MR KLEIN

Joseph Losey's brilliant thriller "Mr. Klein" is about a well-off French art dealer in Nazi occupied Paris who suddenly finds he is being 'mistaken' for a Jewish man with the same name. Like Joseph K he can make no sense of what's happening to him or why. It's this Kafkaesque air of unreality that makes Losey's film so disquieting. There's no room for logic; events unfold like a bad dream which is how it must have been for so many in Europe at this time. The film opens with medical examination of a woman to determine if she is Jewish or not; it beggars belief that such practices went on and yet in view of what history has told us, why should we doubt it. This is a nightmare from which there really isn't any waking and which Losey films in the same cold, glacial style he brought to "Eve" and "The Servant" and "Accident", (in other words, it's a thriller almost devoid of 'conventional' thrills). As Klein, Alain Delon is superb, though were the film not in French one could see Losey regular Dirk Bogarde in the role just as easily, (indeed Bogarde played a not dissimilar if considerably more mannered part in Fassbinder's "Despair", a film not unlike "Mr. Klein" in some ways). But it's also somewhat unusual for Losey in that you engage a lot more with Delon's Klein than many of Losey's other so-called heroes and it's also a lot more suspenseful.  A critical success at the time, it's since been passed over in favour of Losey's British, (and earlier American) films. It's time, I believe, it was reassessed, not just as one of Losey's key pictures but as one of the key European films of the seventies.