The Go-Between was released in 1971, directed by Joseph Losey with a screenplay by Harold Pinter based on L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel. The film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and represents the finest of Pinter’s many collaborations with Losey — a partnership that also produced The Servant (1963) and Accident (1967).
Pinter’s adaptation strips Hartley’s novel to its emotional essence: a boy (Leo) spending a summer at a grand country house in Norfolk in 1900 is used as a go-between to carry messages between Marian (the daughter of the house, engaged to a Viscount) and Ted Burgess (the tenant farmer she is having an affair with). The boy’s innocence is exploited by both parties, and the discovery of the affair destroys everyone involved.
Pinter’s screenplay uses a dual time structure — intercutting the summer of 1900 with the aged Leo’s return to Norfolk in the present — that creates the same kind of temporal complexity he achieves in his stage plays (Old Times, Betrayal). The effect is of memory itself: fragmentary, non-linear, haunted by what cannot be forgotten and what cannot be fully remembered. The film’s famous opening line (“The past is a foreign country: they do it differently there”) is Hartley’s, but the cinematic language that embodies that idea — the cuts between past and present, the loaded silences, the conversations that fail to connect — is pure Pinter.
Collecting The Go-Between
Screenplay publication (published in Five Screenplays, Methuen, 1971): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- Five Screenplays (first edition): $50–$150
- Signed copies: $150–$400