It is that his comfortable position has separated him from reality. Pinter and Losey’s sardonic point is not that the hapless aristo is snobbish or cruel. The performances are first-rate, subtly stylized, with a feral Bogarde memorably sending up his leading man rep. Visually, Losey transforms the elegant habitat - festooned with paintings that celebrate empire - into a claustrophobic cage, dramatizing Tony’s slow but sure fragmentation through funhouse mirror reflections, distorted images that convey how a psyche - and an antiquated social order - is being toppled topsy-turvy. (Though Pinter supplies an amusing micro-cameo in a restaurant as a “society man.”) Other than that, the sneakily combative dialogue gives us the dramatist at his brusque prime. These scenes tend to be broadly satiric - fuzzy rather than sharp. Pinter’s inexperience writing for film is only evident when, on occasion, the narrative steps outside of the townhouse. Pinter’s clipped dialogue resonates with flickers of hostility as Barrett slowly gains the whip hand through a series of cat-and-mouse games that, step by step, degrade Tony, separating him from his girlfriend and eventually his self-respect. The resulting soul-sucking psychosexual dynamics - engineered with playful panache by Barrett - owe as much to Jean Genet as they do to Ben Jonson and August Strindberg. A pair of opportunistic hedonists (Dirk Bogarde as Hugo Barrett and Sarah Miles as Vera) sink their claws into a young, weak-minded upper-class alcoholic (James Fox as Tony) who has the bad judgment to hire the pair on as butler and maid to take care of him and his classy London townhouse. There is nothing in the least Marxist or counterculture cuddly in this brilliantly choreographed exercise in class manipulation. To mark the occasion, Criterion Collection has released a Blu-ray Special Edition that does right (via such extras as a revealing 1976 interview with the director) by this superbly sinister study in class parasitism, a darkly humorous battle for dominance that ends with an appropriately squalid reversal of fortunes. This year marks the 60th anniversary of The Servant, the first collaboration between director Joseph Losey and playwright Harold Pinter.

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