The Servant is a 1963 British film, directed by Joseph Losey and starring Dirk Bogarde, Sarah Miles, Wendy Craig, and James Fox.
The film, based on the book of the same name by Robin Maugham , is a tightly woven psychological thriller that conveys the absolute coldness of the central characters towards any of the "joy that life is haunted by". Bogarde plays the title character, Hugo Barrett, with a seemingly desperate mixture of deliberateness and resignation. The energy in the film is kept bottled up but is not given a proper release that might bring closure to some viewers.
Tony and Susan (Fox and Craig) hardly exist at all. Tony hires Hugo for reasons that aren't quite clear. He's an accomplished person, capable of tending to his own needs, living in comfort surrounded by familiar tokens of his abilities. Yet, he's frozen. Susan is filled with quiet desperation but she's all dried up inside. She has nothing to give so he turns to the haughty, contemptuous servant to revive his manly spirit.
Throughout the film, Losey uses the Harold Pinter tune, "All Gone" to express the silent agonies each character is suffering through as their lives ware on. Pinter also wrote the screenplay and made a brief cameo appearance.
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