Wealthy wastrel
James Fox hires insouciant cockney
Dirk Bogarde
as a valet. No sooner has he donned his working clothes than Bogarde
begins exercising a subtle but insidious control over his master.
Suggesting that the house could use a little fixing up, Bogarde
convinces Fox to spend a whopping amount of money on it. But this is
just a warm-up session for Bogarde, who by mid-film is calling all the
shots in the Fox household, all the while pretending to keep his place.
Fox's fiance
Wendy Craig sees through Bogarde's game. Bogarde then brings his own lady friend
Sarah Miles
into the house. At Bogarde's insistence, Miles seduces Fox, thereby
loosening Craig's hold on the confused young man. And so it goes. The
homosexual subtext of
The Servant disturbed some of the more hidebound critics of 1963;
Harold Pinter based his cryptic screenplay on a novel by
Robin Maugham.
