THE GO-BETWEEN (1971)

Third and final collaboration for director Joseph Losey and playwright Harold Pinter (not counting uncredited work on Losey’s MODESTY BLAISE/’66) drops the swinish modern characters of THE SERVANT/’63 and ACCIDENT/’67 for upper-crust period snobs from L.P. Hartley’s novel. (With its famous opening line about ‘the past being a foreign country,’ it’s a more conventional adaptation than earlier Pinter/Losey films.) So exquisitely situated, dressed & groomed, we forgive (or is it revel in) the class entitlement that runs narrative & ruins lives. On the surface, everything well mannered, perfectly maintained, endless lawns & farm fields of the Maudsley estate, perfectly caught in Gerry Fisher’s sun-dappled cinematography and Michel Legrand’s ear-lapping score. But all may not be quite as it appears. And the catalyst to family fissure turns out to be a 13-yr-old lower-middle-class friend of a Maudsley boy, guest for the summer break who falls hard for beautiful older sister Julie Christie, all but engaged to Boar War hero Edward Fox, but just as engaged in a passionate affair with musky tenant farmer Alan Bates. And that’s how our outlier guest lands in-over-his-head, carrying notes between secret lovers, unaware he’s setting up indiscreet meetings. Is he corrupted or wised up? Beautifully orchestrated by Pinter & Losey, it’s hard to imagine another filmmaker molding this material in such a chilly manner; with its class implications leading to a Palme d’Or at Cannes. Hartley gave it a Junior Edition BRIDESHEAD REVISITED vibe: in characters, wealth, envy, sexual tensions, flashback structure, but at least managed to keep Catholicism off the buffet. Not that it stopped Margaret Leighton, Maudsley materfamilias and rarely so comfortable in film, from making an award-winning meal of it.

DOUBLE-BILL: Julie Christie’s acting was still a work in progress, but she & Bates make an unbeatable pair (once Peter Finch & Terence Stamp get out of the way) in John Schlesinger’s rhapsodic version of FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD/’67.