Word: pinter
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Between is an ingenious, pretty little picture but it is neither moving nor beautiful. Director Joseph Losey and writer Harold Pinter are so determined on elegance that the film's higher aims are strangled by its stylistic pretensions...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...