Don't be fooled (writes our Marxist correspondent) by PBS prestigerie like Upstairs Downstairs; they're nostalgic recuperations of all the tensions plotted by Harold Pinter and Joseph Losey in this, their seminal study of master-servant relationships. How and why does the rich young man with aristocratic pretensions (James Fox) fall under the sway of the creepy butler (Dirk Bogarde) and his sluttish sister (Sarah Miles)? The two auteurs begin with Robin Maugham's short sharp novel about the nanny complex in the British upper classes and its transsexual extension through military community onto lower-class males. They expand it into a study of a whole culture's loss of purpose and therefore self-assurance, and it becomes all the more monstrous and compelling for being heterosexualized (or rather desexualized). It started the whole cycle of movies on master-servant relationships (The Night Porter, et al.) and this stern little classic remains the most rigorous and lyrically queasy of the lot.