Optimum Home Entertainment are set to release Joseph Losey's The Go-Between (1970) on September 28.
Roger Ebert:
Quote:
There was a time, fairly recent, when the British upper classes thought it was a shade embarrassing to have to work for a living. Boys from middle-class families might attend the same school as upper-class boys, but they were tarnished, somehow, by their parents' direct contact with money. Money was something that needed to pass through a few sets of intervening hands, to let the sweat dry, before it could be spent by the aristocracy.
In a famous essay about English boarding schools, George Orwell delineated this delicate, cruel class distinction. He came from a white-collar family that made less than many blue-collar families, and yet had to present certain "standards" to the world. One of these was the necessity to send its children away to schools which, although they were shabby by Eton standards, were at least private. The children were the ones who suffered directly at the hands of class snobbism, of course, and sometimes their personalities were marked for life.
Joseph Losey's "The Go-Between" is about class distinction and its warping effect upon the life of one small boy. The story is set in the days before World War I, privileged days that seemed to stretch endlessly before the British upper class. The boy, Leo, comes to spend a summer holiday at the home of a rich friend. And he falls in hopeless schoolboy love with the friend's older sister (Julie Christie).
The sister is engaged to marry well, but she is in love with a roughshod tenant farmer (Alan Bates), and she enlists the boy to carry messages back and forth between them. The boy has only a shadowy notion at first about the significance of the messages, but during the summer he is sharply disillusioned about love, fidelity, and his own place in the great scheme of things.
Losey and his screenwriter, Harold Pinter, are terribly observant about small nuances of class. In the family's matriarch (Margaret Leighton) they give us a woman who seems to support the British class system all by herself, simply through her belief in it. They show a father and a fiancé who are aware of the girl's affair with the farmer, but do nothing about it. They are confident she will do the "right thing" in the end, and she does.
"Why don't you marry Ted," the boy asks the young woman. "Because I can't," she replies. "Then why are you marrying Trimmington?" "Because I must." She understands, and she is tough enough to endure. Indeed, at the end of the film she turns up years later as an old lady very much in the image of her mother. The victim is the boy, who is scarred sexually and emotionally by his summer experience. When we see him at the film's end, he is a sort of bloodless eunuch, called in to perform one last errand for the woman.
Losey's production is elegantly costumed and mounted and has the same eye for details of character that distinguished his two previous films with Pinter ("The Servant" and "Accident"). One visual device is distracting, however; he keeps giving us short flash-forwards to the end of the film. On the one hand, this eventually gives the ending away. On the other, it imposes a ponderous significance on the events that go before, diluting their freshness.
If the film had been told in straight chronology followed by an epilogue, it would have been more effective. In fact, the epilogue could have been lost altogether with no trouble; everything that will become of this boy in his adult life is already there, by implication, at the end of his summer holiday.
Are we familiar with Optimum from a regional encoding perspective? It would be a bugger if this is locked. Great film.
Yes. We are very familiar with Optimum. Most unfortunately for Region-A film aficionados, the British distribs lock their releases 98% of the time (as demanded by Studio Canal).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Alex DeLarge
Julie Christie in High-definition! Any word on DARLING or BILLY LIAR?
LONDON - Directed by Joseph Losey from a script by Harold Pinter, the 1970 film The Go-Between is classic of British cinema, telling a story of a torrid affair between an upper class British woman (Julie Christie) and a country man of humble origins (Alan Bates).
For a new DVD release of the film, Dana O'Reilly, a restoration specialist at Ascent Media's facility in London, spent more than 100 hours returning The Go-Between to its original cinematic splendor.
Working from HD 4:4:4 media scanned from the original camera negative, O'Reilly employed MTI Film's Correct software in a three-step process. After identifying problem scenes, O'Reilly used Correct to automatically eliminate small dirt and dust particles. For more difficult problems, such as tears, chemical stains and bad splices, she used the software in its manual mode to apply specific repair options.
"I can split the frame into parts, move pixels around, adjust density, subtract grain, or replace part of one frame with part of another," she explains. "There are a lot of possibilities and you decide according to the nature of the problem."
Negative scratches are a common problem of older films. To address those, O'Reilly employed a feature of Correct to analyze the problem across a series of frames and apply an automatic solution. She then went back through each scene and applied additional repairs to frames that weren't completely resolved.
"It's time-consuming," O'Reilly says, "but it's also very satisfying to see the results.
I know I can trust you PRO-B if any other Julie Christie films become available on Blu-ray. Thanks again for the "heads-up" on these fantastic releases.
For some reason it appears there is no separate thread for this Studio Canal Collection release.
(it doesn't come up in a search)
Anyway, I have never seen this classic British film which won the Palm d'Or at Cannes in 1971.
Can't wait to check this one out, and I got my shipping notice from the UK so I figured I would make this thread in celebration.
well all I can say is that the SEARCH function on here seems clearly broken.
I chose "forum" from the drop down menu and entered both "The Go Between" and "The Go-Between" and it comes up "no results"
so someone needs to figure out what is going on because this is the second time I have started a thread for a title that had a thread already after no results came up after using SEARCH.
very frustrating.
I got it today and have watched it this evening. Considering the film's age, I was impressed by the technical quality of the transfer. There are just a few individual shots where the level of grain is heavier than usual and where I noticed some slight brightness instability, but generally it looks fine. Great film of course!
The disc also has a few interesting interviews, including one with Losey's widow, Patricia, and one with the cinematographer, Gerry Fisher.
I got it today and have watched it this evening. Considering the film's age, I was impressed by the technical quality of the transfer. There are just a few individual shots where the level of grain is heavier than usual and where I noticed some slight brightness instability, but generally it looks fine. Great film of course!
The disc also has a few interesting interviews, including one with Losey's widow, Patricia, and one with the cinematographer, Gerry Fisher.
. . . was there any Region Code information on the back of the case - the StudioCanal Collecton site indicates Region B . . . thanks in advance . . .
We will have a review for the UK disc shortly. This said, the Region-B coding you currently see on the site is generic. So, unless there is a review for the title, you should not assume that it is only Region-B.
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The Go-Between (Joseph Losey)
Most unfortunately for Region-A film aficionados, the British distribs lock their releases 98% of the time (as demanded by Studio Canal).
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