The Fallen Idol

Everything is a lie in Carol Reed’s 1948 adaptation of Graham Greene’s short story, "The Basement Room," The Fallen Idol, which is currently being revived at Film Forum. The truth, which is that an accident occurred, is conceived as a lie, as are all the alibis  told to protect the innocent. “The trouble is, we’ve told a lot lies” is a line from the script that could be the film’s mantra. The germ of the story has to do with Baines (Ralph Richardson), a butler who runs the French embassy with his wife (Sonia Dresdel).  Unhappy in his marriage Baines is having an affair with a secretary, Julie (Michele Morgan). Reed turns the screen into a twisted cubist canvas in which everything is perceived at an angle or from the point of view of Phillippe (Bobby Henrey), the son of the ambassador who’s left in the care of the help. Certain scenes stand out, but there’s one where Phillipe, hidden under a table identifies Mrs. Baines, the murderer of his pet snake Macgregor, by the sight of her matron's shoes. It’s an indelible  moment of aggression and suspense. To complicate the dissociated quality of this masterpiece of misperception, Greene’s story presents a proto Upstairs, Downstairs in which the servants have intermittently become the masters of the house. So the universe has a topsy turvy quality from the start and watching Richardson one can’t help thinking of the role Dirk Bogart would play in Joseph Losey’s The Servant (1963), 15 years later.  English society was and is a parody of stratification and no one draws the underclass with more acuity than English directors. But the most astonishing moment of the film might be the very last scene in which Philipe’s parents' return. Phillipe has been separated from his mother, in particular, for some time and what should be a joyous reuniting introduces one final level of unreality. It’s as if she were a footnote to the boy’s life, as if she'd never existed, and it poses the question of how a child, who lives in an imaginative present, can ever find truth in the stories he or she is told.

The Servant

Saying that The Servant is about reality is like saying that a great poem like “Ozymandias" is about reality. "Ozymandias" is about reality, but it has a peculiar relationship to reality. Thus you could say the Joseph Losey masterpiece, with screenplay by Harold Pinter, currently revived at Film Forum (today is the last day of the run), is about colonialism, about sado-masochistic sexuality, or about servitude (Dirk Bogarde’s portrayal of the title character, Hugo Barrett, is a tour de force). The iconography of colonialism is everywhere from the Georgian mansion with its military portrait, the sexuality with its mixture of submission and resignation and the master servant relation which gets reflected in the convex mirror brilliantly based on van Eyck’s,  “The Arnolfini Marriage.”And then there is this one piece of narrative which brings everything together. Tony (James Fox), the fey upper crust master is building cities in the Brazilian jungle, while in effect the movie charts a jungle being released in the middle of one of the most posh areas of London. But the genius of the film is that none of the themes which one might extrapolate adequately account for its power which is that of music. Speaking of music Cleo Laine singing “Now While I love You Alone,” is one of the leitmotifs, which include the dripping of water, the falling of snow and rain and a bookshelf which is also a door. In music you speak of cadences and keys. In The Servant indenture and unraveling are the river on which human debris flows. The integrity of personality is shattered and the lines divided the self and others is blurred. There’s a wonderful scene in restaurant where conversations between a pair of prelates, an arguing mother and daughter and Tony and Susan all meld into one, a harmonious cacophony, with each reflecting the other,  like the mirrors which are ubiquitous in the movie. In another scene Hugo Barrett’s girl, Vera (Sarah Miles), tells Tony, “I love Hugo,” but the words come out sounding like “I love you, though." “Oh I forgot to tell you. I found a man servant,” Tony tells his girlfriend Susan (Wendy Craig) at the beginning. “A what?” she laughs in disbelief. At first you wonder what’s so hard for a woman of Susan’s class to understand. Then you find out.

Swells

Every red blooded American boy needs to experience dispossession. It’s what makes America great and it’s what creates the dynamic quality of American life, to the extent that this country has no real hereditary aristocracy (as De Tocqueville pointed out in Democracy in America). The downstairs of one generation can become master of the house in the next. Joseph Losey’s The Servant (with screenplay by Harold Pinter) brilliantly captured the potentiality for such role reversals in the British context. In America, Raymond Carver was the poet of dispossession. Latter-day incarnations, like the short-story writer Wells Tower, whose work has received a great deal of critical attention, wear dispossession on their sleeves, but Carver exuded what Henry James called “felt life.” In one famous passage, a garage sale becomes an emblematic act of self-revelatory excoriation.

 

After the stock market crash of l929, many of the entitled saw their fortunes fade, and more recently many great families who had invested in blue-chip firms like Lehman Brothers saw their fortunes turn sour overnight. There are undoubtedly support groups for super wealthy individuals whose net worth dropped from hundreds to tens of millions in the market turmoil. What would it be like without Aspen and Palm Beach, without the Connaught and the Hotel du Cap, without Gstaad and Cortina in the winter? Everything in America occurs at such breakneck speed that there is really no time to accommodate a leisure class. By the time one generation has accumulated enough wealth to live like royalty, the wealth is already gone and they are writing memoirs, or, like the Beales of Grey Gardens fame, they're the subjects of documentaries about the decline of yet another age of swells.