Two by Losey

By JAY COCKS

In the films of Director Joseph Losey, truth is not so much disclosed as inflicted. His characters stagger under the impact of selfdiscovery; sometimes they are destroyed by it. Losey shares with Playwright Harold Pinter, one of his most frequent collaborators, a fascination with the surfaces of illusion, with the means by which people delude themselves, and with the mechanics of their inevitable undoing. In earlier Losey-Pinter films, the catalysts of doom were generally characters of a certain ambiguous authority, like the gentleman's gentleman in The Servant or the young girl at Oxford in Accident. In their new film, The Go-Between, it is convention that plays the villain.

The Go-Between thus represents something of a departure for both Director Losey and Scenarist Pinter. It is a film of formal, almost sculpted elegance, of precise, leisurely beauty permeated by melancholy. Watching it is very much like reading a long, old-fashioned novel, for its virtues are as much literary as visual: a strong sense of plot, nuances of character shrewdly observed, a delicate sense of theme and dialogue. It is an extraordinarily pleasurable and successful movie in a minor key.

The Go-Between, like Accident, is doused with sensual summer sunlight (Cinematographer Gerry Fisher did the superb work on both films) and haunted by time. "The past is a foreign country," says the narrator, over a shot of an English manor house. "They do things differently there." Immediately the film plunges into a splendid reconstruction of the Edwardian era, all etiquette and innuendo, cascading lace and carriages, mirrors and staircases (the last two, familiar obsessions from other Losey films). Leo Colston (Dominic Guard) is a twelve-year-old schoolboy come to pass a luxurious summer holiday with a wealthy classmate. Leo is more than a little out of place. He swelters in his woolen Norfolk jacket until his friend's elder sister Marian (Julie Christie) volunteers to take him into town and buy him more suitable clothes. She is fond of the boy, but she is careful to cultivate him too. Soon he is carrying messages to her lover, a Laurentian farmer named Ted Burgess (Alan Bates), and bearing back replies.

Leo cannot comprehend their passion or the reason they cannot marry. He is glad enough of their friendship and eager for their approval as "our post-man." But Leo is not strong enough to keep their confidence. Marian's mother (Margaret Leighton) humiliates the boy into revealing the secret, and the messenger of their passion becomes the instrument of their destruction.

Losey periodically cuts startlingly from the Norfolk estate in 1900 to a graying figure being chauffeured across the same countryside decades later. This, too, is Leo (now played by Michael Redgrave in an exceptional performance). The adult Leo retraces and remembers his past, returning after all this time to deliver a final message. What the message is--and to whom--is the kind of 19th century plot flourish that is spoiled by revelation. It is also too facile and hollow a device, which Losey and Pinter chose to retain from the original L.P. Hartley novel. One can feel affectionate toward this kind of artifice without fully accepting it, a response that may be equally valid for the film as a whole.

Even so, the movie consistently shows Losey's considerable talents to best advantage. Figures in a Landscape, which he made before The Go-Between, intermittently reveals him at his worst. Robert Shaw and Malcolm McDowell appear as two prisoners who have escaped from an anonymous jail in an unspecified country. They are pursued by a nameless army of faceless foes. Wherever they run, a helicopter hovers over them like a wrathful god. It is all very pompous, the kind of vague allegory that is open to any number of interpretations and able to sustain none.

If the symbolism and Robert Shaw's script are heavy, the action is fairly swift. Losey contributes some precise craftsmanship, Shaw and McDowell a couple of very good performances, Spanish deserts and mountains some arrestingly picturesque vistas. The combination is not quite enough to make up for the inflated metaphors, which bob about on the surface of the action like a collection of lopsided inner tubes. Without them, the film would be just another action flick, rather better engineered than most.

-Jay Cocks

"Romantic?" Joseph Losey rumbles in a voice full of measured flamboyance. "You might say that I am. A middleaged Marxist romantic. But I'm not sure that being romantic isn't synonymous right now with being optimistic. And I am that."

He had persisted in his optimism, though it has been severely tried. Just as he was beginning to establish himself in postwar Hollywood as a young director of substantial gifts, he was offered the script of a shrill melodrama entitled I Married a Communist. He refused to film it. Later he discovered that to his bosses at the old RKO studio, anyone who declined the project was politically suspect. Losey's political history--sponsoring Composer Hanns Eisler, supporting Playwright Bertolt Brecht, signing a friend-of-the-court brief for Producer Adrian Scott, one of the original Hollywood Ten--got him into serious trouble. Soon he was called to testify by the House Un-American Activities Committee. He never received the subpoena, he says, but all employment abruptly vanished. Losey left for England, where he managed to work pseudonymously on television shows and several shoestring features.

His optimism may have made this time endurable, but despair shows through tellingly in a series of films he made during the years from The Sleeping Tiger (1954) to Eva (1962). They are preoccupied with thwarted dreams and baroque psychopathy, with characters afflicted by spiritual wounds that will not heal. Although Losey had begun to work under his own name by 1957, it was not until the release of The Servant in 1963 that he became a film maker of international reputation. Losey and Pinter planned to do The Go-Between right after The Servant, but problems with the film rights and then with financing forced postponement. "I was broke," Losey recalls, "and there was Figures in a Landscape, a nice big piece of Hollywood s-- all ready to go. It paid a lot of bills."

Taste of Worm. When Losey finally started The Go-Between in the summer of 1970, he found himself restricted to a $1,000,000 budget and a severe eight-week shooting schedule. It is a tribute to his talent that a film made under such confining conditions could be so lush and fully sustained. "Joe is so scrupulous it's stunning," says Pinter. "He can be directing a complicated scene with actors and be able to pay attention not only to its meaning but to whether a saltcellar on the table is out of position." Of The Go-Between, Losey ventures: "Perhaps the film is different from anything I've done in its period look, what some people may call 'romantic.' But I think there's a bitter core there for those who can taste worm."

Now a reflective, robust 62, Losey lives comfortably in London's Chelsea with his fourth wife. He is planning to film a biography of Leon Trotsky, and spent some time recently in Mexico City with Artist David Siqueiros, who as a Stalinist had been involved in an attempt on Trotsky's life. "How are you going to make a true film?" Siqueiros asked him. "If it was true, how would any film company let you make it?"

"I told him it couldn't be the complete truth," Losey says. "It's like the Trotskyite theory of revolution: if they couldn't have total world revolution, they wanted none at all. But I told him there would be as much truth as possible. Maybe even more. But that it is also necessary to just keep working."

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