Girl with Green Eyes

The only thing I had seen before this by Desmond Davis, was the classic "Clash of the Titans." That was perhaps the best movie ever made based on ancient Greek Mythology. It was a wonderful adventure and fantasy film.

This is totally different. It is British new wave with a camera that tracks, sweeps and runs across the British/Irish countryside as gently as it tickles Rita Tushingham's large nosed, perky face. Besides the energetic cinematography and editing which is somewhere between Goddard's "Breathless" and Richard Lester's "A Hard Day's Night," we get a hard edge slice of life drama/comedy that leaps with wit and poetry. Its as good as Tushingham's earlier, similar hit, "A Taste of Honey."

Lynn Redgrave is cuter than any human being has a right to be and Peter Finch is honest and likable as Eugene, the man who wins Tushingham's confidence, if not her heart.

The point of the movie is that we all change and we even "outgrow our friends". We should accept it without getting hysterical or dramatic about it. It is a touch sad, but we move on.

In a way it belongs with "My Fair Lady," and "Educating Rita" as a picture about women becoming...

All one can say about the movie in its entirety: "Smashing!"

Bitter sweet tale beautifully adapted for the screen by Edna O'Brien from her own novel. It is a difficult subject. a young girl's infatuation with an older married man but the dialogue is so good it even convinces when you initially feel that a scene is unlikely to work. Her inviting him out to tea, her opening his bedroom door are prickly moments dealt with so well they seem perfectly natural. Rita Tushingham and Peter Finch are perfect in their roles and director Desmond Davis' light touch in the first of a short run of successful films ensures that there is almost something magical now and again. Of course, such a subject would be controversial anywhere, anytime but early 60s Ireland it must have been very much a no, no and the film does not avoid this. Indeed it confronts the hypocrisy of family and church very well including a devastating eulogy from the local priest which absolves men from just about anything, except the matter in hand. You can take a girl out of a convent but not the convent out of the girl, is the ardent hope of these primitive souls but perhaps no more as recently uncovered horrors have exposed even greater hypocrisy and criminality in the name of the Lord. In the end the film says more about the making and keeping or changing friends (and lovers) and is a surprisingly insightful outing.

Desmond Davis, who had worked closely with Tony Richardson, decided to try his hand directing films. For his first effort he decided to use Edna O'Brien's novella "The Lonely Girl", which we read a long while ago, and frankly, we don't remember it well. The result was a movie that has that "English Look" of what came out of England during those years.

"Girl with Green Eyes" owes its success to Rita Tushingham, an actress that was the darling of English movie makers. She had a certain waif look that she used to her advantage in films such as this one, and in others of the same period. She holds the movie together as it's hard to take one's eyes from hers. Ms. Tushingham was not a spectacular beauty, yet she had a certain look that was appealing in her work.

Peter Finch appears as Eugene Gaillard, a man who is divorced with a child, and whose estranged wife has moved overseas. His attraction for Kate Brennan is quite understandable, yet, Eugene can't get Kate to be more than a platonic admirer, never being able to consume the passion she feels for him, and vice versa.

Also in the movie, a young and fresh Lynn Redgrave, who went to make bigger and better things on her own in the British cinema and on the stage and films in America, her adoptive country.

"Girl with Green Eyes" is worth a look for what Desmond Davis was able to accomplish in his first feature. The copy we watched recently was sadly in need of restoration.

Long into watching this studiously "small," slice-of-life portrait of a naive young woman, I was still wondering if the film would turn out, in the end, to have been worth watching. Earnest in its desire to be grittily true-to-life, in the neo-realist manner of the Angry Young Men, it is also clearly intoxicated with the quotidian lyricism and plain-spoken poetry of la nouvelle vague. It attempts to be charming and brutally frank at the same time, and manages, to some extent, to carry it off.

But will we end up caring about Tushingham's somewhat obtuse small town escapee, or Finch's sophisticated cold fish? Or will we be left with the rather sodden sensation that we've wasted our time eavesdropping on bores? For my part, I was pleasantly surprised. The story ends with the palpable sense that Kate has grown up a bit, and Eugene has grown a little older and sadder. We've looked on as two people have lived their bittersweet lives, much as we live our own -- and we're a little sad to bid them adieu.

To sum up: not as fresh and appealing today as it probably seemed in its time, but still rewarding and worthwhile.

Girl with Green Eyes seems typical of the period of British "Kitchen-Sink" drama films (I saw it as the 2nd part of a double bill with The Leather Boys and the theme being Rita Tushingham performances, though this is dialed down a little from that turn), and that's what's good but not terribly memorable about it all. It's realistic in some of the basic character interactions, though it has a bouncier/more emotionally-cued up score than the material should have, if that makes sense. It seems like a minor point but Desmond Davis clearly wanted to get a lot of emotional/romantic/tragic pull out of the music by John Addison, and it may have been too much for this lot of realism (how typical this is by the way, it's produced by Tony Richardson).

The story is actually an Irish-Kitchen-Sink movie, though with a couple of British touches: a young girl in Dublin, who originally was from a fairly lower-class farm that was highly religious but working *very* Irish class all the same, is working at a bookstore and finds that there's an author that she would like to meet along with her friend/roommate Baba. Peter Finch is this man, and soon Kate, the girl of the title, takes a real liking to him, and after not too long he to her. So they "hook up", so to speak, and this brings on problems, both external in force (he's technically married with a kid in another country, she's got pressure from her family not to have anything to do with this "Godless heathen), and more about the fact that it's a man who could be old enough, if only barely, to be her father.

This is a story explored in many kind of films, whether it's throw-a-dart-and-hit a Philip Roth story, or of course Manhattan. There's enough chemistry and charm between the two leading people as Tishingham, even dialed down, is delightful, and Finch does a lot playing usually-crusty and mostly sardonic/sarcastic speaking (if there had been a remake some years back I could've seen Alan Rickman in his role), plus Lynn Redgrave being wonderful and funny in her supporting place. But there's not much here that elevates it past its time and place; it's a perfectly fine drama, and it doesn't distinguish itself past some insights, which are only insightful up to a point, that you may need to grow as a person (or can never meet the other on the flipside due to losing "youthful vigor" as an aging man) to have a relationship work sometimes.

There's a nice, tender feeling to the film, Finch and Tushingham make a good pair on screen (precisely because we kind of know, deep down, it's not only not going to work but it can't not ever work, if that makes sense, so let's see them in the little moments) and that should work for anyone looking for that. Although some things that contribute to the 'hasnt-aged-terribly-well' is, say, when the film is edited so early on in their courtship Eugene and Kate talk and one part of a sentence begins in a new location and then another and another, and it feels distracting.