The go-between

UK 1971

Dir: Joseph Losey

116 mins

Cast: Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Dominic Guard; based on the novel by LP Hartley

Rating: M - The content is moderate in impact

... This is the third collaboration between Losey and playwright Harold Pinter, following The Servant (1963) and Accident (1967). It works well as an elegantly filmed mood piece, memory drama and coming-of-age tale, one that sticks daggers into the polite but uptight English class system. The pic is viewed through the eyes of the 13-year-old Leo Colston (Dominic Guard), the son of a refined but poor widow, whose boarding school classmate Marcus Maudsley (Richard Gibson) invites him to spend his summer holiday as the guest of his wealthy aristocratic family (Michael Gough & Margaret Leighton) at their Norfork country estate–Brandham Hall. ...

... The costume period film is lushly photographed by Gerry Fisher and does a good job encapsulating the nuances and mores of that period. The screenplay by Pinter is intelligent, the acting is uniformly intelligent and the film is effortlessly charming and fascinating.

It won at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival the Palm D’Or.

Dennis Schwartz, Ozus’ World Movie Reviews

... Losey and his screenwriter, Harold Pinter, are terribly observant about small nuances of class. In the family’s matriarch (Margaret Leighton) they give us a woman who seems to support the British class system all by herself, simply through her belief in it. ...

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times