GOING TO THE MOVIES
Jonathan Baumbach
THE HOUSE THAT LOSEY BUILT
In 1954, not having worked in two years as a conse–
quence of the Hollywood blacklist, Joseph Losey directed his first
English film, a sleazy, semicoherent project called
The Sleep£ng
Tz"ger.
The narrative purports to be about a psychiatrist (Alexander
Knox) who installs a young hoodlum (Dirk Bogarde) in his house
in order to discover, in the cold-eyed interests of science, what
makes Bogarde erupt into violence. The discovery is made and a
cure effected -- a dazzlingly primitive notion of psychoanalysis
informs the movie -- though not before Bogarde has had an
affair with the doctor's repressed wife (Alexis Smith), awakening
the destructive thrall of the lady's own sleeping tiger. We also have
some indication that a third sleeping tiger resides in the doctor
himself. The narrative of course is a disguise. The film is essentially
about an older man, willfully oblivious of his motives, who brings
a young man into his house to make love to his wife. What we get,
though displaced into something else, is a film dealing with vicari–
ous identification, a love story between surrogate father and sur–
rogate son brought to grief by the woman, who is the outsider .and
enemy.
As I hope the above synopsis suggests, the same obsessions
that inform
AcC£dent
and, in fact, all of Losey's more notable
films are present, and interestingly so, in a project as bizarre and
apparently hopeless as
The Sleep£ng Tz"ger.
Losey's firms, apart
from visual signature and no matter how disparate the occasion
one from another, have a profound similarity of concern. It has
been an uneven and unpredictable career, admirable on a number
