Losey, in a good many of his works, likes to draw the lesson that spontaneity is often not the exercise of freedom, but simply the sign of ignorance about the true emotional and social determinants of our lives. Films like M, TIME WITHOUT PITY, BLIND DATE OR KING AND COUNTRY are concerned with the way a man unwittingly, and yet in retrospect necessarily, entangles himself in different social and private worlds which seem at first to have nothing to do with him, but nonetheless fatally exhaust his strength or destroy his life. Throughout his work, furthermore, Losey has been interested in the worlds within worlds, and his later films trace the properly ideological fabric into which a subjective intelligence is woven. Inevitably, once aware of itself between these worlds, this intelligence experiences life as exile.

From the opening shot, with Colston's voice-over saying “the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there,” THE GO-BETWEEN (as the title suggests) makes the coexistence of different worlds and the sense of being exiled its dominant theme. The ostensible subject – taken from the L.P. Hartley novel – is the loss of spontaneity and innocence through an act of adult selfishness.