Everyone knows how much fun can be had from watching the goofy homemade videos and news clips that are posted on YouTube every day, but recently I’ve become more aware of how much wonderful movie research material is available on the Web site.
In the course of doing some poking around for information on the 1963 Joseph Losey film “The Servant” — which I’m hosting tonight at 7 p.m. at the Fairfield Library’s monthly “Foreign & Fringe” series — I did a search for the film’s star Dirk Bogarde on YouTube and came across a wealth of good material on the British star.
Among the hundreds of items was an excellent British TV documentary on the life of the star — broken up into five-minute segments that led smoothly from one to another — that I had never seen before.
Bogarde was a great actor who seems to have fallen off the radar of a lot of movie buffs in recent years. He never won an Oscar and only worked on a few Hollywood films, but his peak years’ performances in pictures such as “The Servant” and “Victim” (1961) and “Darling” (1965) are superb pieces of work.
As the special on YouTube notes, Bogarde started as a handsome matinee idol in the 1940s and ’50s and then made a conscious decision to improve his acting by insisting on tougher roles in more daring projects, starting with “Victim” in which he became the first major film actor to play a gay man.
In the 1950s, Bogarde was told by a cameraman that it was clear he knew nothing about the technical aspects of film acting. Instead of being insulted, Bogarde decided to find out everything he could about acting with the face as much as with the voice.
The result of Bogarde’s craft work and his excellent taste was a series of 1960s and ’70s triumphs that culminated in his 1971 performance in Luchino Visconti’s “Death in Venice” which contained fewer than 800 works of spoken text.
Bogarde is due for a major revival of interest in his work and you could start tonight at the free Fairfield Library screening of “The Servant.”
(The library is at 1080 Old Post Road in Fairfield Center. For more information call 256-3155 or go online to www.fairfieldpubliclibrary.org)
