A Taste of Honey

Jo's (Rita Tushingham) a daydreaming teen with a distracted mom (Dora Bryan) in search of Mr. Right or a reasonable facsimile. When ma hooks up with a guy she leaves Jo to fend for herself. Jo enters into a romance with a boat cook who ships out to sea after impregnating her and she forms a living arrangement with a gay man (Murray Melvin) to make ends meet and for moral support. When mom returns the two lock horns, debating who is the better fix for Jo and her family way.

What might pass for a very dark Hallmark domestic drama today was a groundbreaking event in 1961. Interracial relationships were scarce on the screen and homosexuality would be a crime until the law was relaxed in 67. Director Tony Richardson met the controversy head on in Honey, softening neither the outcome or its characters. Tushingham is exasperatingly brilliant as the independently minded Jo. You sympathize with her but she can be trying and stubborn. Murray Melvin is also sympathetic, avoiding caricature flamboyance with a low key sensitivity, stating his case as an outsider. Dora Bryan as Jo's floozy mom is abrasively outstanding as she lectures Jo with challenged nurturing skills on the ugly reality of her class and future.

Director Richardson captures the bleak industrial landscape of Manchester, England, managing to romanticize it in moments between the lovers but refusing to sell out the story with its sober, somber climax.

A glum well played drama.

A Taste Of Honey is primarily known for the debut of Rita Tushingham who became a star with this and has had a half century career. But for it's time it was a daring film exploring things we still didn't talk about in the USA. For instance there was that love that dared not speak its name.

This film is set in working class Manchester and the cinematography was reflective of a very grimy environment that single mom Dora Bryan is raising her daughter Tushingham in. Bryan's pushing 40, but she likes to party still especially with her new boyfriend Robert Stephens. Rita is clearly in the way.

Interracial love was something not talked of in the USA, but it's here as young Rita drifts into losing her virginity and getting pregnant by a black sailor Peter Danaquah. He goes off on a long sea voyage without knowing what has happened.

The British may be more frank in talking about it, but interracial love and sex was quite the same as here back then. You can bet the rent money that A Taste Of Honey got no bookings in our Dixie states.

But here next relationship is with Murray Melvin who is as my late British friend Jeff Barker would say was as 'gay as green shoes' which is apparently a British expression. No closet for this man in 1961. The omnipresent Code imposed the cone of silence around anything remotely hinting of homosexuality

Tushingham meets Melvin as a customer in a shoe store she works in and the two hit it off. He knows her plight and maybe sex might not be in the future for these two, it's plain they've got a nice friendship working and can support each other and the interracial child coming into the world.

A Taste Of Honey was based on a play by Shelagh Delaney which when it got to Broadway boasted an impressive cast of Angela Lansbury as the mother, Joan Plowright as the daughter, Nigel Davenport as the boyfriend of the mother, Andrew Ray as the gay friend and the sailor was played by a young Billy Dee Williams. I'd love to have seen that production.

Still no complaints about this film. Groundbreaking, touching, and entertaining.

Rita Tushingham is excellent as an unhappy girl. Her mother (Dora Bryan) is a slattern. The mother is interested primarily in her dubious good looks and gives almost no attention to daughter Jo (Tushingham.) In one of the few heart-to-heart talks -- in which she tells Jo that her (Jo's) father was a simpleton -- she says that we always remember our first.

Jo's first is indeed a very handsome sailor. He's black.

I'm not going to give anything beyond this away other than to say that Jo becomes best friends with a gay man Murray Melvin. He is the best thing that ever happened to her.

Shelagh Delaney, who wrote the play as a very young woman, wrote the screenplay with director Tony Richardson. It's opened up but not in an annoying manner. I think it's one of Richardson's very best.

I saw this when it first came out. I was a kid and very impressionable. I haven't seen it since but find I'd forgotten little. And that includes the wonderful music. I had never heard the song children sing at the beginning, about a big ship sailing, before nor have I heard it since (until tonight when I watched it again.) But I have never forgotten it.

Shelagh Delaney's screenplay for "A Taste of Honey," based on her play of the same name, remains a moving period drama. Beautifully directed by Tony Richardson, this film evokes all the stark realism of the famed English "New Wave/kitchen sink" dramas (made popular by John Osborne) of the late 50s/early 60s.

Rita Tushingham is striking as an working-class adolescent girl, growing into maturity--first through her pregnancy by a young sailor, played by Paul Danquah, and then by her association with a sensitive man, played by Murray Melvin. Dora Bryan is impressive Tushingham's mom.

The sparse photography, sets and score, all combine to make an unforgettable statement.

It's a timely coincidence that my exploration of British Free Cinema generally referred to as 'kitchen sink' dramas made me discover "A Taste of Honey" right during Pride month.

From my preliminary reading about the synopsis I was expecting a sort of docu-drama about unexpected teenage pregnancy in patriarcal times but I missed an important clue: the original successful play (many British classics derive from plays anyway) was written by Shelagh Delaney when she was 18, which means with no agenda or narrative requirements, only the free inspiration from a young woman in the budding of her independence.

Born in 1938, she literally served as a bridge between the lost generation and the baby-boomers who -at the film's release- were teenagers, and before the Beatles would infuse their exuberant adult-defying insouciance through in "A Hard Day's Night", before Tom Courtenay would be the spokesperson of angry youth as a liar and a long-distance runner, it was Rita Tushingham as Jo, the tough pint-sized tom-boy-like brunette with gigantic expressive blue eyes who let her anger implode with particles of joy and devil-may-care detachment spilled all over the black-and-white screen. And let me say that after so many "young angry men" films, I'm pleased and not the least surprised that it was the woman's one to introduce so many milestones one would easily lose the track.

Josephine, aka Jo, is a 19-year old girl, raised by a single mother specialized in the oldest profession, she's played by a delightful and almost endearing Dory Bryan and that Jo calls her Helen is a little taboo-breaking detail. Obviously, Jo was an accident but Helen -if not the looks of her fading youth- still got the heart and is far from the abusive type. To put it straight, if you expect stereotypes in that film you have another thing coming. It's not even the most publicized aspect of the story but there's the romance with Jimmy, a Black sailor played by Paul Danquah; they love each other, their interactions are sincere, and so we're never left with the feeling that he 'abandoned' her, neither is Jo. And Richardson doesn't let us interpret Jo's open-mindedness the wrong way, no she didn't like Jimmy for rebellion's sake, but simply because she liked him... her feelings precede her choices no matter what.

There's just too much modernity to handle in the film that I don't even feel like praising the artistic aspect. What for? All right, it's the first British shot on locations and to enhance the realism of the story, Richardson gratifies with details of the street life in England, a day at the carnival where you can see people barely noticing the actors, shots on rivers, docks, shabby houses: the realism feels real. But any passable director can get the right shots in and just let the camera roll when you've got the right settings. However, what Richardson does and in my opinion better than his next film "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner" is to show a certain truth in his characters by depriving them from any narrative guidance.

Tushingham brings a quirky freshness and spontaneity switching from joy to anger to sheer confusion in a way that yet never confuses us, she argues a lot with Helen but it's never played for melodrama, as the mothers points it out "we enjoy it" and it's true that these characters never seem to have clear ideas of what they're doing but somehow we understand them. I think I understood that it was inevitable that a girl like Jo would be immune to the traditional expectations: she's like the male counterpart of Albert Finney's character in "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning", the man who made a married woman pregnant and could left her for a younger gal. But Jo might be an angry young woman but she's no victim and she's braver, embracing her pregnancy as a fact, not a punishment, only a link to a chain of events that form the path of her life. She deals with it without any hatred or desire of revenge against men.

The film doesn't shame men but establish two male figures that couldn't have been more opposite: there's Helen's husband (Robert Stephens) who's the perfect macho and with his mustache looks like an alpha-male version of Walt Disney, ordering her do the laundry, drinking, flirting, belittling and blackmailing her; and there's Geoff, Murray Melvin as the homosexual who never hid his identity, suspecting that she wouldn't reject her. Her first reaction is curiosity but they quickly become roommates and friends and it goes as far as Geoff proposing to be the father for the child's sake, he does love Jo and that says something about his true need for tenderness and a recognition of being. Murray brings a total naturalness in that man not afraid to be who is and with his long face, owl-like eyes and aquiline nose that reminded me of a young Jean Rochefort, he's got the awkward charm of an effeminate man still proud enough to hide his inner sensibility.

Now, "A Taste of Honey" has no pretension to teach a lesson, but only to show people entrapped in their social conditions and forced to be characters rather than people, Helen wants to believe that she's young enough to attract men, to satisfy her ego, Jo wants to be a good mother but is afraid her child might inherit some traits from her father and there's Geoff who is who he is and yet tries to find a semblance of 'normality' that can englobe his own lifestyle choices ...... Maybe the closest to a bitter taste to that "honey" is that the reality of the world is too much to handle and it's sad to see these free people becoming characters again, as if they ended up thinking "who are we kidding?".

Still, on the film's 60th birthday, one should applaud the extraordinary performers, the gutsy director and the visionary Shelagh Delaney.