The Go-Between (1971 film) The Go-Between (1971 film) The Go-Between is a 1971 British romantic drama film directed by Joseph Losey. Its screenplay, by Harold Pinter, is an adaptation of the 1953 novel "The Go-Between" by L. P. Hartley. The film stars Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Margaret Leighton, Michael Redgrave and Dominic Guard. It won the Grand Prix at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival. The story follows a young boy named Leo Colston (Dominic Guard), who in the year 1900 is a guest of his wealthy school friend, Marcus Maudsley (Richard Gibson), to spend the summer holidays at his family's Norfolk country house. While
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