By the late ’40s, all three were in Hollywood creating a new kind of violent movie drama that interrogated and exposed conformist American values. THE LAWLESS (1950; August 8 at 9:30 pm), an anti-discrimination exposé about migrant workers in Southern California, features the beautiful, enigmatic actress Gail Russell. “Poor, desperate, lonely, tragic Gail Russell’s eyes counted for a great deal” in it, Losey said. THE PROWLER (1951; July 25 at 7 pm), a sordid noir, with Van Heflin as a corrupt cop and another one-of-a-kind actress, Evelyn Keyes, posits middle-class aspiration as empty and hopeless.
Mid-century Southern California creates a unique, sickened mood in The Prowler and The Lawless. Los Angeles is also a big presence in Losey’s improbable remake of Fritz Lang’s M (1951; July 13 at 7 pm). Starring David Wayne in a brilliant rethinking of the Peter Lorre role, a serial murderer of children, Losey’s film updates the story from early-’30s Germany to contemporary LA. As Lang did in the original, Losey substitutes criminals for law and order (reversing The Prowler). Wayne’s pathetic misfit threatens society from a position of absolute weakness. The lowest of the low realize his continued existence threatens an established order in which even they have a part.
M makes an interesting companion to The Boy with Green Hair, which also dealt with predatory adults, threatened children, and weakness that lashes out. THE BIG NIGHT (1951; July 18 at 9:30 pm) extends these themes, with teenage John Barrymore Jr. watching passively as his father is beaten. The film is well cast and brutal, prime characteristics of Losey in America.
This is pre-art-film Losey, working in the most basic genre, the crime film. In his next period, the problems of shabby people in LA became universal and are not confined to the poor. Equally brutal yet also jazzed-up and more gimlet-eyed, THE SLEEPING TIGER (1954; July 21 at 7 pm), TIME WITHOUT PITY (1957; July 20 at 8 pm), and BLIND DATE (1959; August 4 at 9 pm) look like American studio films from the late ’40s made in the England with excellent British and European actors.
Losey’s transitional period was a time of great pressure in his career, but it opened up a world. His peripatetic uneasiness and the way he takes everything personally animate even a minor film like 1958’s THE GENTLEMEN AND THE GYPSY (July 28 at 9 pm), an uncharacteristic costume drama in which Melina Mercouri seems to be talking about Losey when she tells Patrick McGoohan, “They always beat Gypsies.” Two of the later films from this period, THE CRIMINAL (1960; July 12 at 9 pm) and THE DAMNED (1963; August 1 at 9:15 pm), are Losey’s last essential works before the strangeness of his ’60s art period engulfed his filmmaking.
Of course, that period is the one for which he’s known best — his Harold Pinter years. THE SERVANT (1963; July 14 at 7 pm), from a Pinter screenplay, is Losey’s most famous film. Once considered a masterpiece, it descends into self-conscious, fruity whining by the end. A gothic orgy scene arrives to redeem it but ends up collapsing the film. It still fascinates, with mesmerizing performances from Dirk Bogarde and Sarah Miles, who deserved her BAFTA award just for the way she slides matches across a countertop.
