Betwixt and Between

The Go-Between is an ingenious, pretty little picture but it is neither moving nor beautiful. Director Joseph Losey and writer Harold Pinter are so determined on elegance that the film's higher aims are strangled by its stylistic pretensions.

Though the same team has given us two other films dealing luxuriously with upper-class rot (The Servant and Accident), The Go-Between begins with images and words which suggest that tired tricks are abandoned, and that Losey and Pinter have put a novelistic concentration of characterization and detail on the screen. The credits are projected against a raindropped windowpane: we see glimpses of green foliage and a manor-like brown blur. A pitted voice speaks: "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there."

And we see the landscape clearly now, as the child of the voice's memory does: the great country hall set at the peak of a sculptured lawn, with sunlight tinging the entire scene, flecking the grass with gold and making shadows deepen. There are two children holding tight to their caps as they're whirled to the manor door. The smaller, the pained and worried one, is Leo Coston, the narrator. Somehow, the hall is never as big as Leo's first glance suggests.

The all-important tone and point-of-view of this late-Victorian period piece is thus economically set. Losey and Pinter are concerned with the social pressures afflicting Leo, and how his use of emotive and imaginative outlets for escape ultimately cripple him.

Leo's friend, Marcus Maudsley, uses him as a plaything--one with macabre attractions, to be sure. Leo, the orphaned son of a shabby-genteel pacifist and book-collector, is notorious at his school only because of his black magic. There is no real affection present in the relationship; a thick oil of politeness surrounds the entire Maudsley family. The Maudsleys test each other aesthetically rather than touch and exchange emotions or ideas.

It is clear that Leo has come not for reasons of friendship, but out of a searching adolescent curiosity, heightened by upwardly-mobile ambition. And though the hall and lawns continuously awe him, it is the rulers, the adults, the gentlemen and ladies who ignore him, who fascinate him. Even the hall can be a setting for childish games, and its acquiescent housekeepers offer some degree of home comfort. But the elder Maudsleys are to Leo mythical figures, inhabitants of yet-another distant country. Beneath the way of life they share with him, the feel incomprehensible things; Leo is determined to understand their recondite passions.

Marion, Marcus's older sister, is the inevitable object of Leo's yearnings. At once the warmest of the Maudsleys, she also hides more mysterious secrets. While dawdling with a perfect match, the Viscount Hugh Trimmingham, she is making love to a tenant farmer, Ted Burgess. After a series of plot coincidences which seem audacious in a contemporary movie-going context, but are somewhat justified by the boy's mystic qualities, Leo becomes Mercury, the messenger of the gods, the go-between delivering letters of rendezvous from Burgess to Marion.

As Leo slowly becomes aware of the nature of the Marion-Burgess relationship, the stocky, good-natured tenant of Black Farm assumes a father-like role. Burgess is no calloused, warted prophet of the Lawrentian school of peasants, but a strong, understanding worker. He stands in the film for the natural qualities smothered by Hall mores, but to him these are merely the elements of a commonly accessible good life. His tragedy is his inarticulateness, which causes him to lose Leo's trust before he can explain to him the meaning of adulthood.

Ultimately, Burgess is the only admirable figure of the piece. Marion is revealed as a coquette, unable to resolve her social obligations-and her passionate urges. Leo is caught in the midst of Maudsley cruelty, is used by the matriarch to reveal Marion's 'sin', and is shattered by the experience. He is revealed in the end as a drained man, left forever in a state of adolescent ataxia.

The story is sound, and there are times when its potential is stunningly achieved. Director Losey uses the Maudsleys' listlessness and frozen states-of-mind against themselves, and he is equally skillful at portraying Burgess's directness without overstating it. He is able in a single sequence to crystallize all plot conflicts: Burgess swims in the Hall pond as several Maudsleys arrive for a bathing party, with Leo along to watch. (Though he has a bathing suit, his mother warned him not to swim, lest he catch cold). The Maudsleys must patronize Burgess, one of their valuable tenants: but to the eyes of Leo, the boys' frivolous games contrast negatively with Burgess's vigor. Marion dunks herself with a friend. When they all emerge, Leo goes to Marion, and tells her of the strong man he's seen swimming. She is pleased at the description, smiling while she preens. Leo and Marion fall behind the others, he placing his dry bathing-suit on her shoulders, and spreading her wet hair over it. It is late afternoon: a puff of breeze ruffles Marion's dress; and Leo seems part of the foliage in his new green suit. Marion laughs, and says, "What a comfort, your bathing suit on my shoulders." And, though Pinter's cunning dialogue reveals more of state-of-mind than of character, the lighting, mise-en-scene, and acting say most of what there is to be said about Burgess and the Maudsleys, Marion's capriciousness and Leo's devotion.

Julie Christie has always been a fine actress; Marion gives her a role suited to her talents. Her beauty is so ambivalent, and her charm so winning, that it is not difficult to see how she could be so many things to the men and to Leo. Alan Bates is an earnest Burgess (similar to his shepherd in Far From The Madding Crowd); Edward Fox (James's brother?) puts in a fine cameo as the scarred Trimmingham. The young Dominic Guard is suitably discomfited and ruddy as Leo. All are bathed in photographer Gerry Fisher's impeccable lighting, while Michel Legrand contributes an appropriate formal--and lovely--musical score.

The Go-Between is also marked by Losey's fine sense of architecture and design (assisted here enormously by Carmen Dillon's art direction). Leo's venture with Marion into the city of Norfolk is splendidly observed: the pair enters narrow streets which criss-cross and flow with a sedate citizenry; Leo entertains himself in a spired cathedral whose height lets his feelings soar, unlike the staircase-bounded hall of Maudsley.

There is, however, excess calculation, both in Pinter's dialogue, and in the director's conceptions of entire scenes. Though the annual village cricket match is admirably staged, with flies swarming over ossified onlookers, and the Maudsleys running with grace and dignity, Burgess predictably hits a cricket home run every time at bat. And Pinter cannot deal with direct emotional response: a crucial Burgess-Leo dialogue is embarassing. B: "She cried when she couldn't see me." L: "How do you know?" B: "She cried when she did see me."

If Reginald Beck's editing manages to underline the essential content of most scenes, there are too many unexplored ambiguities and unexplained ellipses in the film for it to make a satisfying whole. Leo throws spells, but we have no idea what they're aimed against. (After consulting a critique of L. P. Hartley, the novelist on whose book the screenplay is based, the chants seem wearisome conceits in both book and movie). A pivotal relationship, that of Marion and her mother, is barely drawn; and it is not clear what happened to Ted Burgess, though he probably committed suicide.

The form of the film is exasperating. The story is told in an implied flashback, with numerous flash-forwards to the narrator intercut with the main action. These do not make a discernible comment, though the wordless Michael Redgrave is such an expressive actor that some of the brief cuts are affecting. The film is not as expressive.

What is most bothersome is not the film's literary coating, but the fact that it is obviously imposed. One is forced to read the images and reassemble their meanings at relevant points, and for a story as simple as this one, it's a grievous error.

The Go-Between is so similar to a (far superior) classic British film that I'm surprised few have made the comparison. Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol, written by Graham Greene from his short story "The Basement Room", also chronicled a young boy's encounter with passions beyond his ken, with class conflicts in the background. Reed's film was cinematically more extravagant than The Go-Between, and it unashamedly exploited the use of subjective interludes within its plot structure. But it was not a whit less edifying for that. Reed was simply unafraid of responding heartfully to a tale that cried out for it--unlike the more virtuosic Messrs, Losey and Pinter.