TIME WITHOUT PITY DIRECTED BY JOSEPH LOSEY HOME VISION DVD HEN JOSEPH LOSEY ...

OUT PITY DIRECTED BY JOSEPH LOSEY HOME VISION DVD

HEN JOSEPH LOSEY fled the McCarthy witchhunts and went to work in England in the early 1950s, he also left behind Hollywood's cliches about what constituted drama and heroism. While playing out his taste for melodrama, Losey perfected his particular interest in the dynamics of personal relations. His refined storytelling could invest the simplest scene with sinister overtones, and his preferred protagonists were men caught up in determining right from wrong—first by trying to sort it out in themselves.

In the bare-bones plot of Time Without Pity, a father (Michael Redgrave) tries to get a reprieve for his son (Alec McCowen), who sits on death row, a day away from execution. Time Without Pity has sometimes been described as an anti-capital punishment movie, but that's like saying Titanic is a movie about boating safety. It's not the issue that Losey concentrates on, but the dilemma—and the lingering moral threat. Redgrave's David Graham is an alcoholic, now trying to make up for his past as an absentee father. England's Home Office gives him 24 hours to come up with concrete proof that his son is innocent, and the movie watches him as he unnerves his son's acquaintances, looking for a clue. Among the friends and suspects is a young lawyer (Peter Cushing), his car manufacturer father (played by Leo McKern) and his unhappy mother (Ann Todd).

Graham's investigation deepens into Losey's distinctive form of melodrama; that is, a psychological drama about the responsibilities of fatherhood and citizenship. The film's style is curt and hyperbolic, almost like one of Sam Fuller's social screeds but not didactic. Losey was developing the insinuating moodiness that would make him the ideal film director for playwright Harold Pinter and eventually result in the team's masterpieces The Servant and Accident.

Redgrave's performance is extraordinary. Film legend says that after playing the frantic ventriloquist in the 1945 horror film Dead of Night, Redgrave was never able to escape the role's delirium. In fact, he played a number of varied roles (from the brooding son in Mourning Becomes Electra to his splendid light touch and charm in The Importance of Being Earnest). Redgrave always demonstrated a finely calibrated outward appearance and inner turmoil, but in Time Without Pity Redgrave created a differently memorable portrait of psychological maladjustment with genuine social roots. This was the first of Losey's mold-breaking characterizations of men struggling simultaneously with propriety and their own sanity. Redgrave portrayed what might be called male hysteria, characterizing the paranoia of Losey's period but with sensitivity that still seems ahead of our time.