PARTISAN REVIEW
83
of accounts, and not without some extraordinary disasters. Only a
director of some importance could have made a film as monumen–
tally bad as
Boom.
There are several fine Losey films made in
England before
The Servant,
the first of the Pinter collaborations,
that are still virtually unknown in this country.
.I
am referring in
particular to
Second Chance (Blz"nd Date
in England),
The Con–
crete Jungle,
and
Time Without Pity,
highly distinctive and subtle
movies made out of implausible melodramatic projects.
On the surface Losey's film career, beginning with
The Boy
with Green Hair
(1948), seems a pilgrimage from social conscious–
ness to aestheticism. And yet it is not an opportunistic career in
the vulgar sense, and it is clearly not interested in fashion. And of
course the two sides of Losey are present in all his work: there are
elegances in the American period and tendentiousness in the
English films. Lately, we have two curious projects from
Losey -- a film about Trotsky which is apolitical, more inter–
ested in the generalized politics of assassination (the identification
between assassin and victim) than in the significance of a par–
ticular historical event; and an adaptation of Ibsen's
A Doll's
House
which indicates almost no interest in the values of the Ibsen
play. Despite the unlikeliness, even the perversity of their
occasions, they are both rich and disturbing films.
The Assassination of Trotsk y
is the more interesting of the
two and has been undervalued mainly, it seems to me, because it is
not the movie an audience with an ideological stake in Trotsky
wanted or expected to see. The landscape of Trotsky's exile has
more vitality in Losey's eccentric work than Trotsky's ideas or
even, since in exile there is nothing for him to do but talk, the
great man himself. Moreover, Trotsky's mysterious assassin is, by
virtue of his obsessive activity and opaqueness, the central figure
in
the movie. What concerns Losey - - it recurs in different
disguise in almost every film -- is shared identity, insidious and
vicarious psychological connections between characters who tend
to be dissimilar in most other ways. Losey's obsession with
doubleness - - the image in the mirror has become a kind of trade–
mark in his cinema -- is evident not only in his treatment of
projects but in his choice of them.
As he has had increasing freedom in his choice of subjects,
