Joseph Losey

Among the most critically and commercially successful were his three films with screenplays by Harold Pinter: The Servant (1963), Accident (1967), and The Go-Between (1971).[1][2][28] His 1976 film Monsieur Klein won the César Awards for Best Film and Best Director.[45] 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). Though drubbed by critics and a box-office failure, Boom! (1968) was sometimes cited by Losey as his personal favorite,[3] and Tennessee Williams considered it the best movie adaptation of one of his plays.[4] The film starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, both of whom worked with Losey again: Taylor in Secret Ceremony (1968) and Burton in The Assassination of Trotsky (1972). Losey was also a four-time nominee for both the Palme d'Or (which he won once) and the Golden Lion, and a two-time BAFTA Award nominee.

Joseph Losey studied at Dartmouth College, Harvard University and La Crosse Central High School. Training under Bertolt Brecht and Sergei Eisenstein is recorded. The recorded working language is English. Residence is recorded at London. Positions recorded include President of the Jury at the Cannes Festival. Work by Joseph Losey is recorded in the collections of Harvard Film Archive. Distinctions recorded are Palme d'Or, César Award for Best Film, Jean-Le-Duc award and David di Donatello for Best Producer.

• Name — Joseph Losey • Birth Name — Joseph Walton Losey III • Born — 14 January 1909 • Birthplace — La Crosse, Wisconsin, U.S. • Died — 22 June 1984 • Place of death — London, England • Education — Dartmouth College Harvard University • Occupation — * Director • producer • screenwriter • Children — 2, including Gavrik • Awards — See below • Years Active — 1933–1984

• Illustration — 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. 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.[5][6] He attended Dartmouth College and Harvard University, beginning as a student of medicine and ending in drama.[8][9] Losey became a major figure in New York City political theatre, first directing the controversial failure Little Old Boy in 1933.[10] 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. 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."[11] 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.[12] He also met Bertolt Brecht and the composer Hanns Eisler, who were visiting Moscow at the time.[13] In 1936, he directed Triple-A Plowed Under on Broadway, a production of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Theatre Project.[14] He then directed the second Living Newspaper presentation, Injunction Granted.[15] Losey served in the U.S. military during World War II and was discharged in 1945.[16] 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.[17] On October 30, 1947, Losey accompanied Brecht to Washington D.C. for Brecht's appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). 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, directed 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 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.

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. 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.[18] 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. His Hollywood collaborators included a long list of other HUAC targets, including Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner Jr. 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."[19] 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. In 1946, Losey joined the Communist Party USA. He later explained to a French interviewer: 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:[20] I was offered a film called I Married a Communist, which I turned down categorically. I later learned that it was a touchstone for establishing who was a "red": you offered I Married a Communist to anybody you thought was a Communist, and if they turned it down, they were. Hughes responded by holding Losey to his contract without assigning him any work.[21] In mid-1949, Schary persuaded Hughes to release Losey, who soon began working as an independent on The Lawless for Paramount Pictures. 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[22] 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. 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: He returned briefly to Rome, and settled in London on January 4, 1953.

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.[24] 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).[25] 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.[26][27] Losey was later hired by Hammer Films to direct The Damned, a 1962 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). The Servant won three British Academy Film Awards. Accident won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury award at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival.[29] 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.[30] 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 Servants hybridisation of Losey's signature Baroque style, film noir, naturalism and expressionism, and both Accidents and The Go-Betweens 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. Pinter made uncredited contributions to the script. Sometimes considered a James Bond parody, it was based on the popular comic strip of the same name by Peter O'Donnell and Jim Holdaway. 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.

Losey directed Robert Shaw and Malcolm McDowell in the action-thriller 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 was President of the Jury of the 1972 Cannes Film Festival.[31] 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. 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. He demonstrated a facility for working in the French language and Monsieur Klein 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. Losey won a César Award for Best Director. 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. In 1982, Losey directed The Trout in France, a Roger Vailland adaptation starring Isabelle Huppert and Jeanne Moreau. His final film was 1985's Steaming, an adaptation of Nell Dunn's 1981 play. It was released posthumously, nearly one year after Losey's death from cancer.

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." 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." Dartmouth College, his alma mater, awarded Losey an honorary degree in 1973. In 1983, the University of Wisconsin–Madison did the same. Losey married four times and divorced thrice. He married Elizabeth Hawes on July 24, 1937.[33] They had a son, Gavrik Losey, in 1938, but divorced in 1944.[34][35] 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. From 1956 to 1963, Losey was married to British actress Dorothy Bromiley. 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.[36] 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 Steaming.

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.[37]

• Year — Title — Venue — Notes — Ref. Reference(s) • 1933 — Little Ol' Boy — Playhouse Theatre, New York[39] • 1934 — A Bride for the Unicorn — Brattleboro Theater, Cambridge • Jayhawker — National Theatre, Washington, D.C. • Garrick Theatre, Philadelphia • Cort Theatre • Gods of the Lightning — Peabody Theater, Boston • 1935 — Waiting for Lefty — Moscow • 1936 — Hymn to the Rising Sun — Fourteenth Street Theatre, New York • Conjur Man Dies — Lafayette Theatre, New York • Triple-A Plowed Under — Biltmore Theatre, New York — Federal Theatre Project production • Who Fights This Battle? — Delaney Hotel, Hoosick • 1938 — Sunup to Sundown — Hudson Theatre, New York • 1947 — The Great Campaign — Princess Theatre, New York • 1947–48 — Life of Galileo — Maxine Elliott's Theatre, New York[41] • 1954 — The Wooden Dish — Phoenix Theatre, London[42] • 1955 — The Night of the Ball — Noël Coward Theatre, London • 1975 — Waiting for Lefty — Hopkins Center for the Arts, Hanover • 1980 — Boris Godunov — Paris Opera, Pasris

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

• rowspan=2 — 1950 — 1951 — 1952 — 1954 — 1957 — 1959 — 1960 — 1962 — 1963 — 1964 — 1966 — 1967 — 1968 — 1971 — 1972 — 1973 — 1975 — 1975 — 1976 — 1979 — 1982 — 1985 • The Lawless — The Big Night — Stranger on the Prowl — The Sleeping Tiger — Time Without Pity — Blind Date — The Criminal — The Damned — Eva — The Servant — King and Country — Modesty Blaise — Accident — Boom![48] — Secret Ceremony — The Go-Between — The Assassination of Trotsky — A Doll's House — The Romantic Englishwoman — Galileo — Monsieur Klein — Don Giovanni — The Trout — Steaming • Giorgio Albertazzi • Stanley Baker • Dirk Bogarde • Richard Burton • Macdonald Carey • Alain Delon • Edward Fox • Alexander Knox • Michael Lonsdale • Joan Lorring • Patrick Magee • Sarah Miles • Leo McKern • Jeanne Moreau • Ruggero Raimondi • Michael Redgrave • Delphine Seyrig • Alexis Smith • Elizabeth Taylor • John Van Eyssen • James Villiers

• rowspan=2 — 1948 — 1951 — 1952 — 1954 — 1957 — 1958 — 1959 — 1960 — 1962 — 1963 — 1964 — 1966 — 1967 — 1968 — 1970 — 1971 — 1972 — 1973 — 1975 — 1975 — 1976 — 1978 — 1979 — 1982 — 1985 • The Boy with Green Hair — The Big Night — Stranger on the Prowl — The Sleeping Tiger — Time Without Pity — The Gypsy and the Gentleman — Blind Date — The Criminal — The Damned — Eva — The Servant — King and Country — Modesty Blaise — Accident — Boom! — Secret Ceremony — Figures in a Landscape — The Go-Between — The Assassination of Trotsky — A Doll's House — The Romantic Englishwoman — Galileo — Monsieur Klein — Roads to the South — Don Giovanni — The Trout — Steaming • Henri Alekan • Ben Barzman • Reginald Beck • Hugo Butler • John Dankworth • Gerry Fisher • Richard Hartley • John Heyman • Jack Hildyard • Evan Jones • Michel Legrand • Patricia Losey • Richard Macdonald • Reginald Mills • Harold Pinter • Norman Priggen • Richard Rodney Bennett • Douglas Slocombe • Franco Solinas

Joseph Losey is recorded as having studied at Dartmouth College, Harvard University and La Crosse Central High School.

• Year — Title — Functioned as — Notes • Director — Writer — Producer • 1948 — The Boy with Green Hair — Feature directorial debut • 1950 — The Lawless • 1951 — M • The Prowler • The Big Night • 1952 — Stranger on the Prowl — First non-American film • 1954 — The Sleeping Tiger • 1956 — The Intimate Stranger — U.S. title: Finger of Guilt • 1957 — Time Without Pity • 1958 — The Gypsy and the Gentleman • 1959 — Blind Date — U.S. title: Chance Meeting • 1960 — The Criminal — U.S. title: The Concrete Jungle • 1962 — Eva — U.S. title: The Devil's Woman • The Damned — U.S. title: These Are The Damned • 1963 — The Servant • 1964 — King & Country • 1966 — Modesty Blaise • 1967 — Accident • 1968 — Boom • Secret Ceremony • 1970 — Figures in a Landscape • 1971 — The Go-Between • 1972 — The Assassination of Trotsky • 1973 — A Doll's House • 1975 — The Romantic Englishwoman • Galileo • 1976 — Monsieur Klein • 1978 — Roads to the South • 1979 — Don Giovanni • 1982 — The Trout • 1985 — Steaming

• Year — Title — Functioned as — Notes • Director — Writer — Producer • 1939 — Pete Roleum and His Cousins[38] • 1941 — Youth Gets a Break • A Child Went Forth • 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