Pinter/Losey 1963

Class Dismissed
by Tom Sutpen
Revisiting Losey and Pinter's misunderstood masterpiece, The Servant
via Bright Lights Film Journal

As Hugo Barrett, the manservant with a private agenda, Dirk Bogarde achieves more with a glance or a slight movement in Joseph Losey's The Servant than another actor would have accomplished bringing a lifetime of stage technique to the part. Barrett is a phenomenally complex, delicate role, and the wrong actor could have easily thrown the entire film out of balance simply by leaning too heavily on a line or holding a beat just a second too long. What it needed was an actor possessing both prodigious intelligence and intuition, and Bogarde was, in that sense, perfectly suited for it.
...
Matters of Class may have been a principal subtext of the novel from which The Servant was derived (a novel I confess I have not read), but in no sense are they anything more than a vague underpinning of either the movie Joseph Losey directed or, particularly, the screenplay Harold Pinter wrote. This is a film about power, in its most basic and consuming forms.