The Go-Between
Such an English film could perhaps only have been made by a foreign director, in this case American exile Joseph Losey. The story is by English novelist L.P. Hartley ; the screenplay, perhaps his best, by Harold Pinter ; and the cast so English: Julie Christie ; Edward Fox ; Alan Bates ; Dominic Guard; Michael Gough; Oscar nominated Margaret Leighton ; and Michael Redgrave . But there is a feeling of looking in from outside, and of course looking back. Released in 1970 the film marks an end to the swinging 60s, as it records a world shortly to end with Victoria’s death and eventually WWI . Pinter’s sparse dialogue, playing on the loss of details with declining memory delineates the past. Losey’s camera angles, often setting us above the action, or bringing us in from afar, distance us from it. So do the Proustian entanglements of characters and times. The story is a simple one: boy, invited to a house party, feels out of place; is exploited by Christie’s character to run messages to her lower-class lover, who in the end along with Leo the go-between is the one who suffers; upper classes blithely carry on. But Pinter and Losey revel in the complex presence of the past in our lives. And what a feast too for the eyes: Julie Christie 50 times sexier in crinoline than mini-skirted in Darling ; the cricket match; scenes of the empty Norfolk countryside (around Melton Constable and Heydon) moving in themselves; others on the lawn of parasol-carrying women and men in boaters deliberately reminiscent of a Seurat painting. What is seen in The Go-Between depends on the observer.
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