Joseph Losey

Joseph Losey (1909-1984), American film and theatre director. Losey was born in La Crosse, Wisconsin. His own account of his childhood focuses on the differences in culture and wealth between his father's side of the family and his mother's. Such perceptions seem a likely source of the concerns of his major films, in which dynamic compositions, fluid camera movements, forceful performances, and expressive use of sets and locations combine to reveal an exploration of hierarchies of class, envy, dominance, and deference.

After an Ivy League education, Losey embarked on a career in the New York theatre. In 1936 Injunction Granted, his third outstanding production for the Federal Theater, a New Deal project for unemployed people, proved so politically controversial that it was closed on the grounds that it represented a misuse of Federal funds. Losey resigned in protest.

Years directing off-Broadway theatre, radio drama, and short films led to a Hollywood contract, signed immediately before a brief spell in the army, which lasted from January to November 1944.

A historic collaboration with Bertolt Brecht and Charles Laughton on the English-language text and production of the former's Life of Galileo followed in 1947, and Losey helped Brecht prepare for the appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that precipitated the dramatist's return to Europe.

Five feature films followed, notably The Prowler and M, the latter a remake of the 1931 German masterpiece by Fritz Lang (both 1951). Despite their diversity of subject matter, all five revealed a clear and critical vision of American society.

Losey was forced in turn to move to Europe to avoid an appearance himself before HUAC. At first only the use of pseudonyms permitted the release of his work in the United States, then Time Without Pity (1957) inaugurated a series of major films: Blind Date (1959; US title, Chance Meeting), one of his most underrated films; The Criminal (1960; US title, The Concrete Jungle); The Damned (release postponed to 1963; US title, These are the Damned); Eve (1962; European title, Eva), disastrously cut by its producers; and The Servant (1963), his first collaboration with Harold Pinter. The latter two mark Losey's transition from entertainment genres to the European art cinema.

Critical opinion is divided over Losey's later work. Some find much of it lacking in the energy and resultant moral and behavioural complexity that distinguished his earlier films; others, Losey included, prefer the formal experiments and explicit seriousness characteristic of Accident (1967), The Go-Between (1971), The Assassination of Trotsky (1972), The Romantic Englishwoman (1975), Mr Klein (1976), and Don Giovanni (1979), the latter a challenging and innovatory adaptation of the Mozart opera. Unfortunately, Losey was never able to finance the production of Pinter's adaptation of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (Remembrance of Things Past) by Proust, which he hoped would be his masterpiece.