Losey: Time Without Pity (1957)

Time Without Pity was Joseph Losey’s first English film released under his own name, and it brims with the visceral intensity of his trial and excommunication from the United States, restarting his career like a tightly wound coil. Based on Emyln Williams’ play of the same name, it’s about an alcoholic, David Graham (Michael Redgrave), who’s released from a sanatorium to discover that he has twenty-four hours to save his son from being executed for murder. Screenwriter Ben Barzman stays pretty close to the original script, with one critical exception – the real murderer, industrialist Robert Stanford (Leo McKern), is shown committing the crime in the first frame. As a result, all the suspense is channelled into the narrowing time before the execution, making it a masterpiece of pace. And Losey directs in thick brushstrokes, as if trying to envisage the film as a totality before the paint dries – the murder takes place in an apartment crammed with modernist process painting – until it feels more like a live performance than a film adaptation. It’s no coincidence, then, that Robert is a specialist in automotive acceleration, or that the key witness collects alarm clocks – the film breaks time into smaller and smaller intervals as the execution hour draws near, warping any sense of a stable or continuous timeline. Among other things, that makes for a peculiarly powerful vision of addiction – as someone who’s barely escaped from the final throes of alcoholism, David’s also grown used to a life lived in smaller and smaller micro-intervals, from drink to drink. Even as his son’s case requires him not to drink, then, it forces him to think like an alcoholic - and so, whatever else happens, it’s clear from the very start that this is also, somehow, about the last day of an alcoholic; Losey's version of The Lost Weekend. In some ways, the late 1950s camera hadn’t evolved to meet that vision, which cries out for the abstractions of a handheld, frenzied camera, just as it yearns to fuse Redgrave’s twitching face with the screen, to infect the lens with delirium tremens. Yet there’s also something poetic and prophetic about the way Losey embraces his camera's limitations, pairing it with static, staid tablueaux that render it as impotent as David, as he strives – and fails – to envisage his utter intoxication with his son’s innocence.