The first of three film collaborations with the American director Joseph Losey, Harold Pinter’s screenplay adapts a 1948 novel by Robin Maugham, pen name of the 2nd Viscount Maugham (1916–1981), the Eton-educated nephew of the novelist W. Somerset Maugham.

Filmed in London during one of the coldest British winters on record, The Servant dissects the power-play between the wealthy and callous aristocrat Tony (Fox) and his manipulative manservant Barrett (Bogarde). The homosexual undercurrent is more pronounced than in the more circumspect Victim, which also starred Bogarde, but far more prominent is the class antagonism. Here the circumspection reflects a covert competition, rather than a fear of societal censure.

Left-leaning Losey had been blacklisted by Hollywood in the McCarthy era and found refuge in England, where he brought an outsider’s perspective to bear upon the absurdities of the British class system. Memorable scenes are shot through the distortion of the convex mirror on the sitting room wall, reflecting the skewed relationships between the protagonists.

The social gulf between Bogarde’s role in this film and Victim highlights not just his talent as an actor but the way that homosexuality had come to be seen as a social commonplace, rather than the preserve of an elite minority, over a surprisingly short space of time, heralding the legal and cultural changes of the 1960s. The prominence of class was the real harbinger.

“The film is set very firmly in the early 1960s, in a period when old certainties about class and sexuality were being challenged as never before.” Geoffrey Macnab, The Independent

“That neither Barrett nor Tony are ever ‘revealed’ as queer heightens the shadowy power that homosexuality comes to possess within The Servant – a structuring absence whose winking lack of confirmation only ensures its ability to wreak havoc.” Matthew Connolly, Slant Magazine