The film stars Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Margaret Leighton, Michael Redgrave and Dominic Guard.
[6][7][8] Set during the Belle Époque , The Go-Between exposes the psychologically destructive effects of the rigid class conventions in Great Britain.
[9] In 1900, twelve-year-old Leo Colston is invited to spend his summer holiday at Brandham Hall, the Norfolk country house of his wealthy school friend, Marcus Maudsley.
Upon arriving at the house, the middle-class Leo finds himself out of place among the upper class; his hosts, particularly Marcus's older sister Marian, try to make him feel welcome.
Tenant farmer Ted Burgess tends to Leo's injury, asking the boy if he can bring a letter to Marian for him in return.
Marian's engagement to Hugh is announced and Leo is relieved, thinking this means his messenger duties will no longer be needed.
Marian and Ted continue their affair and proceed to rely on Leo as a go-between, much to the boy's worry and confusion.
Though some family members insist on waiting for her, Madeleine loses her patience and goes to look for Marian herself, taking Leo along with her.
The event has a long-lasting impact on Leo, as it is revealed that after he was caught with Marian, Ted shot and killed himself in his farmhouse kitchen.
He envisioned Alec Guinness and Margaret Leighton in the leads and employed Nancy Mitford to write a script.
[10] Eventually John Heyman managed to get financing from EMI Films, where Bryan Forbes agreed to pay £75,000 for the script.
[17][10][18] In July 1970, MGM-EMI announced it would make the film as part of four co-productions; the others were Get Carter (1971), The Boy Friend (1971) and The Last Run (1971) directed by John Boorman.
[10] Dominic Guard struggled with a stammer that made his delivering his lines impossible at times and that caused him to develop nervous tics.
[23] “Michel Legrand’s driving music for The Go-Between is one of the all-time best film scores, as important in its way as Bernard Herrmann’s score for Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958)—it adds emotion where it is sorely needed.”— Critic Dan Callahan in Senses of Cinema[24] Richard Rodney Bennett was announced as the composer.
[27] The love theme "I Still See You", written by Legrand with lyrics by Hal Sharper, was performed by Scott Walker and released as a single in late 1971.
[33] The inaugural screening of a new restoration of the film released by StudioCanal UK took place at Cinema City, Norwich on 11 September 2019.
[39] Roger Ebert awarded the film 3 and ½ stars out of 4, praising the production detail and Losey and Pinter's attention to the "small nuances of class".
[40] In The Village Voice, Andrew Sarris praised the film's cast, period detail, and camera work.
[41] However, Sarris also found issue with the film's incorporation of flashforward scenes, which he said made for a jarring, unnecessarily convoluted narrative.
[42] Writing in 1985, Joanne Klein saw the filmscript "as a major stylistic and technical advance in Pinter’s work for the screen", and Foster Hirsch described it as "one of the world’s great films" in 1980.
Robert Maras at the World Socialist Web Site called The Go-Between "[A] devastating critique of bourgeois morality and the British social order.