Word: pinter
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
Though the same team has given us two other films dealing luxuriously with upper-class rot (The Servant and Accident), The Go-Between begins with images and words which suggest that tired tricks are abandoned, and that Losey and Pinter have put a novelistic concentration of characterization and detail on the screen. The credits are projected against a raindropped windowpane: we see glimpses of green foliage and a manor-like brown blur. A pitted voice speaks: "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there...
...important tone and point-of-view of this late-Victorian period piece is thus economically set. Losey and Pinter are concerned with the social pressures afflicting Leo, and how his use of emotive and imaginative outlets for escape ultimately cripple...
...shoulders, and spreading her wet hair over it. It is late afternoon: a puff of breeze ruffles Marion's dress; and Leo seems part of the foliage in his new green suit. Marion laughs, and says, "What a comfort, your bathing suit on my shoulders." And, though Pinter's cunning dialogue reveals more of state-of-mind than of character, the lighting, mise-en-scene, and acting say most of what there is to be said about Burgess and the Maudsleys, Marion's capriciousness and Leo's devotion...
There is, however, excess calculation, both in Pinter's dialogue, and in the director's conceptions of entire scenes. Though the annual village cricket match is admirably staged, with flies swarming over ossified onlookers, and the Maudsleys running with grace and dignity, Burgess predictably hits a cricket home run every time at bat. And Pinter cannot deal with direct emotional response: a crucial Burgess-Leo dialogue is embarassing. B: "She cried when she couldn't see me." L: "How do you know?" B: "She cried when...