THE SERVANT

The Servant: a 60s masterwork that hides its homosexuality in the shadows

Joseph Losey's superb 1963 film about class and sex is once again in cinemas – but to locate its elusive gay gene, you have to revisit its source in Robin Maugham's extraordinary and disturbing novella

Peter Bradshaw

 @PeterBradshaw1

Wed 27 Mar 2013 16.21 GMT First published on Wed 27 Mar 2013 16.21 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/mar/27/the-servant-homosexuality-harold-pinter

Homosexuality is everywhere and nowhere in The Servant. Harold Pinter's superbly controlled, elliptical, menacing dialogue is able to hint, to imply, to seduce, to repulse, in precisely the manner that gay men were forced to adopt in 1963, when homosexuality was still a criminal offence, and when representing homosexuality on screen was forbidden. To locate the gay gene in The Servant, you have to go back to its source, the 1948 novella written by Robin Maugham, the nephew of W Somerset Maugham. The Servant has its spark in an extraordinary event in Maugham's own life, to be treasured by connoisseurs of British sex and class.

Maugham had rented a house, which came with its own servant, a man who unnerved him by gliding about almost invisibly. One evening, Maugham went on a date with Mary Soames, the daughter of Winston Churchill. He took her back to his flat and she asked for a drink: a cold lager from the fridge, as opposed to warm ale. (Interestingly, this drink recurs in the movie, but not the novel.) The fridge was just next to the manservant's room in the basement, the door of which was open; Maugham glanced in and saw a naked teenage boy on the bed. The servant appeared from nowhere and said in his odd drawl: "I see you are admiring my young nephew, sahr. Would you like me to send him up to you to say goodnight, sahr?" Maugham pretended he hadn't heard and simply went away without replying.

The trap was plainly set for blackmail – financial or moral, or both. In the book, of course, Maugham heterosexualises the trap. Barrett brings in a young woman he describes as his "niece"; in the film it is his sister, and the misplaced suspicion of incest between Barrett and Vera becomes the "unnatural" act. It is a woman who seduces Tony. But it is Barrett who is pulling the strings. It is Barrett who effects the seduction at one remove, in the hope that he can use this as leverage over the master. In the film, it is as much about power as pleasure, but this manipulation is replete with sexuality.

Maugham's book is far more candid about the homosexual act. He has a character, Richard Merton, who does not appear in the film: a concerned friend of Tony who is the narrator (Maugham even implies that it is their relationship that is the bond of true love). Merton asks Tony outright if he and Barrett have sex, and Tony laughingly denies it, though without being offended or shocked. His passions are to become centred on Vera, who is absurdly and rather naively depicted as a nymphomaniac. But students of linguistic history might be interested in the use of the word "gay" in the book. After Barrett's redecoration, Tony's "chairs had been covered in a gay yellow chintz". Tony is asked by his friend if he is at heart a roving bachelor or a "gay wolf". "Moderately gay" is how Tony replies. The word did not yet mean "homosexual" but is in the process of transition. Harold Pinter avoids it entirely. His movie is about more than sex.

What did audiences make of this extraordinary, disturbing and compelling story? They may well have been alive to its literary echoes. Everyone adored PG Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster. They understood how Jeeves had the upper hand. But Jeeves was entirely benign and discreet. He knew his place. JM Barrie's play The Admirable Crichton showed a butler taking power because he is the only one with practical knowhow when his aristocratic employers are shipwrecked with him on a desert island: but the status quo is ultimately restored.

Insidious and insinuating, Barrett is more like a subtler Uriah Heep, and in their claustrophobia and hysteria, Tony and Barrett have something of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, or perhaps Lord Henry Wootton and Dorian Gray, or even Edward II and Gaveston in Christopher Marlowe's play.

As far as movies go, Joseph Losey's previous film with Dirk Bogarde had a similar cuckoo-in-the-nest theme. The Sleeping Tiger (1954) starred Bogarde as Frank, a criminal who is invited by a trendy psychotherapist to come and live in the family house, believing that a stable environment will help him. Frank makes himself at home and begins an affair with the therapist's troubled wife. In later years, when live-in servants are less common, parallels with The Servant are less common also, but there is Curtis Hanson's The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992) featuring Rebecca De Mornay as the nanny who tries to take over the household. And a mention should go to Tinge Krishnan's social-realist drama Junkhearts (2011), which features Eddie Marsan as the ex-soldier who befriends a young homeless teen and gives her a platonic bed for the night in his council flat, only to discover she wants to bring in her boyfriend, who has been planning from the outset to take over his property.

Even in context, however, The Servant looks unique: its formal, theatrical elegance, combined with the ugliness of its emotions and fears, looks sharper and fiercer than ever. With its dark shadows, and faces distorted in convex mirrors, it looks like a scary movie, which is what it is. In Britain in 2013, even with Old Etonians in charge, the master/servant dialogue of 50 years ago seems impossibly arrogant. It was not unusual for instructions to be brusque, and the word "please" to be avoided, and a sentence rounded off with a curt "… would you?" And so the servant classes might well take refuge in an enigmatic mask, or take revenge with little gestures of pique or cheek, and generally store up resentment. In Britain the rhetoric of class, like that of sex, was largely in code. This is what the outsider Losey orchestrates, what Pinter writes and what Bogarde embodies.

• This is an edited extract from Peter Bradshaw's essay on The Servant included in the film's DVD booklet. The Servant is out now in cinemas, and will be released on DVD and Blu-Ray on 8 April.