With his criminal dramas Time without Pity (1957) and The Criminal (1960, Losey reached not only the peaks of this genre but also the peak of film production at the time. He combined elements of European tradition with the economy of the American gangster films



American Joseph Losey is an author with an unbalanced opus that includes many great films (and several failures) that were mostly made outside of his home country. Even though he began by studying medicine he soon devoted all of his attention and energy to theatre. He was an actor and writer but worked mainly as a director by the age of twenty-three. At the same time he wrote about theatre and showed special interest in some of the modern movements in European theatre. During the great German dramatist Bertolt Brecht’s visit to America, Losey collaborated with him. Their work peaked with the play Galileo Galilei in 1947. Losey was so impressed with this play that he made a film version of it in 1974. His theatrical success opened the doors of film studios. After making a few short films, in 1948 he directed his first feature film The Boy with Green Hair. Afterwards Losey made four more films that proved how different his vision was from the prevailing tendencies of contemporary American film. Pronounced leftist viewpoints in his portrayal of the individual’s conflict with social norms coupled with a divergent approach to film-making (he sometimes favored Brecht’s effect of alienation) are especially apparent in his remake of Lang’s film M. Because of these things he found himself on McCarthy’s “communist witch hunt” black list in the beginning of 1950s. In order to continue working, Losey moved to England where he began a career in low budget exploitation films (under a pseudonym). With his criminal dramas Time without Pity (1957) and The Criminal (1960) he reached not just the peaks of this genre but also the peak of film production at the time. He combined elements of European tradition with the economy of the American gangster films and produced an impressive image of the world of evil that reflected existing social relationships.


Losey was praised by the influential French magazine Cahiers du cinéma, and by way of thanks he tried to employ some of the stylistic characteristics of the French New wave in his atypical film Eva (1962). Losey’s collaboration with the famous dramatist Harold Pinter was crucial for the next period in his career. Consequently, Losey’s film procedures became more innovative. His plots became less consistent, the stories less important and he focused more on the inner lives of his protagonists. This led him to use unusual visual and atmospheric effects as representations of their psychological states. The results of these creative experiments are his great films The Servant (1963), Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1970).


Later Losey tried to reach into some other creative realms and made the political film The Assassination of Trotsky (1972). At one point he returned to his old love, the theatre, and made a weak film adaptation of Ibsen’s Doll House and a slightly better Galileo (much better and more effective was his adaptation of Mozart’s Don Giovanni from 1979).The relative failure of these films caused a change in the topics of his films as well as his residence. While working on a British-French co-production The Romantic Englishwoman (1975) Losey moved to France. There he combined experience that he gained from collaborating with Pinter with the search for modern expression in Resnais and Visconti’s films and created his masterpiece Mr Klein (1976). He made several more interesting films that focused on the individual’s identity (and its loss) in an unfavorable surrounding. These films were enriched by multiple layers of meaning and an abundance of motives, thus allowing viewers to draw their own conclusions. His complex investigations of the ways of the modern world, (even when the topic at hand was connected to the past), didn’t not draw optimistic conclusions. The author’s worldview is best summed up by a character in the film The Damned (1961) who says: “I like him because he does not like the world. That is a good start”. (Tomislav Kurelec)