The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (255 page)

A professional life so given up to sham, and a private life of continual breakdown, made for an ever-greater frustration. The turning point that failed to turn was his one direction, in Germany, of
Die Verlorene
(51), a worthy film that lacked his poetic eccentricity as a supporting actor. Growing fatter, he became more resigned and was an increasingly amiable distinction in generally unworthy films. Only
Beat the Devil
(54, Huston);
Silk Stockings
(57, Rouben Mamoulian); his belated meeting with Roger Corman in
Tales of Terror
(61);
The Raven
(62); and then
A Comedy of Terrors
(63, Jacques Tourneur) showed what comedy there was in his gentle madness. Otherwise he seemed content to be playing: including Fleischer’s
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
(54);
Congo Crossing
(56) for Pevney; with Jerry Lewis in
The Sad Sack
(57, George Marshall); a clown in Joseph Newman’s
The Big Circus
(59); as a stooge to Jerry Lewis in
The Patsy
(64).

Lorre is one of the great screen personalities, no matter that he had so few leading roles. Perhaps he was a genius frustrated by the various sanities and insanities of the world. But perhaps he came very close to the nature of film with his extraordinary combination of impact and nonsense. He hardly seems dead, just as it is difficult to believe he was ever clinically alive. He was Peter Lorre, and that was something no one else was capable of being. It was often enough to encourage directors and other actors to be more imaginative than they had ever thought likely. Indeed, it was hardly possible to make an unwatchable film with Lorre in it. His scenes in those films, no matter how arbitrary they may have seemed at the time, now run together with amazing consistency. He must be somewhere still, pattering around Sydney Greenstreet and doing what he can to dodge Bogart’s laughter.

Joseph Losey
(1909–84), b. La Crosse, Wisconsin
1948:
The Boy with Green Hair
. 1949:
The Lawless
. 1951:
The Prowler; M; The Big Night
. 1952:
Stranger on the Prowl
. 1954:
The Sleeping Tiger
(made under the name of Victor Hanbury). 1955:
A Man on the Beach
(s). 1956:
The Intimate Stranger
(made under the name of Joseph Walton). 1957:
Time Without Pity; The Gypsy and the Gentleman
. 1959:
Blind Date
. 1960:
The Criminal
. 1962:
The Damned; Eve
. 1963:
The Servant
. 1964:
King and Country
. 1966:
Modesty Blaise
. 1967:
Accident
. 1968:
Boom; Secret Ceremony
. 1970:
Figures in a Landscape
. 1971:
The GoBetween
. 1972:
The Assassination of Trotsky
. 1973:
A Doll’s House
. 1974:
Galileo
. 1975:
The Romantic Englishwoman
. 1976:
Mr. Klein
. 1978:
Les Routes du Sud/Roads to the South
. 1979:
Don Giovanni
. 1982:
La Truite/The Trout
. 1985:
Steaming
.

The hardening of Losey’s arteries seems to date from 1964. He had just made
The Servant
, a highly wrought study of self-destruction and sexual sociology, subjects the fluctuating
Eve
hits and misses. Like all his best work,
The Servant
uses interior setting as an extension of character and finds a unique suggestibility in the spaces and shapes within a house. Its complex camera movements are meticulous and emphatic, but it is given vitality by the pain and surprise in the acting, and by the grim logic that breaks down people into fleshly hulks and contradictory impulses. Losey’s heavy misanthropy shows through in the cheerless ending: one remembers the remark of Freya in
The Damned
of the Macdonald Carey character (an American in England): “I like him because he doesn’t like the world. It’s a good beginning.”

More than that,
The Servant
marked Losey’s coming of age among the artistic elite. Compelled to leave America at the time of Senator McCarthy, he had had to digest the mores of a new environment and struggle to obtain work. Times had changed, however; the man who had made
The Prowler
and
M
as gripping, low-budget thrillers was now working in a world ready to acclaim his seriousness. Thus, some critics praised the subtlety and ignored the hysteria in
The Servant
. That was a disservice to Losey, whose strength had always been a fusion of the two. From
The Criminal
onward, the attention that Losey had long enjoyed in France was growing in Britain.
The Servant
could not have completed the trick better: it indulged the facile guilt of the English intelligentsia; it was a collaboration with the playwright Harold Pinter; and it offered unexpected depth to an English favorite, Dirk Bogarde.

In retrospect, its success may have lured into the open Losey’s yearning for significance.
The Boy with Green Hair
was a blatant allegory, unlike anything else in the American cinema; while in
M
, Losey was hoping to comment on American society as directly as Lang had on Germany. His
M
is a marvelous, frightening film, years ahead of its time and typical of his American virtues: narrative economy; sustained camera setups based on dynamic composition; the ability to make characters reveal themselves quickly and naturally; and the power to get good performances from actors. The policeman in
The Prowler
and the murderer in
M
are flawed men, driven to their own destruction by an unwholesome society that they inadequately comprehend. In that sense,
The Criminal
is an American picture; it sees the opposed hierarchies of law and crime squeezing together on the innate solitariness of the Stanley Baker character, and gives the criminal a politically tinged importance. In all these films, Losey used the thriller genre for larger purposes so that the melodrama expanded to support the metaphor.

But by the early 1960s, Losey was conforming to the English ideal of the director irked by commercial limits. Increasingly free, his work seemed to show how far it had thrived under restriction. But a man who could make
The Servant
must deserve better things—including the attention of
Sight and Sound
, who had barely noticed the confused achievement of
Blind Date
and the outright triumph of
The Criminal. King and Country
was a decent little film, except that it had no reason for being made; how could so open-and-shut a case really engage Losey? Its subject was so one-sided that anyone other than a Fritz Lang was bound to make it monotonous and brutal. It was the first plain film Losey had made.
Modesty Blaise
was amusing, but again unnecessary, a break in Losey’s seriousness, without indicating any sense of humor. That led to the pastoral slowness and pretension of
Accident
, another Pinter script with echoes of E. M. Forster and the uncanny feeling that Losey was trying to make a film F. R. Leavis might teach.
Accident
was highly praised, whereas it should have been taken to pieces for its ingrowing artiness, its self-conscious beauty, and its opting for restraint rather than urgency. It was difficult not to conclude that Losey had fallen into thinking of himself as an intellectual; whereas his best films showed a passionate melodramatist, torn between ideas and feelings.

Secret Ceremony
was interesting, a true penetration of obsession, sadly spoiled by cuts.
Boom
was high folly,
Figures in a Landscape
arid exercise, and
The GoBetween
exactly the sort of prettified, literary pomp that passes for intelligent cinema in Britain. It is not equal to a paragraph of Hartley’s novel, nor a reel of so painful a film as
The Damned
. The deterioration was one of the saddest spectacles in modern cinema.

The significance of Losey’s story is to show up the deadly stupidity of too much criticism and the uneasy public role of the director as an artist. Nothing is more suspicious than the hollow stylistic smoothness of
The GoBetween
—broken only by the ridiculous flashes forward. Losey is a director of violence: originally it was externalized—in
The Prowler, M, The Criminal
, and
The Damned
. In
Eve and The Servant
it went inward. Now it was gone, and Losey was perched on calendar photographs and the pinnacle dialogue of Harold Pinter. Whereas, in 1960, he felt compelled to dig into England and find the many layers of Wey-mouth in
The Damned
and the mournful snowscapes of
The Criminal
, the
Trotsky
film looked like Festival fodder, and
A Doll’s House
was a gesture toward feminism. That last was especially odd since Losey had seldom handled women well. The exception—Jeanne Moreau’s
Eve
—was achieved only by turning the prostitute into an acid bath for rotting social structures and the man’s masochism.

But in 1976, Losey regained distinction with
Mr. Klein
, the Borgesian study of a conniving art dealer in occupied Paris haunted by the possibility of a Jewish double. It is a very controlled film, with more stress on decadent high society than the approaching Gestapo. But the trap it poses is gripping and intelligent, and there is even a trace of sardonic humor watching the magnificent alienation of Alain Delon.
Mr. Klein
was among the best of Losey’s films, and one wondered if its urgency came in part from the discovery of a new environment—Paris.

In his last few films, Losey seemed neither American nor British—he was an international art-house man. Yet, in hindsight, it seems clear that he was a director who needed to respond to the exactness of place and social situation. It is a career that demonstrates the difficulty in being both itinerant and concentrated.

David Caute’s careful biography showed Losey’s creativity growing out of a cheerless vanity that kept few friends. He seemed determined to give others no chance of liking him.

Myrna Loy
(Myrna Williams) (1905–93), b. Radersburg, Montana
Although her career spans a much greater period, it was during the 1930s (when she made no less than fifty-eight pictures) that Myrna Loy was at her peak as a sophisticated, glamorous comedienne, perfectly cast as Nora Charles opposite William Powell’s Nick in the
Thin Man
series. That movie marriage, always securely based emotionally but playing with hostility, flirtation, and raillery, served in its time as the epitome of an adult, liberated partnership. Equally, it was part of Myrna Loy’s appeal that she was so often the hero’s wife, suggesting sexual liberation without actually exploiting it. Thus, while appearing one of the cinema’s most risqué stars, she was joining in one of its subtlest dreams of conformity.

In her restrained, or withheld, smartness and her consistent underplaying, for years Myrna Loy seemed very modern and alluringly cool. But she would not—could not?—dominate a film. Did the idea seem indecent to her? She was only really stirred if she liked the idea of a screen partnership. The attitude is allied to her own modesty and the feeling that stardom just happened to her.

She was a dancer at Grauman’s Chinese Theater, who made her debut in
Pretty Ladies
(25, Monta Bell) and worked very hard for the next few years under contract at Warners as native girls, maids, spies, dancers, and molls, only occasionally playing lead parts:
Across the Pacific
(26, Roy del Ruth);
The Caveman
(26, Lewis Milestone);
Don Juan
(26, Alan Crosland);
The Exquisite Sinner
(26, Josef von Sternberg and Phil Rosen);
So This Is Paris
(26, Ernst Lubitsch);
Bitter Apples
(27, Harry Hoyt);
The Climbers
(27, Paul L. Stein);
Girl from Chicago
(27, Ray Enright);
The Jazz Singer
(27, Crosland);
If I Were Single
(27, del Ruth);
State Street Sadie
(28, Archie Mayo);
The Midnight Taxi
(28, John Adolfi); and
Noah’s Ark
(28, Michael Curtiz).

Sound only improved her as an actress, but she was slow to become established and still found herself cast in slinky, exotic roles:
The Desert Song
(29, del Ruth);
The Black Watch
(29, John Ford);
The Squall
(29, Alexander Korda);
The Show of Shows
(29, Adolfi);
Under a Texas Moon
(30, Curtiz);
Cock o’ the Walk
(30, R. William Neill and Walter Lang);
Cameo Kirby
(30, Irving Cummings);
The Truth About Youth
(30, William A. Seiter);
Renegades
(30, Victor Fleming);
Body and Soul
(31, Alfred Santell);
A Connecticut Yankee
(31, David Butler);
The Naughty Flirt
(31, Edward Cline);
Transatlantic
(31, William K. Howard);
The Devil to Pay
(31, George Fitzmaurice); and
Arrowsmith
(31, Ford).

Warners had not renewed her contract and she now worked largely at Fox, but in 1932 Irving Thalberg called her to MGM, a studio much more likely to recognize her smart good humor. Even so, Thalberg gave her modest work and loaned her out:
Emma
(32, Clarence Brown);
The Wet Parade
(32, Fleming); a poor version of
Vanity Fair
(32, Chester Franklin);
The Woman in Room 13
(32, Henry King);
Love Me Tonight
(32, Rouben Mamoulian);
The Mask of Fu Manchu
(32, Charles Vidor and Charles Brabin); very good as a manipulative “new” woman in
The Animal Kingdom
(32, Edward H. Griffith);
Topaze
(33, Harry d’Arrast);
Night Flight
(33, Brown); and
The Barbarian
(33, Sam Wood).