I realized that I’d forgotten, when I caught up with The Go-Between last week at the Quad, that Alan Bates and Julie Christie, yes one of the 1960s most magnetic parings in 1967’s Far From the Madding Crowd,
are here four years later almost never on screen together, and most of the time when they are, they are deliberately having nothing to do with each other to conceal the fact that they are actually having an illicit and ultimately disastrous romance.
The film is told almost entirely through the perspective of the barely-teenaged boy who runs errands between them and ultimately–as the superb L.P. Hartley novel makes even clearer–is emotionally scarred for life by the experience.
Losey’s angular, unsentimental direction is merciless in Edwardian class critique as well: daughter-of-the-manor Christie is even more heedless than tenant-farmer Bates. But both stars play characters who are self-absorbed, rather ruthless in their exploitation of the boy. And since we never are shown any love or lust rapture between them, we’re less likely to forgive.
I’m not sure how often stars of this wattage today would risk taking on roles or a film like this. But it was remade in 2015 as a TV movie, which I haven’t yet seen.