The classic film The Go-Between which sees the combined talents of American director Joseph Losey, British playwright Harold Pinter and three generations of outstanding British actors, will be screened next Tuesday at the National Gallery, Castellani House.
In the movie, Pinter, the leading playwright and actor-director of his generation, and later Nobel Laureate 2005, expertly adapted the haunting 1953 novel of the same name by LP Hartley, with its famous opening line (retained in the film), about a young boy’s painful coming of age during an idyllic summer in 1900, spent at the country estate of his wealthy schoolfriend’s family.
A release from Castellani House said that 12-old Leo, brilliantly played by young Dominic Guard, is smitten by his friend’s elder sister, the beautiful Marian Maudsley (Julie Christie), and is then enlisted to take messages between her and her lover, Ted Burgess (Alan Bates), a tenant farmer on the estate. It is an illicit affair not only because of Burgess’s lower social status and connection to the estate, but because Marian is engaged to the aristocrat Viscount Trimingham (Edward Fox, in typical upper-class form, and before he played, several shades cooler, the notorious assassin in The Day of the Jackal). When the affair, known to some, is more widely discovered, Leo, caught in the middle, abruptly learns the facts of adult life and stratified British society that lie beneath the smoothness and ease of upper-class manners.
Margaret Leighton, as the formidable family matriarch, and Sir Michael Redgrave, as the much older Leo telling his story in flashback, join a first-rate cast that won this film the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and Dominic Guard the Best Newcomer Award at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards, both in 1971.
An atmospheric film score, composed for two pianos and orchestra by Michel Legrand, adds drama and poignancy throughout the story, which is beautifully composed and shot by the director and his cinematographer.
Castellani House invites the general public to view the 1 hour and 53 minutes film and promises that arrangements will be in place in the event of inclement weather or a power outage.