Joseph Walton Losey III (/ˈloʊsi/; January 14, 1909 – June 22, 1984) was an American film and theatre director, producer, and screenwriter.

His other notable films included The Boy with Green Hair (1948), Eva (1962), King & Country (1964), Modesty Blaise (1966), Figures in a Landscape (1970), A Doll's House (1973), Galileo (1975), and Don Giovanni (1979).

[6][7] Losey became a major figure in New York City political theatre, first directing the controversial failure Little Old Boy in 1933.

[6] Bosley Crowther in The New York Times noted that "The play, being increasingly wordy, presents staging problems that Joe Losey's direction does not always solve.

Losey went on to stage Galileo, again with Laughton in the title role, in New York City where it opened on December 7, 1947, at the Maxine Elliott Theatre.

Seymour Nebenzal, the producer of Fritz Lang's classic M (1931), hired Losey to direct a remake set in Los Angeles rather than Berlin.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Losey maintained extensive contacts with people on the political left, including radicals and communists or those who would eventually become such.

They had collaborated on a "political cabaret" from 1937 to 1939, and Losey had invited Eisler to compose music for a short public-relations film that he had been commissioned to produce for presentation at the 1939 New York World's Fair, Pete Roleum and His Cousins.

Losey directed the play Triple-A Plowed Under, which been denounced by HUAC's antecedent, the Dies Committee, as communist propaganda.

He later explained to a French interviewer:[16] I had a feeling that I was being useless in Hollywood, that I'd been cut off from New York activity and I felt that my existence was unjustified.

And I think that the work that I did on a much freer, more personal and independent basis for the political left in New York, before going to Hollywood, was much more valuable socially.Losey was under a long-term contract with Dore Schary at RKO when Howard Hughes purchased the company in 1948 and began purging it of leftists.

Instead, Losey abandoned his work editing The Big Night[20] and left for Europe while his ex-wife Louise departed for Mexico a few days later.

Accident explores male lust, hypocrisy and ennui among the educated middle class as two Oxford University tutors competitively objectify a student against the backdrop of their seemingly idyllic lives.

In The Go-Between, a young middle-class boy, the summer guest of an upper-class family, becomes the messenger for an affair between a working-class farmer and the daughter of his hosts.

Although Losey's films are generally naturalistic, The Servant's hybridisation of Losey's signature Baroque style, film noir, naturalism and expressionism, and both Accident's and The Go-Between's radical cinematography, use of montage, voice over and musical score, amount to a sophisticated construction of cinematic time and narrative perspective that edges this work in the direction of neorealist cinema.

In 1966, Losey directed Modesty Blaise, a comedy spy-fi film produced in the United Kingdom and released worldwide in 1966.

Sometimes considered a James Bond parody, it was based loosely on the popular comic strip Modesty Blaise by Peter O'Donnell.'

[citation needed] Losey's Monsieur Klein (1976) examined the day in Occupied France when Jews in and around Paris were arrested for deportation.

He said he so completely rejected naturalism in film that in this case he divided his shooting schedule into three "visual categories": Unreality, Reality and Abstract.

"[6] He told an interviewer the year before he died that he was not bitter about being blacklisted: "Without it I would have three Cadillacs, two swimming pools and millions of dollars, and I'd be dead.

On September 29, 1970, Losey married Patricia Mohan in King's Lynn, Norfolk, shortly after finishing shooting The Go-Between.

[4][31] In Guilty by Suspicion, Irwin Winkler's 1991 film about the Hollywood blacklist, McCarthyism, and the activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Martin Scorsese plays an American filmmaker named "Joe Lesser" who leaves Hollywood for England rather than face HUAC investigations.