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(More customer reviews)The third, last, and probably most famous of the collaborations between director Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter, "The Go-Between" is a coming of age story for adults. While containing all the ingredients of the standard "summer I became a man" situation, "The Go-Between" presents a bitter, sophisticated view of sexual awakening that may take many viewers by surprise.
Like another great American expatriate filmmaker, Stanley Kubrick, Losey was a visual stylist with a bleak take on humanity. Losey's considerable technical skill--and pessimism--are at peak in "The Go-Between." Set on an English country estate during the summer of 1900, everything that contributes toward the sense of the past is ravishingly textured. A long, hot summer afternoon relieved by an impromptu bathing party, the justly famous cricket match sequence, thick with lassitude, the services before Sunday breakfast, stiffly formal, familiar yet remote at the same time, the games of croquet, seen from a pretty distance, as if watching chess pieces in boaters and crinolines--all testify to the director's ability to find those details that help to make the past come to life.
Amid the lush green fields, the breezes blowing through the trees, the sun dancing across the reeds and the sparkle of the water, a group of selfish, repressed upper and middle-class English pose, lie and suffer through the heat. At the center of the story is Leo Colston, a thirteen year old visitor to the estate who gets caught up in the adults' deceptions and machinations. As with most of Losey and Pinter's work, it's never entirely clear exactly who knows what. There is only the constant, heavy implication that something lurks just beneath the surface, and it is probably unpleasant. "The Go-Between" is practically a circus of raised eyebrows passed between the characters in knowing, unspoken comment. Leo, the innocent outsider, ends up impaled on their smug superciliousness, and for all the summer lyricism, the net effect is ashen.
All of the actors are superb. Margaret Leighton, as the matriarch of the household deserves special mention for her quicksilver motions, her ability to convey Madeleine's barely constrained neurasthenic rage. The music, by Michel Legrand, can be painfully loud and abrupt in places, but there's no denying that it's catchy. (How appropriate it is is another matter.) The transfer is not grossly awful, but it doesn't allow much informed evaluation of the cinematography. At the very least it would be nice to see the film in the correct aspect ratio. Contrasty, over-saturated, with a warbly soundtrack, the video makes you long for DVD. While I don't have much hope of it (Columbia is the studio, after all, that allowed "Lawrence of Arabia" literally to rot in its vaults), perhaps we can look forward to a new transfer that takes advantage of DVD's capabilities. This movie certainly deserves the best the studio can offer.
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