The Go-Between (1971, Columbia) is the third film Joseph Losey has directed from a Harold Pinter script. Its virtues and defects are so much those of the first two (The Servant, 1963, and Accident, 1967) that Pauline Kael’s judgment on Accident fits — “a fascinating, rather preposterous movie, uneven, unsatisfying, but with virtuoso passages of calculated meanness.”

No doubt about it, Richard Lester has “the knack”: considerable intelligence, explosive visual invention, unequalled cleverness with a camera. Petulia, his latest, parades these virtues – and reveals the defects which prevent him from becoming a major artist. Petulia starts with an almost insurmountable disadvantage...