The Go-Between (1971 film) envisaged Alec Guinness and Margaret Leighton in the leads and employed Nancy Mitford to write a script. L.P. Hartley later claimed Korda had no real intention to make a film of the book - he kept the rights hoping to re-sell them at a profit. Hartley says "I was so annoyed when I heard of this that I put a curse on him and he died, almost the next morning." Joseph Losey was interested in filming the novel. He tried to get financing for a version in 1963 after "The Servant" and says Pinter wrote "two thirds of a script".
The Go-Between Leo's age in 1909, Hartley spent a summer with a school friend called Moxley at Bradenham Hall in Norfolk and took part in a cricket match. The names are sufficiently close to Maudsley and Brandham to give rise to such speculation. But Tóibín counsels a cautious approach to the question, quoting Hartley's own study of fiction-writing, "The Novelist's Responsibility". The novelist's world, he wrote, "must, in some degree, be an extension of his own life." And, while it is “unsafe to assume that a novelist's work is autobiographical in any direct sense,” this does not prevent it from reflecting his