The film makes a strong contrast between the father and the killer, one that in any objective sense would seem to give the game to the killer. The father is a man whose life is in ruins, while the killer seems successful in every way. Stanford, the killer, is a successful industrialist who has risen through the force of his own personality and his willingness to do whatever he deems necessary to achieve his goals, clearly even to the point of murder. The one area of failure for Stanford is his marriage--he has married a woman socially superior to himself in order to achieve a higher place in Britain's stratified society, but he does not love her and is constantly irked by her pretensions and her condescension toward him. This personal failure is the one link he has with Graham. Stanford is always seeking to control every situation, and his wife is one thing he cannot control. The fact that he takes to Graham as he does reflects his need to control this situation as well. He knows who Graham is, and he kn

Losey, Joseph. Chance Meeting. Paramount, 1959.

Losey's later films seem different on the surface from these earlier works, but there are themes found in Time Without Pity that can also be found in The Go-Between (1970) and The Romantic Englishwoman (1975), for example. There are clearly considerations of class difference and societal control in these films, as there is in the somewhat different Mr. Klein (1977), and there are intimations of the intruder in each film as well. In The Go-Between, the young boy who helps the lovers is a type of intruder into the homes of the two, and the lover is himself an intruder into a social class that rejects him so that he kills himself. The theme of the individual against the group is used here, and the group has all the power over the lives of the lovers, leaving the boy disillusioned as he faces his own future with the knowledge that it will be shaped more by outside forces than by his own desires and abilities.

Graham, for his part, is a man with no control at all. He has failed in his life so completely that he seems an unlikely candidate to do anything for his son. Yet, he undertakes the task with a single-mindedness that is ultimately unstoppable. The obsession this father has for saving his son overcomes his natural tendency to hide from life in a bottle. Finally, he has to surrender his life to save his son's, a sacrifice that also becomes an inversion of the expected outcome for his son--that is, what was supposed to be the last day in the young man's life becomes the last day in his father's life.

Losey, Joseph. Time Without Pity. Harlequin, 1957.

Losey, Joseph. The Go-Between. Columbia, 1970.

One of Losey's last films in America before his exile to Europe was The Prowler, another crime film which creates a sense of social oppression and which uses the melodrama of the plot as a springboard