5 - “The Annihilation of Time”: The Go-Between

Summary

In 1971 at the Cannes festival the grand prize, the Palme d'or, was awarded to The Go-Between, Losey's last-produced film with Harold Pinter. Alexander Walker rightly called the film, which is based on a novel by L. P. Hartley, a “masterpiece,” but like that of so many of Losey's films before and after it, the path of The Go-Between from inception to completion was tortuous. In this instance, however, delay proved fortunate. “Immediately after The Servant I took The Go-Between to Harold,” Losey told Michel Ciment:

He wrote a screenplay of about fifty or sixty pages. In the middle of his work the project broke up because a man got a hold of some subsidiary rights that blocked us. It was not revived until seven years later. And when we went back to that script, we found that we were not at all satisfied with it, which was a development simply of The Servant collaboration.

(1985, 239)

The more adventurous collaboration on Accident had intervened, and Losey and Pinter had become, in Losey's words, “fascinated by the concept of time, and by the power the cinema has suddenly to reveal the meaning of a whole life” (304). Pinter told John Russell Taylor when The Go-Between was in production:

Looking back at what I had done the first time, I realised that I had missed a whole aspect, perhaps to me now the most important aspect, of the book. […]