The Go-Between

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 east 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 pinks 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). © EMI Films, Robert Velaise Productions, John Heyman Productions, Columbia Pictures