With director Joseph Losey, U.S. expatriate and a victim of the Hollywood blacklist, it was never a question about remembering the same story from an earlier film. Losey's vast, colorful filmmaking career was all about diversity and constant reinvention. There were numerous second acts because Losey faced funding obstacles at every juncture of his career.

Yet there are distinct films that stand out like signposts, chapter breaks to help audiences divide Losey's output into neat categories. The Boy With Green Hair (1948), an anti-war fantasy about a young war orphan (Dean Stockwell) whose hair turns green as a symbol of peace, has become the best known film of his brief Hollywood years (1948-52), thanks to its successful reissue in Europe 20 years after its initial release.

The Boy With Green Hair was made for RKO, the type of message movie favored by production head Dore Schary, but Losey battled studio boss Howard Hughes over the film's pacifist message. Losey played a key role in transforming overtly commercial British cinema in the late '50s and early '60s into auteur-oriented, art-house fare.

The Servant (1963), Losey's initial collaboration with playwright Harold Pinter, remains the director's best-known film. It's also the first of four '60s films Losey would make with actor Dirk Bogarde, an acclaimed follow-up to their first film together, the 1954 thriller, The Sleeping Tiger, directed by Losey under the pseudonym Victor Hanbury.

Bogarde's role as the manipulative manservant in The Servant (1963) and a campy master criminal in Modesty Blaise (1966) are some of his best-known performances. He played an introverted academic in Accident (1967) and a World War I officer charged with defending a military deserter in King and Country (1964). They were produced on minuscule budgets with little help from the British film industry. Yet, with the exception of the campy Modesty Blaise, the films are recognized as British classics.

Two recent DVD releases from Home Vision Entertainment put the spotlight on lesser known -- although every bit as vibrant -- chapters of Losey's career. Time Without Pity (1957), an adaptation of Emlyn Williams' suspense play, was the first British film Losey was able to put his real name on after being blacklisted.

Time Without Pity is essentially a melodrama with a strong anti-capital punishment message. Michael Redgrave plays the alcoholic father who races against the clock to prevent the execution of his son for a wrongly accused murder. Leo McKern is the hot-tempered millionaire who knows the truth behind the murder. Joan Plowright has a small role as a dance hall girl with ties to the crime.

Every shot matters in Time Without Pity. Every set item, from the Goya-like bull on the wall of the millionaire's modern apartment to the worn cars of the London subway, contributes to the spirit of the movie. It's easy to overlook the simple pleasures in a potboiler like Time Without Pity, but Losey boosts the drama with his own sense of political justice. There is a substantive message behind the crime-solving in Time Without Pity, and that protest against capital punishment makes the film's overwrought moments acceptable.

Audiences who remember Losey probably think of him as British, because the majority of his films were made overseas. The truth is a far more interesting scenario.

Losey was born in La Crosse, Wisc., and worked as a theater critic and a stage manager before directing The Boy With Green Hair for RKO. He came to Britain in the early 1950s after being a victim of the Hollywood blacklist because of his politics.

Losey's British gangster film, The Criminal (1960), is considered an equal with crime classics such as Mike Hodges' Get Carter, John Mackenzie's The Long Good Friday and Stephen Frears' The Hit.

In a newspaper interview before his death in 1999, Bogarde explained that he and Losey had "set out to make British cinema important and to lift it out of the domestic rut."

But despite the fact that Losey was worshipped in the '60s thanks to the acclaim of his quartet of films with Bogarde, he continued to experience setbacks.

Losey planned an adaptation of Marcel Proust's Le Temps Retrouve and commissioned his frequent collaborator, playwright Harold Pinter, to write the screenplay. The film was never made, but Pinter's screenplay was subsequently published to great acclaim.

By 1975, after a series of international productions including Boom! (1968) and Figures in a Landscape (1970), a surreal adaptation of Barry England's Booker Prize-winning novel, Losey reinvented himself as a French filmmaker and completed four films in France.

La Truite (1982), starring a young Isabelle Huppert as an adventurous wife who leaves her husband and the family trout farm to travel to Japan with a wealthy businessman, continues the core themes of Losey's humanistic dramas -- personal destruction, anguished behavior and the devastating impact of sexual relationships.

In Tom Milne's 1968 interview book, Losey on Losey, the veteran director, easily at the height of his career following the release of Accident, summed up his filmmaking approach: "I am a foreigner wherever I am and always will be -- and my eye was foreign."

Taking him at his word, it's fair to say that Losey's early Hollywood, British and French stages in his career could be lumped into a single internationalist movement.

After directing the Nell Dunn play, Steaming, Losey died in 1984 in his adopted home of London. His legacy is one of constant re-examination, re-evaluation and posthumous praise. Film enthusiasts compare Losey to Nicholas Ray and Orson Welles, meaning he is considered a "thwarted auteur," someone driven into exile by Hollywood and undermined by producers and whose cherished projects were never realized.

The fact that Losey never made his Proust film sums up the constant travails during his career. Nevertheless, Time Without Pity and La Truite, two lesser-known Losey films, remind us of the triumphs he managed to push through the constant obstacles. ©