Julie Christie Marian Maudsley Alan Bates Ted Burgess Margaret Leighton Mrs. Maudsley Michael Redgrave The Older Leo Colston Dominic Guard Leo Colston (younger) Michael Gough Mr. Maudsley Edward Fox Hugh Trimingham Directed by Joseph Losey Writing credits L.P. Hartley (novel) Harold Pinter
The Go-Between (1970) links the
present and the past, taking an
ageing bachelor back to the long hot
summer when he was twelve and the
twentieth century was only a few
months old: when he lost his boyish
heart to a beautiful, headstrong
young woman who used his
adoration to suit her own purposes
and, by so doing, brought about the
death of a fine man and destroyed
the boy's chance of eventually
finding the fulfilment of love and
marriage.
The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. In the 'foreign country' of 1900, Leo's hosts, the Maudsleys, live in a huge country mansion. They idle away their days with croquet and dinner parties and patronise the poor with their charity. But their surface contentment and politeness conceal the frustrations of conforming to the Victorian code of respectability.
When the daughter of the house (Julie Christie) falls for a handsome young tenant farmer (Alan Bates) class distinctions make marriage impossible and an open affair unthinkable. But the fever of her passion consumes her self-restraint and her willing slave, Leo, is the innocent go-between who makes it possible for the lovers to meet in secret.
We are what we are because of what we were; and the man is what he is because of what happened to the boy in one shattering moment of revelation on his 13th birthday. Joseph Losey made The Go- Between entirely on location in and around the 300-year-old Melton Hall in Norfolk, on land owned by the same family for 22 generations, after ten years of cutting through legal tangles to acquire the rights to L.P. Hartley's novel and to raise the money.
The official British entry for the Cannes Film Festival of 1971, the film won the Grand Prix and later collected more awards from the Society of Film and Television Arts: Best Screenplay (Harold Pinter); Best Supporting Actress (Margaret Leighton); and Best Supporting Actor (Edward Fox).
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Distributed by: EMI
Films Ltd. |
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This page was last updated 02 Dec 2002
