DVD of the Week: Joseph Losey’s “Mr. Klein”

In 1951, Joseph Losey, a high-school friend of Nicholas Ray’s from Wisconsin and a distinctive, original Hollywood director of the postwar years, left the country rather than respond to a subpoena from the House Un-American Activities Committee. He continued his stellar directorial career in Great Britain, with such films as “Time Without Pity” and “These Are the Damned,” and in France, with “Monsieur Klein,” from 1976—which I discuss in the clip above. In this film, working with a script by Franco Solinas (who had written “The Savage Innocents” for Ray in 1960), Losey took on one of the darkest moments in French history: the German occupation during the Second World War, and the persecution, arrest, and deportation of Jews to concentration camps. The film was centered on one horrific day, the day of “La Rafle” (the round-up), July 16, 1942, when thirteen thousand Jews were arrested in and around Paris and piled in a bicycle arena (the Vélodrome d’Hiver, or Vél d’Hiv). But Losey’s approach to the monstrous events was marked by his singular way with the cinema. In 1967 (as cited in David Caute’s biography of the filmmaker), Losey declared, “I’ve always detested naturalism,” and in his production notes he divided the shoot into three “visual categories”: Unreality, Reality, and Abstract. They’re all on view in this clip, and they mesh—and clash—in surprising ways.