DVD of the Week: Time Without Pity

“Time Without Pity” (which I discuss in this clip) was shot in London in 1956 by the American director Joseph Losey, working with a script by the American screenwriter Ben Barzman, both of whom had left the country due to Congress’s political inquisitions and the studios’ resultant blacklisting. Its political import is built into its suspense: a young man is about to be executed for a murder to which he is linked only circumstantially and of which he seems to be manifestly innocent. Meanwhile, his father, a literary wreck who had cavalierly destroyed his relationship with his son, comes back to London in a last-minute attempt to save him. The political elements of the story (which finds the judicial system in the pocket of a dissolute, corrupt businessman) connect with another, more pervasive, more universal, and, ultimately, more radical vision of generational battles that arise from existential despair: the struggle to reconcile oneself to a broken world that draws on the past to harness the virtuous to perpetuate the evil. Losey stands beside Nicholas Ray (whom he knew from their youth in Wisconsin and with whom he later worked in the theatre) and Vincente Minnelli as a poet of lost youth. He was a master of cinematic depression, which comes off, in his view, as a depressingly rational response to a seemingly irreparable world. For further viewing: try “These Are the Damned,” “The Boy with Green Hair,” and “The Prowler.”