The Go-Between (1971)

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Directed by Joseph Losey.

Starring Alan Bates, Julie Christie, Michael Gough, Margaret Leighton, Michael Redgrave.

The third collaboration between director Joseph Losey and writer Harold Pinter, following The Servant and Accident, continues their exploration of class rituals and the darker recesses of desire. Pinter's script adapts the 1953 L.P. Hartley novel about Leo Colston, a middle-aged man (Michael Redgrave), recalling a summer of his early adolescence at a country estate. Young Leo (Dominic Guard) observes the machinations of the adults in the household, all but two of whom conveniently ignore his presence. Marion Maudsley (Julie Christie) is promised in marriage to another aristocrat, but she is secretly in love with farm worker Ted Burgess (Alan Bates). They enlist Leo as their messenger, with tragic consequences for all concerned. The older Leo has never married, and as the story winds on, it becomes clear that his own infatuation with Marion irrevocably altered his life. The Go-Between won several British Academy Awards, including one for Pinter's screenplay, and was one of four films awarded a grand prize at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide

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Review by All Movie Guide

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What sets The Go-Between apart from its two predecessors, the Joseph Losey-Harold Pinter collaborations The Servant and Accident, is a strong sense of melancholy, no doubt a reflection of L.P. Hartley's source material. The decadence of the first two films is less obvious here; the aristocratic rot that Julie Christie's Marion Maudsley is trying desperately to escape is not the focus of the film; it's her fanciful and inevitably doomed affair with a commoner, the farmer played by Alan Bates. Their relationship here has echoes of their previous collaboration, Far From the Madding Crowd, and those films, along with Darling and Petulia, confirm that few actresses could match Christie for playing characters plagued by romantic indecision. Because The Go-Between is also about the memory of this summer affair, its reliability may be tantalizingly in question; after all, what is to say that the middle-aged Leo isn't embellishing his recollections, given his own infatuation with Marion? This extra dimension marks The Go-Between as a film of real substance and emotional power. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide

Tags: aristocracy , bachelor , disapproval , engagement , secrets
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