The Go-Between DVD

Like the blind men and the elephant, Joseph Losey is a film director you may view a variety of different ways according to which of his film you have seen. At one end of the scale, you have stylish crime dramas (like The Sleeping Tiger, an early movie Losey filmed under the pseudonym Victor Hanbury), dizzying flights of intellectual fancy (such as the daring and decadent Eva, filmed in 1962 and starring Jeane Moreau) and complex and sexually ambiguous melodrama (in the shape of The Servant, Losey's first collaboration with Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter); at the other end of the scale, you have both the sublime (in the shape of the vastly under-rated Mia Farrow / Elizabeth Taylor double-header Secret Ceremony) and the ridiculous (take your pick of Boom!, Modesty Blaise or The Assassination of Trotsky). Regarded by many as Losey's last great masterpiece in an otherwise greatly chequered career, The Go-Between sits very definitely in the former camp than the latter.

Reuniting with Pinter for the third and final time (the pair also worked up Accident in between The Servant and The Go-Between) to adapt the stately novel by LP Hartley, the film once more concerns itself, as many of Losey's better films did, with the relationships between the classes and, more particularly, the relationship between men of one class and women of another.

The Go-Between of the title is Leo, a young boy invited to summer with his chum Marcus, a wealthy classmate, in the family's grand home in rural Norfolk. Introduced to Marcus' sister Marian (a glacial Julie Christie), herself engaged to be wed to all round good egg Hugh (played with a waspish charm by Edward Fox) - it isn't long before Leo is caught up in all manner of illicit carrying on, transporting messages between Marian and neighbouring rake, Ted Burgess (Alan Bates playing the commoner card for all he's worth). Of course, Leo's naivety is quickly worn down and replaced by a dissembling edge and the lovers are, pretty much from the outset, on a course for disaster.

Beautifully filmed, with an understated (and unexpected, given who the director is) eye for detail, The Go-Between is best approached as a precursor of Kubrick's superior Barry Lyndon. Also worth noting is the driving score by Michael LeGrand, considered by many to be among the greatest film scores of all time.

Peter Wild on 18th December 2006
Author of 99 reviews