The Go-Between

Michael Redgrave is Leo Colston, remembering back to 1900, when he was boy of 13 (Dominic Guard plays Leo as a boy) and spent the summer at the Norfolk estate of his friend Marcus. Marcus’s sister Marian (Julie Christie) takes a shine to Leo, and eventually starts asking him to take secret messages to their neighbor Ted (Alan Bates), behind the back of the man to whom she’s engaged (Edward Fox). L.P. Hartley’s novel is a modern classic, as powerful an inquiry into the nature of veiled motivations and emotions in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. In their final collaboration, Pinter and Losey crafted an acutely perceptive, quietly tragic film out of Hartley’s classic. Thanks to their addition of the framing device with Redgrave as the older Leo, The Go-Between ranks as one of the finest “memory films” ever made. “When I first read The Go-Between I burst into tears on the last page,” Pinter admitted.