Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

At age fifteen, I considered Julie Christie a goddess, so a movie from around that time in which a fifteen-year-old portrays a boy who turns thirteen and is mesmerized by her attention is more than believable to me. “But of course!” I think. “What young boy would not do whatever he could to have the sun of Julie Christie, circa 1971, shine upon him? or to continue to shine upon him once he had bathed in that light?”

When the film was released, Joseph Losey was the Anglophone god of the cineastes, working frequently with screenplays by Harold Pinter (completing a trinity). “The Go-Between” is less murky than other Losey work and other Pinter work. Although there is no talk about motivation, why each of the characters does what he or she does is quite clear, whatever judgments one may have of what they do. The only exception is when Mrs. Maudsley (Margaret Leighton) charges out in the rain. In that instance, I assume she is too enraged to think through what she is going to find.

The film reunited a magnetic Julie Christie with a (literally) down-to-earth Alan Bates, at the height of his sexual animal magnetism.
(“Reunited” from John Schleisinger’s “Far From the Madding Crowd,” a great, but not very commercially successful film of the minor Thomas Hardy novel.) Christie plays Marian Maudsley, the daughter of the manor in full blossom. Bates plays Ted Burgess, a tenant farmer whom she cannot think of wedding but also cannot resist.

Their affair is facilitated, at first unknowingly, later guiltily by Leo (Dominic Guard), a classmate of Marian’s younger brother Marcus, who is visiting for the summer (an unusually hot one). Leo comes from far less grand and wealthy family circumstances: he is a sort of a younger version of Charles among the Marchemaines in Brideshead Revisited, except that Leo’s single parent is his mother and in more straitened financial shape.

Marcus develops the measles and is quarantined, leaving Leo even more lost in the palatial but strange villa filled with people he does not know. I do not think that Marian takes him up to use him. Rather, I think that she is more sensitive to his discomforts than the rest of her family is. Similarly, Ted Burgess is nice to him without any initial ulterior motive. Soon, however, they are using him as a messenger to set up assignations. Then the interest they take in him and the affection they show him is more quid pro quo. Perhaps I am romantic in thinking it is not entirely payoff. . .

Being uncertain about what sex might be and might be like, Leo is both puzzled and troubled when the nature of the correspondence becomes (somewhat) clear to him. He has an awkward choice between disloyalty to his hosts and disloyalty to the two people who befriended him and see him as an individual.

Although I am not at all convinced that this is sufficient to traumatize him permanently, his multiply false positions provide convincing dilemmas, and what he does seems entirely plausible to me. It seems to me that he like Marian better than he likes Marcus, in addition to being enamored of her.

The film luxuriates in period (Edwardian) detail and the sacred (to many) English countryside--Merchant-Ivory-Forster territtry (filmed by Gerry Fisher, who also filmed Losey’s glorious film of “Don Giovanni,” and “The Romantic Englishwoman,” my other Losey favorite; plus many others, including “Accident” which once intrigued arthouse-film audiences).

The film’s kick seems to me to derive from contradicting the very famous opening line of the novel, which is also solemnly intoned by Michael Redgrave at the start of the film: “The past is a different country: they do things differently there.” Some things, perhaps, but there is a startling continuity between the then and the now within the story line.

The actor--those already mentioned plus Edward Fox as Marian’s posh fiancé are splendid. The pacing is a bit slow, and Michel Legrand's piano-pounding piano score is obnoxious, but overall I think “The Go-Between” remains a powerful and well-realized film about complicity and hypocrisy, about using and being used, and (if less importantly) about the repression of another age and its subversion.



Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older