Time Without Pity (Joseph Losey)
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Time Without Pity (1957) is an example of Joseph Losey's work as a director from the transition period between his American films and his later, more European work. At the time, Losey was rebuilding his career as a director after fleeing from his homeland after being blacklisted for his Communist leanings of an earlier era. Losey showed a number of interests throughout his career, many of which are reflected in this British crime drama--a strong social consciousness, a sense of the plight of the individual when faced with the institutions of society, a search for justice in world that often denies it, and a strong sense of the ambiguities of reality. Losey does not see the world in black and white terms but in terms of complexities, and his characters show ambiguities in their personalities that indicate the degree to which we are all mixtures of innocence and guilt. This is certainly true of the protagonist of Time Without Pity. Graham, played by Michael Redgrave, is intent on proving his son's innocence, but he himself has already been guilty of neglecting the young man and of turning to alcohol to dull the pain his life has become. He comes back into his son's life precisely because he believes the young man is innocent of the murder for which he will be executed if his father does not succeed in identifying the real killer. The material suggests many examples of film melodrama, but Losey treats the material in a somewhat different manner, showing that he is more
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f the house struggling to maintain control against his manservant. The two women who visit the household upset its balance, but in any case the power struggle would continue between the two men as ideas of what constitutes power are explored. Tony, the head of the household, is in fact completely helpless when left on his own, and though he is ostensibly the one in power because he has the money and position, it is the manservant, Barrett, who can actually do things. In the structure of the film, there is a shift in power that is clear and unsettling. The two maintain the usual sense of decorum between master and servant in the first half. When Tony feels Barrett has betrayed him, he lets him go. In the second half, Tony meets Barrett in a pub and lets him return, but the power has shifted so that Barrett treats Tony with open contempt. The struggle between the two is not unlike that between Graham and Stanford.
A film closer in time to Time Without Pity is Chance Meeting (1957), another thriller with a murder mystery used for social commentary. The British class system provides many of Pinter's works with a subject for analyzing master-servant struggles, and Chance Meeting is one example. Here, the artist, saddled with
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1693
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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