Joseph Losey

Template:Short description Template:Use mdy dates Template:Infobox person Joseph Walton Losey III (Template:IPAc-en; January 14, 1909 – June 22, 1984) was an American film and theatre director, producer, and screenwriter. Born in Wisconsin, he studied in Germany with Bertolt Brecht and then returned to the United States. Blacklisted by Hollywood in the 1950s, he moved to Europe where he made the remainder of his films, mostly in the United Kingdom.

Among the most critically and commercially successful were the films with screenplays by Harold Pinter: The Servant (1963) and The Go-Between (1971).<ref>Sanjek, 2002: “The artistry and effort illustrated in particular by the trilogy that Losey produced along with Harold Pinter – Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1970) in addition to The Servant (1963).</ref><ref>Maras, 2012: “[H]is three films with Pinter, and The Servant in particular, are aesthetically assured and unsettling works and well worth watching.”</ref> His 1976 film Monsieur Klein won the César Awards for Best Film and Best Director. His other notable films included The Boy with Green Hair (1948), Eva (1962), King & Country (1964), Modesty Blaise (1966), Figures in a Landscape (1970), A Doll's House (1973), Galileo (1975), and Don Giovanni (1979).

He was also a four-time nominee for both the Template:Lang (winning once) and the Golden Lion, and a two-time BAFTA Award nominee.

Early life and career

File:LoseyArch.JPG

Losey Memorial Arch (1901) was erected by the city of La Crosse, Wisconsin, in tribute to Losey's grandfather, a prominent attorney and civic leader<ref name="La Crosse Library"/>

Joseph Walton Losey III was born on January 14, 1909, in La Crosse, Wisconsin, where he and Nicholas Ray were high-school classmates at La Crosse Central High School.<ref name="La Crosse Library">Template:Cite web</ref><ref name=nytobit>Template:Cite news</ref><ref name=brody>Template:Cite magazine</ref> He attended Dartmouth College and Harvard University, beginning as a student of medicine and ending in drama.<ref name=archer>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Palmer and Riley, 1993 p. 20</ref>

Losey became a major figure in New York City political theatre, first directing the controversial failure Little Old Boy in 1933.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> He declined to direct a staged version of Dodsworth by Sinclair Lewis, which led Lewis to offer him his first work written for the stage, Jayhawker. Losey directed the show, which had a brief run.<ref name=archer/> Bosley Crowther in The New York Times noted that "The play, being increasingly wordy, presents staging problems that Joe Losey's direction does not always solve. It is hard to tell who is responsible for the obscure parts in the story."<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

He visited the Soviet Union for several months in 1935, to study the Russian stage. In Moscow he participated in a seminar on film taught by Sergei Eisenstein.<ref>See Michel Ciment: Conversations with Losey. London New York: Methuen, 1985, p. 37.</ref> He also met Bertolt Brecht and the composer Hanns Eisler, who were visiting Moscow at the time.<ref>See Robert Cohen: "Bertolt Brecht, Joseph Losey, and Brechtian Cinema", in "Escape to Life": German Intellectuals in New York: A Compendium on Exile after 1933. Eckart Goebel and Sigrid Weigel (eds.). De Gruyter, 2012. 142–161, here p. 144 ff.</ref>

In 1936, he directed Triple-A Plowed Under on Broadway, a production of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Theatre Project.<ref name=ray>Template:Cite book</ref> He then directed the second Living Newspaper presentation, Injunction Granted.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Losey served in the U.S. military during World War II and was discharged in 1945.<ref name="UPI">Joseph Losey, American movie director, dies United Press International. Retrieved October 27, 2021.</ref> From 1946 to 1947, Losey worked with Bertolt Brecht—who was living in exile in Los Angeles—and Charles Laughton on the preparations for the staging of Brecht's play Galileo (Life of Galileo) which he and Brecht eventually co-directed with Laughton in the title role, and with music by Eisler. The play premiered on July 30, 1947, at the Coronet Theatre in Beverly Hills.<ref name="Cohen_149">See Cohen, "Bertolt Brecht, Joseph Losey", p. 149.</ref> On October 30, 1947, Losey accompanied Brecht to Washington D.C. for Brecht's appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).<ref name="Cohen_149"/> Brecht left the US the following day. Losey went on to stage Galileo, again with Laughton in the title role, in New York City where it opened on December 7, 1947, at the Maxine Elliott Theatre. More than 25 years later Losey, in exile in England, would direct a film version of Brecht's play Galileo (1975).

Losey's first feature film was a political allegory titled The Boy with Green Hair (1947), starring a young Dean Stockwell as Peter, a war orphan who is subject to ridicule after he awakens one morning to find his hair mysteriously turned green.

Seymour Nebenzal, the producer of Fritz Lang's classic M (1931), hired Losey to direct a remake set in Los Angeles rather than Berlin. In the new version, released in 1951, the killer's name was changed from Hans Beckert to Martin W. Harrow. Nebenzal's son Harold was associate producer of this version.

Politics and exile

During the 1930s and 1940s, Losey maintained extensive contacts with people on the political left, including radicals and communists or those who would eventually become such. He had collaborated with Bertolt Brecht and had a long association with Hanns Eisler, both targets of HUAC's interest.<ref name=gardner /> Losey had written to the Immigration and Naturalization Service in support of a resident visa for Eisler, who had many radical associations. They had collaborated on a "political cabaret" from 1937 to 1939, and Losey had invited Eisler to compose music for a short public-relations film that he had been commissioned to produce for presentation at the 1939 New York World's Fair, Pete Roleum and His Cousins.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Losey had also worked on the Federal Theatre Project, long a target of HUAC. Losey directed the play Triple-A Plowed Under, which been denounced by HUAC's antecedent, the Dies Committee, as communist propaganda.<ref name=gardner /> His Hollywood collaborators included a long list of other HUAC targets, including Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner Jr.<ref name=gardner />

Losey's first wife Elizabeth Hawes worked with a wide range of communists and anticommunist liberals at the radical newspaper PM. After their divorce in 1944, she wrote about working as a union organizer just after World War II, where "one preferred the Communists to the Red-Baiters."<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> At some point, probably early in the 1940s, the FBI maintained dossiers on both Losey and Hawes, and that of Losey charged that he was a Stalinist agent as of 1945.<ref name=gardner />

In 1946, Losey joined the Communist Party USA. He later explained to a French interviewer:<ref name=gardner />

Losey was under a long-term contract with Dore Schary at RKO when Howard Hughes purchased the company in 1948 and began purging it of leftists. Losey later explained how Hughes tested employees to determine whether they had communist sympathies:<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Hughes responded by holding Losey to his contract without assigning him any work.<ref name=gardner>Template:Cite book</ref> In mid-1949, Schary persuaded Hughes to release Losey, who soon began working as an independent on The Lawless for Paramount Pictures.<ref name=gardner /> Soon he was working on a three-picture contract with Stanley Kramer. His name was mentioned by two witnesses before HUAC in the spring of 1951. Losey's attorney suggested arranging a deal with the committee for testimony in secret. Instead, Losey abandoned his work editing The Big Night<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> and left for Europe while his ex-wife Louise departed for Mexico a few days later. HUAC took weeks to try unsuccessfully to serve them with a subpoena compelling their testimony.<ref name=gardner />

After more than a year working on Stranger on the Prowl in Italy, Losey returned to the U.S. on October 12, 1952. He found himself unemployable:<ref name=gardner />

He returned briefly to Rome and settled in London on January 4, 1953.<ref name=gardner />

Career in Europe

Template:Box quote Losey settled in Britain and worked as a director of genre films. His first British film The Sleeping Tiger (1954), a noir crime thriller, was made under the pseudonym of Victor Hanbury, because the stars of the film, Alexis Smith and Alexander Knox, feared being blacklisted by Hollywood in turn if it became known they had worked with him. It was financed by Nat Cohen at Anglo-Amalgamated who also financed The Intimate Stranger (1956), where Losey carried a pseudonym as well.<ref name=archer/><ref name="one">Template:Cite magazine</ref>

His films covered a wide range from the Regency melodrama The Gypsy and the Gentleman (1958) to the gangster film for Cohen, The Criminal (1960).<ref name=french>Template:Cite news</ref>

Losey was also originally slated to direct the Hammer Films production X the Unknown (1956), but after a few days' work the star Dean Jagger refused to work with a supposed Communist sympathiser and Losey was removed from the project. An alternative version is that Losey was replaced due to illness.<ref name="rusc">Template:Cite web</ref><ref name="senses">Template:Cite web</ref> Losey was later hired by Hammer Films to direct The Damned, a 1963 British science fiction film based on H.L. Lawrence's novel "The Children of Light".

In the 1960s, Losey began working with playwright Harold Pinter, in what became a long friendship and initiated a successful screenwriting career for Pinter. Losey directed three enduring classics based on Pinter's screenplays: The Servant (1963), Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1971).<ref>Maras, 2012: “ [H]is most acclaimed and influential films—The Servant, Accident and The Go-Between—were made in the 1960s and early 1970s in collaboration with British playwright Harold Pinter.”</ref> The Servant won three British Academy Film Awards. Accident won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury award at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> The Go-Between won the Golden Palm Award at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, four prizes at the 1972 BAFTA awards, and Best British Screenplay at the 1972 Writers' Guild of Great Britain awards.<ref>"IMDb: Awards for The Go-Between" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067144/awards</ref> Each of the three films examines the politics of class and sexuality in England at the end of the 19th century (The Go-Between) and in the 1960s. In The Servant, a manservant facilitates the moral and psychological degradation of his privileged and rich employer. Accident explores male lust, hypocrisy and ennui among the educated middle class as two Oxford University tutors competitively objectify a student against the backdrop of their seemingly idyllic lives. In The Go-Between, a young middle-class boy, the summer guest of an upper-class family, becomes the messenger for an affair between a working-class farmer and the daughter of his hosts.

Although Losey's films are generally naturalistic, The ServantTemplate:'s hybridisation of Losey's signature Baroque style, film noir, naturalism and expressionism, and both AccidentTemplate:'s and The Go-BetweenTemplate:'s radical cinematography, use of montage, voice over and musical score, amount to a sophisticated construction of cinematic time and narrative perspective that edges this work in the direction of neorealist cinema. All three films are marked by Pinter's sparse, elliptical and enigmatically subtextual dialogue, something Losey often develops a visual correlate for (and occasionally even works against) by means of dense and cluttered mise-en-scène and peripatetic camera work.

In 1966, Losey directed Modesty Blaise, a comedy spy-fi film produced in the United Kingdom and released worldwide in 1966. Sometimes considered a James Bond parody, it was based loosely on the popular comic strip Modesty Blaise by Peter O'Donnell.'

Losey directed Robert Shaw and Malcolm McDowell in the British action film Figures in a Landscape (1970), adapted by Shaw from the novel by Barry England. The film was shot in various locations in Spain.

Losey also worked with Pinter on The Proust Screenplay (1972), an adaptation of A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust. Losey died before the project's financing could be assembled.

In 1975, Losey realized a long-planned film adaptation of Brecht's Galileo released as Life of Galileo starring Chaim Topol. Galileo was produced as part of the subscription film series of the American Film Theatre, but shot in the UK. In the context of this production, Losey also made a half-hour film based on Galileo's life.Template:Citation needed

Losey's Monsieur Klein (1976) examined the day in Occupied France when Jews in and around Paris were arrested for deportation. He said he so completely rejected naturalism in film that in this case he divided his shooting schedule into three "visual categories": Unreality, Reality and Abstract.<ref name=brody/> He demonstrated a facility for working in the French language and Monsieur Klein (1976) gave Alain Delon as star and producer one of French cinema's earliest chances to highlight the background to the infamous Vel' d'Hiv Roundup of French Jews in July 1942.

In 1979, Losey filmed Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, shot in Villa La Rotonda and the Veneto region of Italy; this film was nominated for several César Awards in 1980, including Best Director.

Personal life

In 1964, Losey told The New York Times: "I'd love to work in America again, but it would have to be just the right thing."<ref name=archer /> He told an interviewer the year before he died that he was not bitter about being blacklisted: "Without it I would have three Cadillacs, two swimming pools and millions of dollars, and I'd be dead. It was terrifying, it was disgusting, but you can get trapped by money and complacency. A good shaking up never did anyone any harm."<ref name=nytobit />

Dartmouth College, his alma mater, awarded Losey an honorary degree in 1973.<ref name=nytobit /> In 1983, the University of Wisconsin–Madison did the same.<ref name=nytobit />

Losey married four times and divorced thrice. He married Elizabeth Hawes on July 24, 1937.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> They had a son, Gavrik Losey, in 1938, but divorced in 1944.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref name = ODNB>Template:Cite ODNB</ref> Gavrik helped with the production on some of his father's films. Gavrik's two sons are film directors Marek Losey and Luke Losey.

Later in 1944, Losey married Louise Stuart; they divorced in 1953.<Ref name = ODNB/> From 1956 to 1963, Losey was married to British actress Dorothy Bromiley.<ref name = ODNB/> They had a son, Joshua Losey, born on July 16, 1957, who became an actor. On September 29, 1970, Losey married Patricia Mohan in King's Lynn, Norfolk, shortly after finishing shooting The Go-Between.<ref>See David Caute: Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life. London: Faber and Faber, 1994, p. 248.</ref> Patricia Losey went on to adapt Lorenzo Da Ponte's opera libretto for Losey's Don Giovanni and Nell Dunn's play for Steaming.

He died from cancer at his home in Chelsea, London, on June 22, 1984, aged 75, four weeks after completing his last film.<ref name=nytobit /><ref name = ODNB/>

In Guilty by Suspicion, Irwin Winkler's 1991 film about the Hollywood blacklist, McCarthyism, and the activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Martin Scorsese plays an American filmmaker named "Joe Lesser" who leaves Hollywood for England rather than face HUAC investigations. The fictional director played by Scorsese is based on Joseph Losey.

Filmography

Short films

Year	Title	Notes
1939	Pete Roleum and His Cousins<ref name="vanDongen">While Losey has been credited as the director of Pete Roleum and his Cousins, Helen van Dongen wrote that he was its producer, and that she had directed and edited the film. See Template:Cite book</ref>
1941	Youth Gets a Break
	A Child Went Forth	Also producer and writer
1945	A Gun in His Hand
1947	Leben des Galilei
1955	A Man on the Beach
1959	First on the Road	Promotional short for the launch of the Ford Anglia 105E

Feature films

Year	Title	Contributed to			Notes
		Director	Writer	Producer
1948	The Boy with Green Hair	Template:Yes	Template:No	Template:No	Feature directorial debut
1950	The Lawless	Template:Yes	Template:No	Template:No
1951	M	Template:Yes	Template:No	Template:No
	The Prowler	Template:Yes	Template:No	Template:No
	The Big Night	Template:Yes	Template:Yes	Template:No
1952	Stranger on the Prowl	Template:Yes	Template:No	Template:No	First non-American film
1954	The Sleeping Tiger	Template:Yes	Template:No	Template:Yes
1956	The Intimate Stranger	Template:Yes	Template:No	Template:No
1957	Time Without Pity	Template:Yes	Template:No	Template:No
1958	The Gypsy and the Gentleman	Template:Yes	Template:No	Template:No
1959	Blind Date	Template:Yes	Template:No	Template:No
1960	The Criminal	Template:Yes	Template:No	Template:No
1962	Eva	Template:Yes	Template:No	Template:No
1963	The Damned	Template:Yes	Template:No	Template:No
	The Servant	Template:Yes	Template:No	Template:Yes
1964	King & Country	Template:Yes	Template:No	Template:Yes
1966	Modesty Blaise	Template:Yes	Template:No	Template:No
1967	Accident	Template:Yes	Template:No	Template:No
1968	Boom!	Template:Yes	Template:No	Template:No
	Secret Ceremony	Template:Yes	Template:No	Template:No
1970	Figures in a Landscape	Template:Yes	Template:No	Template:No
1971	The Go-Between	Template:Yes	Template:No	Template:No
1972	The Assassination of Trotsky	Template:Yes	Template:No	Template:Yes
1973	A Doll's House	Template:Yes	Template:No	Template:Yes
1975	The Romantic Englishwoman	Template:Yes	Template:No	Template:No
	Galileo	Template:Yes	Template:No	Template:No
1976	Monsieur Klein	Template:Yes	Template:No	Template:No
1978	Roads to the South	Template:Yes	Template:No	Template:No
1979	Don Giovanni	Template:Yes	Template:Yes	Template:No
1982	La Truite	Template:Yes	Template:Yes	Template:No
1985	Steaming	Template:Yes	Template:No	Template:No

Theatre credits

Year	Title	Venue	Notes	Ref.
1933	Little Ol' Boy	Playhouse Theatre, New York		<ref name=":0">Template:Cite web</ref>
1934	A Bride for the Unicorn	Brattleboro Theater, Cambridge		<ref name=":1">Template:Citation</ref>
	Jayhawker	National Theatre, Washington, D.C.		<ref name=":1" />
		Garrick Theatre, Philadelphia		<ref name=":1" />
		Cort Theatre		<ref name=":0" />
	Gods of the Lightning	Peabody Theater, Boston		<ref name=":1" />
1935	Waiting for Lefty	Moscow		<ref name=":1" />
1936	Hymn to the Rising Sun	Fourteenth Street Theatre, New York		<ref name=":1" />
	Conjur Man Dies	Lafayette Theatre, New York		<ref name=":0" />
	Triple-A Plowed Under	Biltmore Theatre, New York	Federal Theatre Project production	<ref name=":0" />
	Who Fights This Battle?	Delaney Hotel, Hoosick		<ref name=":1" />
1938	Sunup to Sundown	Hudson Theatre, New York		<ref name=":0" />
1947	The Great Campaign	Princess Theatre, New York		<ref name=":0" />
1947-48	Life of Galileo	Maxine Elliott's Theatre, New York		<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
1954	The Wooden Dish	Phoenix Theatre, London		<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
1955	The Night of the Ball	Noël Coward Theatre, London		<ref name=":1" />
1975	Waiting for Lefty	Hopkins Center for the Arts, Hanover		<ref name=":1" />
1980	Boris Godunov	Paris Opera		<ref name=":1" />

Other productions

• Political Cabaret (1937)<ref name=":1" />
• Russian War Relief (1940–43), shows in New York, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit<ref name=":1" />
• Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial Show (1945), Hollywood Bowl<ref name=":1" />
• 18th Academy Awards (1946), Grauman's Chinese Theatre<ref name=":1" />
• 19th Academy Awards (1947), Grauman's Chinese Theatre<ref name=":1" />

Awards and nominations

Institution	Year	Category	Title	Result
British Academy Film Award	1968	Outstanding British Film	Accident	Template:Nom
	1972	Best Direction	The Go-Between	Template:Nom
Cahiers du Cinéma	1964	Top 10 Films of the Year	The Servant	Template:Partial
Cannes Film Festival	1962	Template:Lang	Eva	Template:Nom
	1966		Modesty Blaise	Template:Nom
	1967		Accident	Template:Nom
	1971		The Go-Between	Template:Won
	1976		Monsieur Klein	Template:Nom
César Awards	1977	Best Film		Template:Won
		Best Director		Template:Won
	1980	Best Film	Don Giovanni	Template:Nom
		Best Director		Template:Nom
Nastro d'Argento	1966	Best Foreign Director	King & Country	Template:Nom
			The Servant	Template:Won
	1972		The Go-Between	Template:Nom
New York Film Critics Circle	1964	Best Director	The Servant	Template:Nom
San Sebastián International Film Festival	1954	Golden Shell	The Sleeping Tiger	Template:Nom
Sant Jordi Awards	1972	Best Foreign Film	The Go-Between	Template:Won
Taormina Film Fest	1978	Golden Charybdis	Roads to the South	Template:Nom
Venice Film Festival	1962	Golden Lion	Eva	Template:Nom
	1963		The Servant	Template:Nom
	1964		King & Country	Template:Nom
	1982		La Truite	Template:Nom

Sources

• Hirsch, Foster. 1980. Joseph Losey. Twayne Publishers, Boston, Massachusetts. Template:ISBN
• Maras, Robert. 2012. Dissecting class relations: The film collaborations of Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter. World Socialist Web Site, May 28, 2012. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/05/lose-m28.html Accessed 12 October, 2024.
• Palmer, James and Riley, Michael. 1993. The Films of Joseph Losey. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England. Template:ISBN
• Sanjek, David. 2002. Cold, Cold Heart: Joseph Losey’s The Damned and the Compensations of Genre. Senses of Cinema, July 2002. Director: Joseph Losey Issue 21.https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2002/director-joseph-losey/losey_damned/ Accessed 10 October, 2024.

Further reading

• Template:Cite book
• Ciment, Michel, Conversations with Losey (New York: Methuen, 1985); originally published as Template:In lang Ciment, Michel, Le Livre de Losey. Entretiens avec le cinéaste (Paris: Stock/Cinéma, 1979)
• Template:In lang Ciment, Michel, Joseph Losey: l'oeil du Maître (Institut Lumière/Actes Sud, 1994)
• Cohen, Robert, "Bertolt Brecht, Joseph Losey, and Brechtian Cinema". "Escape to Life": German Intellectuals in New York: A Compendium on Exile after 1933. Eckart Goebel and Sigrid Weigel (eds.). De Gruyter, 2012. 142–161. Template:Isbn
• DeRahm, Edith, Joseph Losey: An American Director in Exile (Pharos, 1995)
• Hirsch, Foster, Joseph Losey (Twayne, 1980)
• Houston, Penelope, "Losey's Paper Handkerchief", Sight and Sound, Summer 1966
• Jacob, Gilles, "Joseph Losey, or The Camera Calls", Sight and Sound, Spring 1966
• Leahy, James, The Cinema of Joseph Losey (A. S. Barnes, 1967)
• Template:In lang Ledieu, Christian, Joseph Losey (Seghers, 1963)
• Palmer, Palmer and Michael Riley, The Films of Joseph Losey (Cambridge University Press, 1993)
• Template:In lang Vallet, Joaquín, Joseph Losey (Cátedra, 2010)

External links

• Filmography at BFI Film & TV Database
• Template:Screenonline name
• Template:IMDb name
• Template:IBDB name
• A Child Went Forth at Archive.org
• Robert Maras, "Dissecting class relations: The film collaborations of Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter", May 28, 2012