Losey's first collaboration with Pinter resulted in the director's best-known and certainly one his very best films. The gradual entrapment of a wealthy layabout – James Fox in his debut role – by his duplicitous manservant, powerfully captured by Bogarde, offers an allegory for the psycho-sexual perversity of the British class system. The screenplay is pure Pinter, with dialogue acting primarily as a ritualistic mask designed, yet ultimately unable, to conceal the characters' misshaped lives. One of the best of Losey's many collaborations with artistic consultant Richard MacDonald, The Servant underscores the decadence of its subject with deliriously extravagant cinematography and mise-en-scène, using unexpected camera angles and frames-within-frames to illustrate the story’s multiple layers of deception, roleplay and power struggle.