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A Taste Of Honey (1961) [Re-UP]

Posted By: Someonelse

Date: 11 Dec 2016 13:12:10

Director: Tony Richardson
Stars: Rita Tushingham, Dora Bryan, Robert Stephens

Black and white, gay and straight, mothers and daughters, class, and coming of age. Jo is working class, in her teens, living with her drunk and libidinous mother in northern England. When mom marries impulsively, Jo is out on the streets; she and Geoffrey, a gay co worker who's adrift himself, find a room together. Then Jo finds herself pregnant after a one night stand with Jimmy, a Black sailor. Geoffrey takes over the preparations for the baby's birth, and becomes, in effect, the child's father. The three of them seem to have things sorted out when Jo's mother reappears on the scene, assertive and domineering. Which "family" will emerge?

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Celebrating one of the most influential studios in the development of cinema and bringing back to the big screen an era’s most important films, the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York is presenting a two-week showcase of the key films of Woodfall Film Productions, formed in 1956 by Tony Richardson, John Osborne (Look Back in Anger) and American producer Harry Saltzman.

A Taste Of Honey (1961) [Re-UP]

Taking audiences out of the studio and into the streets, where the real stories were, Richardson and his partners favored realism above all: young, fresh actors, location shooting, and narratives featuring controversial subjects such as interracial dating and sex, homosexuality and class. Clumsily over-reaching in some parts, deeply moving in others, but true to their founding spirit, the lasting legacies of Woodfall were the exciting new generation of British actors it introduced to Sixties audiences: Lynn Redgrave, Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay and Rita Tushingham; as well as the example set for succeeding generations of British filmmakers to examine these subjects with an uncompromising honesty.

A Taste Of Honey (1961) [Re-UP]

A Taste of Honey (1961), directed by Tony Richardson, is a key example in this cinema of the Angry Young Men, as it was alternately called. Although time may have blunted the impact of its taboo-busting issues, 46 years on, it’s no less flavorful for its powerful performances, most notably Rita Tushingham in her breakout role as Jo, through whose wide, expressive eyes we see a grim world of mean expectations.

A Taste Of Honey (1961) [Re-UP]

The film version of Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 play, the film tells the tale of Jo, a plain high school girl in Manchester, who lives with her single mother, Helen, a tarty, rent-skipping pub singer (a brilliant portrayal by Dora Bryan). After Jo spends the night with a black sailor and gets pregnant, her mother decides to marry a man she’s just met who promises a new life in the suburbs – without her difficult and acid-tongued daughter.

A Taste Of Honey (1961) [Re-UP]

With nowhere left to go, Jo moves into a shabby flat and soon forms a relationship with a young gay man, Geoffrey (Murray Melvin), who works with her at a shoe store. Geoffrey moves in with Jo and they form their own, compromised version of family, awkwardly attempting to meet their own emotional needs for security and social acceptance. Geoffrey offers to be the father of Jo’s unborn child, while Jo is left unsure if she wants the baby at all, feeling as though life is inexorably railroading her into a direction already taken by her mother.

A Taste Of Honey (1961) [Re-UP]

The film’s final, affecting scene, capturing its atmosphere of emotional ambiguity, shows Jo lighting a cheerless sparkler on Guy Fawkes Day, while the soundtrack features a children’s chorus singing a winsome British sailing song. It’s the same song we have heard at the beginning of the film when Jo and her mother had escaped the landlord of a grotty bedsit by climbing out the apartment window, suitcases in hand, and hopping on a bus. Now, at the end of the film, the song reminds us that Jo is still very much the same lost child, but now with very different circumstances. Now, at the end, we watch along with Jo, mesmerized, as the cold flame of the sparkler burns down.

A Taste Of Honey (1961) [Re-UP]

Seen within the context of a still very straight-laced Britain of the early Sixties, Richardson’s film address the issues of interracial dating and sex, homosexuality and single-parent households with a fresh-feeling nonchalance, rather than the spectacle-adjusting ‘Social Ills’ approach of other films of the period, however well meaning (see Victim for example). Granted, as PC-sensitized audiences of the 21st century, we squirm in discomfort at a few scenes: Geoffrey’s whirlwind, effortless home-decoration treatment he gives Jo’s shabby cold-water flat; or Jo and Jimmy’s conversation about his ‘bongo-beating ancestors’ in deepest Africa. At least we have three-dimensional characters trying to connect to each other beyond class, race and sexuality, and make their way in a world nearly bombed to smithereens.

A Taste Of Honey (1961) [Re-UP]

Dora Bryan as Helen, Jo’s mother, is an utterly convincing portrayal of a woman as thick-skinned as a carnie and as loud and louche, but with cagey expressions that reveal her conflicted inner life. She’s a deadbeat mother and she knows it, unable to say no to a good time, but not able to reject her daughter completely, either. In one scene we see her belting out bawdy songs next to a piano in a crowded pub and the adoration of the crowd is visible in their faces. In the next scene she’s coughing in a bathtub with the flu, taking the verbal assault of her neglected daughter as her due. It’s this feet-in-both-worlds-and heart-in neither that gives this film an uneasy center.

A Taste Of Honey (1961) [Re-UP]

A generation later, another British filmmaker, no doubt influenced by the Woodfall films and even inheriting their mandate, will pick up roughly the same story outline: Single mother and daughter in teacup-and-hotplate-misery confront race, sex, class, and unspoken resentments. Sound familiar? Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies (1996). Brenda Blethyn’s character Cynthia could easily be a modern-day Helen, and Claire Rushbrook as Roxanne is easily the next-generation Jo.

A Taste Of Honey (1961) [Re-UP]

The setting, their modest council flat in a London suburb, and their situation in life, seem as predetermined by class as their cinematic forebears in A Taste of Honey. Doubtlessly, directors like Leigh and Danny Boyle (Trainspotting), among others, have verbalized the cinematic debt they owe The Angry Young Men School, and the influence that revolutionary cinema played on their careers. What is notable, however, is the continuity of the subject matter, forty-odd years apart, and how fresh and raw a film like A Taste of Honey feels today, even when bookended with its far more realistic modern day counterpart.
(Rita Tushingham and Murray Melvin both won acting awards for their roles in A Taste of Honey at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival.)
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