Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life

Novelist and historian Caute's (Frantz Fanon) biography of director Losey (1909-1984) is admirably judicious and articulate. At their worst, Losey's films were pretentious and stylistically overwrought. His best married ``human emotion to the physical world,'' as in his famous collaborations with playwright Harold Pinter, especially The Servant (1963) and The Go-Between (1971), the summit of Losey's career, according to Caute. The author examines the leftist sympathies that color Losey's life and work: he collaborated with a thorny Bertolt Brecht, staging Galileo in New York City; blacklisted, he fled to England to avoid the protracted scrutiny of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Caute also explores the pervasive misogyny in Losey's films and attributes ``his lifelong hostility towards women'' to his unfavorable image of his mother. Though the director worked successfully with such headstrong talents as Jeanne Moreau, Vanessa Redgrave and Jane Fonda, perhaps only Elizabeth Taylor was spared his prickly hostility-in films like Boom! that ironically were among his worst. Photos. (Oct.)