The Go-Between

Based upon L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel, The Go-Between (Joseph Losey, 1971) is an elegant film in its pristine formal composition and beguiling Edwardian setting. Beneath this polished surface, however, there is a lurking sense of disquiet. The third and final collaboration between the exiled American director Joseph Losey and the British playwright Harold Pinter, The Go-Between was met with widespread critical acclaim, winning the 1971 Palme d’Or at Cannes. Told from the point-of-view of Leo Colson (Dominic Guard), the narrative unfolds over a sultry summer in the Norfolk countryside. Young Leo is invited into the British upper-class world of his school friend Marcus Madsley (Richard Gibson) and immediately takes a shine to Marcus’ beautiful older sister, Marian (Julie Christie), who in turn courts his affections so that he will deliver letters to her secret lover Ted Burgess (Alan Bates). Leo’s loss of innocence mirrors the impending horrors of World War I; in the summer of 1900, wealthy families like the Madsleys remained blissfully unaware of the desecration that would soon befall them. 

The Go-Between is undoubtedly a more conventional film than Losey and Pinter’s previous collaborations: it lacks the horrific claustrophobia and barbed provocation on show in The Servant (1963) or the formal sophistication and experimental film language of Accident (1967). And while the social commentary is arguably less overtly lacerating, The Go-Between continues to probe Losey and Pinter’s thematic preoccupations. Here again is the mirror held up to the British upper classes, the fascination with rituals and games, and the often-cruel subtext underpinning social interactions. Transgressive both stylistically and thematically, their films’ fusing of European sensibility with the settings of British life – particularly those associated with the wealthy upper classes – helped usher in the emergence of a new mode of art cinema that would transform the landscape of British film. Losey’s love of baroque film language found lucid synchronicity with Pinter’s (always adapted) screenplays, where class privilege and duelling power dynamics are front and centre; language collapses and words often conceal more than they reveal about a character’s motivations or state of mind. As James Palmer and Michael Riley note, “Losey’s films neither insist on nor ignore causality; instead, his characters are more often compelled by motives that are ambiguous or uncertain rather than simple or straightforward.”¹ This insistence on psychological complexity likewise informs Pinter’s work and is one of the keynotes of what is commonly known as ‘Pinteresque’ characterisation. For Pinter, “we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else’s life is too frightening.”²

In The Go-Between this slippery process of constant evasion is not limited to interpersonal dynamics. From the title sequence, Losey’s mise-en-scène and camera movement inscribes a sense of uncertainty, signalling the unreliability of Leo’s perception, both of himself and of his recollections of the past. This tension is present in Losey’s opening image of rain spattering against a windowpane on a grey afternoon. The image is familiar but not comforting for the spectator as Losey places us outside of the window, distancing us from the world behind the glass. This establishes a sense of dislocation and introduces Losey’s ‘outsider’s gaze’ – a way of looking that is predicated on the defamiliarisation of settings, particularly those associated with class. We hear Michel Le Grand’s mysterious and melancholic refrain for the first time; the music is forceful and loaded with the threat of danger, reinforcing the brutal world that Leo is about to be indoctrinated into. As Losey’s camera finally zooms in close to the window as if to get a closer view, the image loses focus, recalling the act of remembering and the way that details shift or swim out of the grasp of recollection. For Leo, memory is an inescapable trap, at once unreliable and oppressively persistent, forever casting its shadow over the present. 

This idea is magnified by Losey’s intercutting of disjunctive perspectives in the establishing scene, which opens with a long shot of the sprawling grounds of the Maudsley’s summer residence. To the rear of the frame sits Brandham Hall, but its indistinct features resemble a watercolour painting. The voiceover of a man who will eventually be revealed as the adult Leo speaks over the image, delivering the immortalised line: “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” By collapsing past and present, Losey gently compromises the reliability of the recollections that we will spend the rest of the film watching. When we see young Leo for the first time, he is riding with Marcus in a horse carriage towards the grand house. The swooning score and handheld camera suggest his excitement, yet something is off. The camera once again resists allowing us to share Leo’s point of view; it is too close to his face and registers as an intrusion. The perspective then shifts abrasively to an objective static image of the carriage carrying the boys towards their destination. This sense of disquiet, which undercuts the joy of Leo’s arrival, will pervade the entire film. 

The Outsider’s Gaze

Accused of Communist sympathies in 1952, Losey was blacklisted by Hollywood and moved to the United Kingdom where he made most of his subsequent films. Losey later remarked, “I think that I have a certain distance that has made it possible for me to comment on certain European societies and situations in ways that perhaps otherwise I couldn’t have done.”³

In The Go-Between, Losey’s clinical perspective exposes the cruelty and prejudice that underpins class politics. He scrutinises the moral implications of power imbalances via his ‘outsider’s gaze’, which registers both diegetically and aesthetically; there is an almost fetishistic attention to the minutia of place, to the buildings and rooms in which the rituals of British upper-class life play out. Losey’s stylistic flourishes often undercut the civilised veneer of the ornate Edwardian mise-en-scène and the staccato conversations of characters. Robert Hanks describes Pinter’s characters as having “… few words, and yet they hardly shut up; they prattle about nothing but every word is weighted with meaning; they fill the silence, and in doing so create new voids.”⁴

It is as though Losey’s insistence on ‘place as character’ externalises what the human characters fail to communicate, displacing the ‘voids’ left by Pinter’s language. In The Go-Between, the grand spaces of Brandham Hall are analogous with the psychological spaces inhabited by its characters. The staircase that Leo delightedly runs up when he arrives is a recurring site of psychological transformation. For Losey, the stairs are a transitional space that reflects Leo’s movement away from childhood innocence. As he ascends them for the first time, he steps up into the Maudsley’s corrupting orbit. A window frames his movement up the stairs, presenting his initiation into the Maudsley’s world from a cool distance that reinforces his lower social class. He looks out of a window where a game of croquet is in progress. The smack of the ball and the cries of the players are captured from Leo’s aerial view, emphasising the formality of the players’ stances while capturing his own incomprehension. This moment prefigures the ritualised social dynamics of the cricket match where Ted will be labelled ‘uncivilised’ because of his powerful hitting range. When Marcus leads Leo on a chase down the stairs, he is in charge of the game; his insider status visually inscribed by his hiding place in a secret panel concealed by paintings of his ancestors. Tellingly, when Leo next returns to the staircase, he chooses to descend to the lower levels beneath where the family reside, drawn to the kitchen where the cooks are preparing dinner. When he is offered a bowl and sits atop the table to happily eat from it, Losey signals that he may be more closely aligned with working class Ted than Marian and Marcus. 

The tyranny of class will prove traumatic for Leo, as the horror of this summer will forever shape his identity and prove inescapable. According to Losey, he and Pinter had become “…fascinated by the concept of time, and by the power the cinema has suddenly to reveal the meaning of a whole life.”⁵ Throughout the film, editing patterns create an unsettling glitching effect, as though the materiality of the film frame records the process of remembering and the distance that separates ‘then’ and ‘now’. Sometimes the progression of images doesn’t quite cohere, or a subtle jump interrupts the movement from one image to the next. So when adult Leo is eventually intercut into the diegesis of his memories, we momentarily lose our bearings and reference points. The Go-Between materially replicates the sensation of an intrusive memory resurfacing; despite the sadness it brings, we realise that it was there all along, hiding in plain sight. 

The Go Between (1971 United Kingdom 112 minutes) 

Prod Co: EMI /Parlophone / World Film Services Prod: John Heyman and Norman Priggen Dir: Joseph Losey Scr: Harold Pinter Phot: Gerry Fisher Ed: Reginald Beck Mus: Michel Le Grand Art Dir: Carmen Dillon Cos Des: John Furniss 

Cast: Julie Christie, Dominic Guard, Alan Bates, Margaret Leighton, Edward fox, Michael Gough, Richard Gibson, Michael Redgrave, Simon Hume-Kendall

Endnotes