Word: upper-class
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Books for older children are also a problem. Many are still written by English authors whose upper-class vocabulary, easy for a literate nine-year-old in Britain, is at a level sometimes not reached by American children until they are older. As a result, all that wholesome British chatter about ripping adventures during the long hols seems, well, childish-and alien corn to boot. To provide up-to-date reading, American juvenile writers have for some years been drearily confronting such Now subjects as sex, violence and drugs...
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...
Mary's parents were firmly upper-class. In Venice they forced her to put on white gloves, to act the role of the young aristocrat, and to speak Italian instead of her German dialect. Life with the indulgent poet and the aloof, implacable violinist was made out of what her village parents would consider frivolity. In the village farmhouse there had been only two books: The Life of Christ and The Lives of the Saints. At the center of Pound's villa library in Venice, among all the books in all the many languages, there was huge, wood-bound Ovid...
Despite the fact that he knew most of the giants of modern art, Gerald never collected their pictures. He was in some ways very much his merchant father's son. Just as the elder Murphy introduced many appurtenances of upper-class European life to the U.S., Gerald acquainted his friends in France with such American contrivances as jazz records and waffle irons, portable bathhouses and inflatable rubber horses. Fitzgerald was so awed by Murphy's taste that he thought it must apply to everything and consulted him on literary matters. Gerald did not really respond to his friend...
...this sense or that feeling. Even when the Cuban legal system intervenes in his life, and puts him on trial for rape, Alea presents the whole situation through his eyes-along with his voice-over judgments of the poor people accusing him, judgments from a highly bigoted upper-class perspective. The hero's generalizations about national character, his sense of the country, the Cuban soul, his generally useless impressions of social events, all run through the film and stand as a description of Cuba which the film nowhere objectively opposes. His oppressive sense of the alien city with its crowds...