Word: burgess
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Marion, Marcus's older sister, is the inevitable object of Leo's yearnings. At once the warmest of the Maudsleys, she also hides more mysterious secrets. While dawdling with a perfect match, the Viscount Hugh Trimmingham, she is making love to a tenant farmer, Ted Burgess. After a series of plot coincidences which seem audacious in a contemporary movie-going context, but are somewhat justified by the boy's mystic qualities, Leo becomes Mercury, the messenger of the gods, the go-between delivering letters of rendezvous from Burgess to Marion...
...slowly becomes aware of the nature of the Marion-Burgess relationship, the stocky, good-natured tenant of Black Farm assumes a father-like role. Burgess is no calloused, warted prophet of the Lawrentian school of peasants, but a strong, understanding worker. He stands in the film for the natural qualities smothered by Hall mores, but to him these are merely the elements of a commonly accessible good life. His tragedy is his inarticulateness, which causes him to lose Leo's trust before he can explain to him the meaning of adulthood...
Ultimately, Burgess is the only admirable figure of the piece. Marion is revealed as a coquette, unable to resolve her social obligations-and her passionate urges. Leo is caught in the midst of Maudsley cruelty, is used by the matriarch to reveal Marion's 'sin', and is shattered by the experience. He is revealed in the end as a drained man, left forever in a state of adolescent ataxia...
...story is sound, and there are times when its potential is stunningly achieved. Director Losey uses the Maudsleys' listlessness and frozen states-of-mind against themselves, and he is equally skillful at portraying Burgess's directness without overstating it. He is able in a single sequence to crystallize all plot conflicts: Burgess swims in the Hall pond as several Maudsleys arrive for a bathing party, with Leo along to watch. (Though he has a bathing suit, his mother warned him not to swim, lest he catch cold). The Maudsleys must patronize Burgess, one of their valuable tenants...
...since James Agee to enjoy distinction as a scenarist, she has become something of a recluse, both in her life and work. The prominent are never the subjects of her fiction, so far almost twoscore polished short stories and two novels, largely about the odd, unfashionable characters whom Anthony Burgess reviewed as "defiantly interesting...