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The Go-Between
Roger Ebert Review
THERE was a time, fairly recent, when the British
upper classes thought it was a shade embarrassing to have to
work for a living. Boys from middle-class families might attend
the same school as upper-class boys, but they were tarnished,
somehow, by their parents' direct contact with money. Money was
something that needed to pass through a few sets of intervening
hands, to let the sweat dry, before it could be spent by the
aristocracy.
  In a famous
essay about English boarding schools, George Orwell delineated
this delicate, cruel class distinction. He came from a white-collar
family that made less than many blue-collar families, and yet
had to present certain "Standards" to the world. One
of these was the necessity to send its children away to schools
which, although they were shabby by Eton standards, were at least
private. The children were the ones who suffered directly at
the hands of class snobbism, of course, and sometimes their personalities
were marked for life.
Joseph Losey's "The Go-Between"
is about class distinction and its warping effect upon the life
of one small boy. The story is set in the days before World War
I, privileged days that seemed to stretch endlessly before the
British upper class. The boy, Leo, comes to spend a summer holiday
at the home of a rich friend. And he falls in hopeless schoolboy
love with the friend's older sister (Julie Christie).
The sister is engaged to marry well, but
she is in love with a roughshod tenant farmer (Alan Bates), and
she enlists the boy to carry messages back and forth between
them. The boy has only a shadowy notion at first about the significance
of the messages, but during the summer he is sharply disillusioned
about live, fidelity, and his won place in the great scheme of
things.
| Small Nuances of Class |
 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. They show a
father and a fiance who are aware of the girl's affair with the
farmer, but do nothing about it. They are confident she will
do the "right thing" in the end, and she does. "Why
don't you marry Ted," the boy asks the young woman. "Because
I can't," she replies. "Then why are you marrying Trimmington?"
"Because I must." She understands, and she is tough
enough to endure. Indeed, at the end of the film she turns up
years later as an old lady very much in the image of her mother.
The victim is the boy, who is scarred sexually and emotionally
by his summer experience. When we see him at the film's end,
he is a sort of bloodless eunuch, called in to perform one last
errand for the woman.
Losey's production is elegantly costumed
and mounted and has the same eye for details of character that
distinguished his two pervious films with Pinter ("The Servant"
and "Accident"). One visual device is distracting,
however; he keeps giving us short flash-forwards to the end of
the film. On the one hand, this eventually gives the ending away.
On the other, it imposes a ponderous significance on the events
that go before, diluting their freshness.
If the film had been told in straight chronology
followed by an epilogue, it would have been more effective. In
fact, the epilogue could have been lost altogether with no trouble;
everything that will become of this boy in his adult life is
already there, by implication, at the end of his summer holiday.
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The Go-Between
Video Review
11/26/96
 The
Go-Between (**** out of four) (1971, Columbia TriStar, $20):
Though Darling and Doctor Zhivago turned 1965 into
the Year of Julie Christie, I'm as inclined to vote for 1971,
which gave us McCabe & Mrs. Miller and this Cannes
Film Festival smash.
Adapted from L.P. Hartley's novel, it was
the final teaming of writer Harold Pinter and director Joseph
Losey after a lauded duo: The Servant (1963) and Accident
(1967). On camera, it further reunited Christie with Alan Bates
after 1967's haunting Far From the Madding Crowd. The
Christie-Bates relationship is much more sexually charged in
this British culture-clash, set in pre-World War I Norfolk.
An underprivileged adolescent (Dominic Guard)
visits an upper-class family and is pressed into messenger duty
delivering notes that set up illicit trysts between his friend's
engaged older sister (Christie) and a tenant farmer (Bates).
In a sub-theme, this gorgeously shot film addresses how the Christie-smitten
lad ends up being warped by a final tragedy that turns him into
an emotionally hollow adult (Michael Redgrave).
A cricket scene is so lovely that you may
want to take up the game. Note also Oscar-nominated Margaret
Leighton's makeup and coiffure, which make her look uncommonly
credible as Christie's mother. |||
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