolt Brecht, Losey returned to the United States, eventually making his way to Hollywood. In the 1950s Losey was blacklisted in the United States and moved to Europe where he made the remainder of his films, mostly in the United Kingdom.

Biography

Early life and career

During the McCarthy Era, Losey was named during hearings of the HUAC for his supposed ties with the Communist Party. Although he was never officially blacklisted, his career in the US declined, and he moved to England to continue working as a director.

Even in the UK, he experienced problems: his first British film, The Sleeping Tiger, a 1954 film noir crime thriller, bore the pseudonym Victor Hanbury, rather than his own name, in the credits as director, as the stars of the film, Alexis Smith and Alexander Knox, feared being blacklisted in Hollywood due to working on a film he directed. He was also originally slated to direct the 1956 Hammer Films production X the Unknown; however, after a few days work on the project, star Dean Jagger refused to work with a supposed Communist sympathiser and Losey was moved off the project.

Collaboration with Harold Pinter

In the 1960s, Losey began working with playwright Harold Pinter, the collaboration beginning what would be a long friendship and a successful career for Pinter as a screenwriter. Losey realized three films from Pinter's screenplays, The Servant (1963), Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1971), all of which have made a mark in the traditions of British, European, and American art house cinema. The Servant won three British Academy Film Awards. Accident won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury award at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival. And The Go-Between won, among others, the Golden Palm Award at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, four prizes at the 1972 BAFTA awards, and 'Best British Screenplay' at the 1972 Writers' Guild of Great Britain awards. Each of the Pinter-Losey films examines the politics of sexuality, gender, and class in 1960s and 1970s Britain. In The Servant, a manservant named Hugo Barrett (Dirk Bogarde) facilitates the moral and psychological degradation of a member of the nouveau riche named Tony (James Fox); Accident explores male lust, hypocrisy, and ennui amongst the educated middle class as two Oxford tutors named Stephen (Bogarde) and Charley (Stanley Baker) competitively objectify a pupil named Anna (Jacqueline Sassard) against the backdrop of their seemingly idyllic lives. In The Go-Between, a young working class boy named Leo Colston (Dominic Guard) is involved in both facilitating and undermining a socially transgressive affair between an upper class woman named Marian Maudsley (Julie Christie) and a working class farmer named Ted Burgess (Alan Bates).

Losey's move from The Servant to the subsequent two films saw him experimenting increasingly with the mechanisms of cinema, in particular a rendering of time that was not linear but layered and thus exemplary of the subjective experience of memory. Although Losey's films can in the main be described as naturalistic, The Servant's hybridization of Losey's signature Baroque style, film noir, naturalism, and expressionism and both Accident's and The Go-Between's radical cinematography, use of montage, voice over, and musical score amount to a sophisticated construction of cinematic time and narrative perspective which edges this work in the direction of neorealist cinema. All three films are marked by Pinter's sparse, elliptical, and enigmatically subtextual dialogue, something Losey often develops a visual correlate for and occasionally even works against by means of dense and cluttered mise en scene and peripatetic camera work.

Pinter later worked with Losey on The Proust Screenplay (1972), an adaptation of A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust; however, the finances were never found to realize a film before Losey died.

Later career

In 1975, Losey realized a long-planned adaptation of Brecht's Galileo (aka Life of Galileo). Losey had co-directed the original U.S. production of Galileo with the author himself as the other co-director (and Charles Laughton, who had worked on the translation/adaptation, had had the lead role, taken in the film by Topol). Galileo was produced as part of the subscription film series of the American Film Theatre, though it was shot in England. In the context of that production, Losey also made a half hour film based on Galileo's life.

In 1979 Losey filmed Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, shot in Villa La Rotonda and the Veneto region of Italy: this film was nominated for several César Awards in 1980 including Best Director. He demonstrated a facility for working in the French language and Monsieur Klein (1976) gave Alain Delon as star and producer one of French cinema's earliest chances to highlight the background to the infamous Vel' d'Hiv Roundup of French Jews in July 1942.

Private life

Losey married three times. From 1956 to 1963 he was married to British actress Dorothy Bromiley; they had a son, Joshua Losey, an actor. He had a son, Gavrik Losey, with the fashion designer/author Elizabeth Hawes. Gavrik helped out with the production on some of his father's films. Losey then married the former Patricia Mohan, who adapted Lorenzo Da Ponte's libretto for Don Giovanni, and Nell Dunn's play Steaming. Losey's third marriage lasted for the rest of his life. Joseph Losey is also the grandfather of film directors Marek Losey and Luke Losey.

Filmography as director

• Pete Roleum and His Cousins (1939, short)
• Youth Gets a Break (1941, short)
• A Child Went Forth (1941, short)
• A Gun in His Hand (1945, short)
• Leben des Galilei (1947, short)
• The Boy with Green Hair (1948)
• The Lawless (1950)
• The Prowler (1951)
• M (1951)
• The Big Night (1951)
• Imbarco a mezzanotte (1951)
• The Sleeping Tiger (1954)
• A Man on the Beach (1955)
• The Intimate Stranger (1956)
• Time Without Pity (1957)
• The Gypsy and the Gentleman (1958)
• Blind Date (1959)
• First on the Road (1959, short)
• The Criminal (1960)

• Eva (1962)
• The Damned (1963)
• The Servant (1963)
• King & Country (1964)
• Modesty Blaise (1966)
• Accident (1967)
• Secret Ceremony (1968)
• Boom! (1968)
• Figures in a Landscape (1970)
• The Go-Between (1970)
• The Assassination of Trotsky (1972)
• A Doll's House (1973)
• The Romantic Englishwoman (1975)
• Galileo (1975)
• Monsieur Klein (1976)
• Les Routes du sud (1978)
• Don Giovanni (1979)
• La Truite (1982)
• Steaming (1985)

Bibliography

• David Caute, Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life, Faber, 1994, ISBN 978-0571164493
• Michel Ciment, Le Livre de Losey. Entretiens avec le cinéaste, Paris, Stock/Cinéma, 1979, 465 p.
• Michel Ciment, Conversations with Losey, London & New York: Metheun, 1985, 436 p.
• Michel Ciment, Joseph Losey: l'oeil du Maître, Institut Lumière/Actes Sud, 1994, 360 p.
• Joaquín Vallet, Joseph Losey, Cátedra, 2010, 330 p.
• Edith DeRahm, Joseph Losey: An American Director in Exile, Pharos, 1995.
• Colin Gardner Joseph Losey, Manchester University Press, 2004.
• Foster Hirsch, Joseph Losey, Twayne, 1980.
• Penelope Houston, "Losey's Paper Handkerchief", Sight and Sound, Summer 1966, pp. 142–143.
• Gilles Jacob "Joseph Losey, or The Camera Calls", Sight and Sound, Spring 1966, pp. 62–67.
• James Leahy, The Cinema of Joseph Losey, A.S Barnes, 1967, 175 p.
• Christian Ledieu Joseph Losey, Seghers, 1963, 188 p.
• Joseph Losey, Losey on Losey, edited and introduced by Tom Milne, Secker & Warburg, 1967, 192 p.
• James Palmer and Michael Riley, The Films of Joseph Losey, Cambridge University Press, 1993,

External links

• The Complete Joseph Losey (Links to notes for the retrospective series screened by Harvard Film Archive in July and August, 2008)
• Filmography at BFI Film & TV Database (contains entries not found at IMDb)
• Joseph Losey at filmreference.com includes extensive bibliography
• Joseph Losey at the British Film Institute's Screenonline
• Joseph Losey at the Internet Movie Database
• Joseph Losey: Pictures of Provocation (Notes by Steven Seid for the retrospective series screened by Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, March 5-April 16, 2010)
• Joseph Losey's Boom! (1968) by Kimberly Lindbergs; liner notes for the CD release of the film score by John Barry
• Senses of Cinema: Great Directors Critical Database
• A Child Went Forth at Archive.org