Buenos Aires, England

Very happy to catch up with LA BESTIA DEBE MORIR — (THE BEAST MUST DIE) — from the novel by Nicholas Blake. Now I’ve seen all the adaptations. Claude Chabrol’s French version quite sensibly removes the gentleman detective hero, Nigel Strangeways, and makes the murderer the protagonist, which he essentially is in the book. The recent Ridley Scott-produced miniseries retains Strangeways but makes him a boring policeman with boring PTSD, and you wish the focus was on the killer, who is now a woman (Cush Jumbo, magnificent) which works just as well.

(There’s no werewolf break in any of these, though. In my view, every movie deserves a werewolf break — a moment of silent contemplation when we consider which of the characters would be the werewolf, if only this were a werewolf movie.)

This Argentinian version comes from Román Viñoly Barreto, director of EL VAMPIRO NEGRO, a quasi-remake of Fritz Lang’s M which is quite impressive. This one might be even better, except for the unconvincing false beard you have to look at for most of the movie. But there are bravura moments, and the film retains the novel’s unconventional structure — there’s a looong flashback which breaks the movie kind of into thirds.

The revelation is that this works — Blake’s structure was sound, if you play it pretty much the way he intended. Surprisingly, the titular beast, the worst man in the world, George Rattery (Guillermo Battaglia), gets somewhat de-emphasized. Also surprisingly, he dies in the first scene, then re-appears in the flashbacks and is so awful you can’t wait for him to die again. One of our friends watching along with us remotely would have been quite happy for the guy to die twice, in the best Karloffian tradition.

The other weird thing is that the filmmakers retain the English setting and character names, though everyone speaks Spanish and many of the actors are very obviously South American. It’s possible that making the story happen in a far-off land diverted the censors from inferring any social critique.

Cameraman Alberto Etchebehere has developed the X-Files approach to night shoots, blasting a big light through the treetops to simulate moonlight, only there seem to be moons everywhere you turn. Whatever, it’s dramatic and beautiful. He gets the same effect with some strange streetlights, which certainly don’t look British, although the fog is authentic.

Also, lovely Hollywood-style hallucinatory dream-flashback montage.

The Elsie Beckmann Brigade

The opening of Damiano Damiani’s GIROLIMONI, THE MONSTER OF ROME (1972) is SO arresting. A line-up of little girls is issued with white TOBY DAMMIT bouncing balls and driven off in a black maria to act as bait for a serial killer.

And the movie continues to provide startling scenes throughout — what it can’t quite do is synthesise them into a wholly coherent drama. It is amazing how — and you wonder WHY — it manages to veer from horror (graphic descriptions of the killer’s child-mutilating technique) to comedy (star Nino Manfredi is an adept underdog). Manfredi plays a suave seducer to begin with, his attitude to the crimes one of morbid curiosity, his reaction to the cops’ suspicions one of arrogant amusement, not a very attractive character, but as his life disintegrates under the burden of unjust suspicion, his increasing vulnerability makes him more likable a, a smoothie battered into the shape of a schlemiel.

It’s a wild ride. There are some big problematic bits — the actor playing Mussolini (Luciano Catenacci) is quite strong and interesting but it’s an issue that he doesn’t look or act like Mussolini — but it’s an incredibly bold piece of writing with a beautiful seventies-does-twenties look, all soft-focus and deco. Of course, it’s nothing to THE CONFORMIST, but what is there to compare with that one?

No Gentleman

The biggest surprise about THE SERVANT is what it’s not.

It sounds, from synopsis, as if we’ll get a critical commentary on the British class system. One would expect, from director Joseph Losey’s history as a man of the left (fleeing American and HUAC) that the theme might come out in the dialogue, ponderously, as it does in his US films such as M and THE LAWLESS, or more subtly, in the action, as it does in the superior THE BIG NIGHT or THE PROWLER. The latter is about “false values,” as Losey put it, which meant the story could simply illustrate where those values might get you, without the need for commentary, and it would be a perfectly clear morality tale from a left-wing perspective.

But we have to factor in Harold Pinter as scenarist, and the source novel I guess, though I’m afraid I don’t know anything about it. Pinter’s involvement guarantees that things won’t be so simple, or direct.

What I was expecting, nevertheless, was a structure where Dirk Bogarde’s manservant, Barrett, is exploited by his “master,” Tony (James Fox), and then rebels. Instead, Barrett is mysterious, conspiratorial, from the start, and Tony is weak and arrogant, occasionally mean, and crumbles with little apparent assistance from Barrett. His girlfriend Susan (Wendy Craig) seems to be on to Barrett from the start, so that her genuine nastiness towards him (some great Pinteresque questions, “Do you use a deodorant?”) are almost justified.

And then, hilariously, just when you might expect persecution, master and servant turn into schoolkids in one scene, a bickering old married couple in the next. There’s not really a sense of escalation, just frequent and perplexing transformation. And then, after the fabulously louche party scene, it stops. I can imagine being quite frustrated with that conclusion if I’d seen it in the cinema.

What the movie resists most obviously is taking sides, even though Bogarde is frequently seen as sinister and Fox never is. Wendy Craig’s casting makes me think of THE NANNY, which starts with the little boy as antagonist and then switches sympathies to make Bette Davis the monster, and then manages to find sympathy even for her. I like that film a lot. But THE SERVANT manages to do something much more complex, where our sympathies rarely land squarely anywhere, the natural class enemy gets more sympathy and is more comprehensible than the worm-that-turns underdog, and maybe PERSONA is a better comparison? Also, the suggestion that, when class barriers crumble, we’re all going to lose our identities and enter a delirious, hazy flux of psychological disintegration, feels more like a right-wing anxiety than one of the left, in a way.

All of which is a confession, really, that I don’t “get” THE SERVANT the way I get other Losey or Pinter films, but I like the feeling of disorientation it produces. More on it as the day goes on.