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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
If Bogarde's choice of roles is any indication of how he felt about the society in which he lived, it is clear that he had a deep disdain for the hubris of upper-class twits, but this conviction never overrode his compassion toward man's frailty. He always found a way to make his characters compelling and almost sympathetic, no matter how vile they were. Bogarde burned brightest in roles with huge dramatic arcs -- he clearly loved ascending and descending from one side of a paradox to the other, particularly from power to slavery or vice versa.
His hunt for a great collaborator led him, in 1963, to a fortunate pairing with director Joseph Losey, with whom he would make several films, the first and best of which was "The Servant." Bogarde plays the Machiavellian butler to snot-nosed, upper-class James Fox with a distinctly sadomasochistic flair. As Barrett, the ultimate Jeeves gone wrong in Harold Pinter's brilliant, structurally flawless script, Bogarde effortlessly evolves from genteel supplication to pitiless cruelty.
Fox is in his finest form as the weak-minded aristocrat whom Barrett exploits. Bogarde's face is a study in reptilian cool: He can eat revenge cold; he is insouciant and unfazed during the most brutal personal confrontations -- he lets the audience do the cringing for him.
This film offers a first glimpse of Bogarde's famous eyebrow-cocked, bedroom-eyed stare, which he levels on Sarah Miles. It is the most blazingly sexual look I have ever seen on an actor's face -- a look that doesn't stop at suggesting only the bedroom, when devouring his on-screen love interest, but goes on to suggest the kitchen table, the floor, a public elevator and a basement dungeon of his own sinister design.
"The Servant" is one of several Bogarde vehicles that feature a strange psychological mind-fuck "game" of the type only seen in films from the '60s involving shallow beautiful people abusing each other at drunken parties. It is an interesting Albee-esque device: the freedom of intoxicated expression that was post-'50s pill-popping Freudian alcoholism, but pre-'60s pothead love 'n' innocence.
The pleasure that Barrett the butler takes in his cruelty is most evident in a round of hide-and-seek with his dissipating master: "You've got a guilty se-cret," Dirk chants in a singsong voice as Fox trembles and sweats in terror, cowering in his hiding place. "I'm getting warmer ... You'll be caught!"
Another key early role for Bogarde was in John Schlesinger's "Darling" (1965) -- another film expressing a vast revulsion for the self-indulgent high jinks of high society, where drunken millionaires in mod outfits brutally mind-fuck each other in the name of fun. Bogarde plays a sensitive, married TV interviewer who falls for up-and-coming model/actress/opportunist Julie Christie, the ultimate hot party girl.
Her jet-set world is full of upper-class buggerers, gamblers and philanderers; she trips along for the ride while Dirk watches, suffering. When Christie aborts their pregnancy, Bogarde, in a masterfully subtle moment, enters her hospital room with flowers. The way he holds them, sideways, says everything. A happy man, with any hope, holds flowers straight up.
It is an interesting film for a number of reasons -- the opening shot features a billboard of Julie Christie, "The Ideal Woman," being plastered over the faces of starving Biafran children. Bogarde gets to display his customary eight-octave emotional range and to utter lines like, "You're a whore, baby, that's all, and I don't take whores in taxis."
The critical acclaim Bogarde earned at this point in his career secured his position as one of Britain's best actors.
A less successful Losey/Pinter/Bogarde effort was "Accident" (1966), in which Bogarde plays a middle-aged university tutor who gets tangled in an affair between two of his glamorous pupils (one of whom is played by the impossibly beautiful young Michael York) when his more successful friend and contemporary leaves his wife for the girl, whom Bogarde also loves.
The pacing seems to be suffering from the constipation of middle age, which I believe is Pinter's fault; the script is a turgid exploration of impotence and emasculation. While it is an interesting meditation on the kinds of comparisons men make with each other that drive them crazy at a certain age, the restless dissatisfaction of a midlife crisis is so well put across by Bogarde that watching the film is as dreadful as being mired in that particularly morose, self-indulgent frame of mind.
