Film review

  • The Go-Between

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Joseph Losey  (1971)

    Michel Legrand’s score for The Go-Between doesn’t improve with age.  Assuming that my dislike of the music had created an exaggerated memory of its prominence, I was astonished to discover, on this return visit to Joseph Losey’s film (after an interval of, I’d guess, approaching thirty years), that it dominates proceedings, especially in the first half, even more than I’d remembered.  I didn’t agree with a lot in Richard Roud’s Sight & Sound (Summer 1971) review, reproduced in the BFI programme note, but he’s right to say there’s ‘No question of the music underlying certain scenes or trying to express emotions:  no, it is used almost autonomously to punctuate the film …’  Roud bafflingly seems to think this is a good thing.  Legrand’s punctuation is all exclamation marks.  The deliberate, insistent piano notes announce repeatedly and emphatically the tragedy to come.

    Losey’s film of L P Hartley’s 1953 novel, in which the elderly narrator Leo Colston recalls a boyhood summer that shaped and soured his life, is set mostly in and around Brandham Hall, a Norfolk country house where, in 1900,  middle-class Leo goes to stay with his posh schoolfriend Marcus Maudsley and his family.  The Go-Between is visually beautiful. Roud is right to admire Gerry Fisher’s cinematography and Carmen Dillon’s art direction but the terms in which he praises the latter are bizarre. Dillon, he says:

    ‘… works miracles, so that we feel, as does Leo, that the people who inhabit such beautiful rooms, wear such beautiful clothes, must also have beautiful souls.’

    It’s incredible that anyone familiar with Losey’s films could feel this.  Even a newcomer to his work would soon notice the cold, in some cases contemptuous, eye he casts on the upper classes in The Go-Between.  His asperity is welcome in ensuring that the glorious countryside and gracious living before our eyes don’t bask in facile nostalgia, as they’ve been known to do in period dramas set in the pre-Great War Indian summer.  But Losey evidently encouraged the actors playing, for example, Marcus (Richard Gibson[1]) and his elder brother Denys (Simon Hume-Kendall) to underline the Maudsley boys’ asinine, repellent snobbery to the exclusion of any other characteristic.  Although their older sister Marian (Julie Christie) and parents (Michael Gough and Margaret Leighton) are a more complicated matter, you don’t need to have read Hartley’s novel to infer very soon that the commanding Mrs Maudsley, though an accomplished gracious hostess, is also a dragon in waiting.

    In the parts where the music shuts up and Losey is distracted from skewering the English class system as a priority, The Go-Between, thanks in no small part to Harold Pinter’s deft screenplay, is a good film.  Hartley’s novel has a strong element of social critique but is memorable chiefly as the story of a child’s being exploited by two older people to whom he develops a strong attachment, of how disillusion takes root in the man the child becomes, as a result of this exploitation and the traumatic events that ensue.  When Marcus goes down with measles, twelve-year-old Leo (Dominic Guard) is left temporarily to his own devices.  He wanders into a nearby farmyard, climbs a haystack, slides down it and cuts his knee badly.  The farmer, Ted Burgess (Alan Bates), bawls Leo out but then, seeing what’s happened, takes him into the farmhouse kitchen, and cleans and bandages the wound.  Leo starts to carry messages between Marian and Ted, a tenant farmer with whom she’s having a clandestine affair.  The boy has a crush on the beautiful Marian and his feelings about Ted verge on hero worship.  The working man makes use of Leo as much as his entitled upper-class lover does; but since Ted and Marian are driven to this by the strength of their passion and desperation, the viewer perceives their human frailty as much as the social significance of what’s happening.  Even though Losey, as expected, is more sympathetic towards Ted than towards Marian, he gives both their due as individuals.

    This willingness to blend social commentary with a drama of personal relationships comes through in an early scene, when Marian takes Leo into Norwich to buy him new clothes more suitable for the hot weather and they have lunch together.  (Her main reason for the expedition is to spend a little time with Ted:  she asks Leo to occupy himself for an hour, while she’s supposedly shopping.)  The nuanced side of Losey’s direction is stronger still in the conversations between Leo and Ted in the farmhouse kitchen, as the boy, knowing that Marian is engaged to be married to the aristocratic Hugh Trimingham (Edward Fox), becomes more uneasy and more curious about what’s going on between her and Ted.

    The peak of this more generous treatment of characters is the landowners versus villagers cricket match (an episode that, after The Servant and Accident, is also the culminating male ball game in the Losey-Pinter trilogy) and its aftermath.  Class differences are naturally crucial to the dynamics of the cricket:  Losey makes good use of a muted chorus of rustic voices giving a running commentary on the progress of the game.  But plenty more is going on too.  Ted is the star player and, once he starts hitting boundaries, looks set to win the match for the villagers.  Leo, originally twelfth man for the Brandham Hall contingent, joins the game when an older player injures his leg.  When Ted hits another colossal shot, Leo takes a brilliant, match-winning catch.  There is more foreboding in this moment – in Leo’s mixed feelings of euphoria and of having betrayed Ted – than in many minutes of aural assault by Michel Legrand.  Marian’s sullen, silent fury at Ted’s dismissal, as she and her mother watch from outside the pavilion, is eloquent.  The communal tea in the village hall that follows the match is well staged too, and strongly atmospheric.  Ted, renowned also for his singing, is persuaded to perform.  Marian, even more reluctantly, accompanies him on the piano.  The song is ‘Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes’ from The Gondoliers; Ted’s competence is eclipsed by the tension he’s feeling and which communicates itself to the gathering[2].  By popular request, hero-of-the-hour Leo follows Ted’s number with a ‘holy song’ (the only thing he can think to sing, on the spur of the moment).  The treble voice is an affecting reminder of his innocence.

    Dominic Guard, fourteen at the time, seemed an exceptional newcomer when The Go-Between was first released and still impresses, above all in suggesting the thoughts and feelings that provoke Leo’s words and facial expressions.  (The quiet reflectiveness that marked Guard out in 1971 may well have limited his opportunities in the longer term.  He hasn’t acted since 2000 and now works instead, somewhat ironically given his role in this film, as a child psychotherapist.  He’s also a published children’s author.)  A key merit of Julie Christie’s and Alan Bates’s performances is that their glamour and charm validate Leo’s idealisation of Marian and Ted.  Bates’s physical acting is particularly expressive in the scene in which Ted, businesslike and tender, patches up Leo’s knee wound. Christie conveys well Marian’s brittle wilfulness.  Leo’s liking for Viscount Trimingham too is part of what complicates the boy’s attitude towards his go-between role:  Edward Fox’s eccentric affability justifies this.  (Leo also occasionally carries word-of-mouth messages to Marian from Trimingham, who dubs him Mercury.  Ted humorously calls Leo ‘postman’.)

    Mrs Maudsley appears suspicious of her daughter’s behaviour from an early stage – so much so that you wonder why stronger action isn’t taken to thwart Marian’s affair with Ted.  The match-up between mother and daughter is very persuasive, though:  Margaret Leighton skilfully suggests that Marian’s getting-her-own-way quality has hardened into something sterner and forbidding in the older woman.  As her husband, the excellent Michael Gough is droll and relatively relaxed for the most part.  When, in the climax to the drama, Mr Maudsley calls out to his wife in urgent exasperation, you get a sudden hint of how difficult their marriage may have been behind their respective expert facades.  That climax, on Leo’s thirteenth birthday, is compelling but protracted.  After weeks of unbroken sunshine and increasing heat, the weather breaks symbolically and melodramatically.  It’s pouring down when Mrs Maudsley marches Leo from his birthday tea to the outhouses where they discover Ted and Marian in flagrante delicto.

    It’s still raining when, half a century on, the elderly Leo (Michael Redgrave) returns to Brandham Hall to visit Marian, now the Dowager Lady Trimingham.  These flashes forward are the one unsatisfying element of Pinter’s screenplay.  He adapts what is an epilogue in Hartley’s novel into an overall narrative framework.  It’s understandable that he and Losey want to kick off with Michael Redgrave, exquisitely melancholy, intoning the book’s famous opening lines (‘The past is a foreign country.  They do things differently there …’) but the structural change overall makes for a weak reflection of the older Leo’s first-person narrative in the novel.  The brief jolts ahead to 1950 are too frequent, especially since they don’t reveal a lot – until the very end, when they reveal both too much and not enough.  Old Marian asks old Leo to tell her grandson, the son of her and Ted’s love child, how beautiful their liaison was – this so as to overcome the grandson’s (hard to believe) belief that he can’t marry.  Of course we’re meant to think that Marian has got an entitled nerve to ask Leo yet another favour, and an outrageous one, but some of what she says, given how abbreviated their conversation is in the script, is too blunt:  ‘Every man should get married.  You too, Leo – you’re all dried up.  I can see that.’   Pinter then reverts to more characteristic obliquity by not making clear (as Hartley does make clear) that Leo obediently carries out his final duty as go-between.

    17 August 2018

    [1]  A decade later (and well beyond), Herr Flick in ‘Allo ‘Allo! …

    [2]  Compare and contrast:  as Guy Burgess in An Englishman Abroad (1983), Alan Bates sings the same Gilbert and Sullivan song, in a duet with Burgess’s Russian boyfriend Tolya (Alexei Jawdokimov) – Tolya playing the balalaika, Burgess on the piano.

  • Gregory’s Girl

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Bill Forsyth (1980)

    Gregory’s Girl begins at night.  Five teenage boys ogle a young nurse as she undresses in the light of an upstairs window in an apartment block.  The film also ends nocturnally, as two of the same boys, Andy (Robert Buchanan) and Charlie (Graham Thompson), try vainly to hitch a lift.  Charlie, who’s been entirely silent until now, finally opens his mouth, suggesting they give up for the night.  He also informs Andy that the piece of cardboard he’s been holding up, indicating the pair’s intended and ambitious destination, contains a spelling mistake.  Andy’s and Charlie’s point of departure is a Scottish new town, near Glasgow.  The place they want to get to is Caracas – ‘Caracos’, according to Andy’s notice.  In another scene late on, Susan (Clare Grogan), one of several candidates for title character in Bill Forsyth’s romantic comedy, asks Gregory (John Gordon Sinclair) why boys like numbers so much.  Gregory’s Girl contains plenty of these:  the appeal of ‘Caracos’ is that, again according to Andy, the ratio of women to men in the Venezuelan capital is 8:1.  In a pack of five at the start, Andy and Charlie were hardly threatening.  As a twosome at the end, they’re definitely pathetic.  Forsyth’s theme is the gauche ineptness of teenage boys and the cool, amused self-possession of the teenage girls they’re obsessed with.  His film suggests an answer to Susan’s question:  in more ways than one, there’s safety in numbers.

    The atmosphere for this BFI screening was very different from the affectionate excitement percolating the packed Edinburgh Filmhouse for the special showing of Forsyth’s Local Hero I attended a few weeks ago – only thirty-odd people in NFT2, even though Gregory’s Girl was among this month’s ‘Big Screen Classics’.  The film contains many charming and funny moments but the basic premise and some of the details seem dated – rather awkwardly dated, in light of the shifts in sexual attitudes that have taken place over the decades since it first appeared.  I loved this movie when I first saw it in 1981 and for a second time a few years later but I now felt a bit uncomfortable during the opening sequence.  This wasn’t due only to wondering what the younger members of the sparse audience would think.  It was also because it seemed to me that Forsyth saw the young peeping Toms as not just harmless but endearing.  All the teenage characters go to the same comprehensive school and the slender plot revolves around Dorothy (Dee Hepburn), who becomes the cynosure of the school’s hitherto hopeless football team.  When the protagonist Gregory falls in love with Dorothy, the first person in whom he confides is Steve (William Greenlees), star baker on the home economics course.  These gender role reversals, though they work well enough thanks to the easy, straight-faced playing of the two actors concerned, no longer have intrinsic comic impact.

    Still, there are many gracefully zany gags, especially visual ones, to enjoy.   Gregory in the school changing rooms, either dressed or topless:  he applies deodorant with his shirt on; surprised by Dorothy with his shirt off, he goes into a panic of modesty, using his index fingers to cover his nipples.  The headmaster (veteran comedian Chic Murray), sampling Steve’s choux pastry and playing the piano at break time.   A small, never identified figure in a penguin costume, shuffling along the corridor and directed by a succession of staff to various classrooms.  The soccer coach Phil Menzies (Jake D’Arcy) at home, talking to the plants in his greenhouse.  (Menzies is as socially clueless with women as the boys are, except that he seems to have turned asexual with age.)  Gregory, up late, leaving his electric toothbrush running while he has his breakfast.  Dorothy, when she scores a goal, getting kissed by the boys on the opposing team as well as her own.  I liked it that Forsyth shows a couple of the male teachers (Alex Norton and John Bett) more inclined to sniggering boredom than any of the students.  It’s a nice idea when Billy (Douglas Sannachan), an ex-pupil who’s now got a window-cleaning job, turns up during an English period to do his work on the other side of the classroom glass.  It’s too much, though, when the teacher (Maeve Watt) chucks a copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Andy, who’s reading aloud from it, so that he’ll shut up and she can concentrate on talking with Billy.

    Forsyth handles the mostly young cast impeccably.  John Gordon Sinclair is naturally eccentric:  what’s so winning about his performance is that, when he works at eccentricity, he’s even odder and funnier.  Another contender for being Gregory’s girl is his sister Madeline (Allison Forster), who’s several years younger than him but relatively wise.  The idea sounds twee but Allison Forster’s amusing gravity saves the day.   The remaining candidates are the relay of girls – Carol (Caroline Guthrie), Margo (Carol Macartney) and finally Susan (who fancies the hero from the start) – who, when Gregory gets a date with Dorothy, turn up instead of her.  This finale takes place on a Scottish summer evening and parts of it have a low-key enchanted quality, chiming with the Shakespeare text in the English lesson (although the coming, going and return of light in successive sequences may be a continuity issue rather than magic in the air).  This quality somehow anticipates Local Hero, as does Colin Tully’s mellow, enjoyable saxophone score, yet you can’t help being amazed at how far Bill Forsyth advanced, in the space of just a couple of years, from this pleasing but minor film to his similarly unassuming masterpiece.

    16 August 2018

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