Sapore di miele

'A Taste of Honey' provides a grim slice-of-life look at the working class poor in early 1960's England. Teen pregnancy, an openly homosexual companion, a negligent single mother and homelessness are featured- mainstream topics in today's movies, but this was released in 1961, folks (beats me how they got it past the censors). This sensitive, remarkable film should be required viewing for junior high schools.

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.

During the late fifties and early sixties a feature of the British film industry was what have become known as "kitchen sink" films- social-realist pictures focusing on the lives of ordinary working-class people. Tony Richardson was one of the key figures in this movement, and "A Taste of Honey" is one of a number of such films directed by him; others include "Look Back in Anger" from 1958 and "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner" from 1962. All of these films are based upon literary sources, in the case of "A Taste of Honey" upon a play by Shelagh Delaney.

The main character is Jo, a working-class Manchester teenager. The plot is a fairly simple one and charts Jo's relationships with her sluttish mother Helen, her sailor boyfriend Jimmy, Helen's car-dealer lover (and later husband) Peter and Geoff, the young man who befriends Jo after Jimmy disappears back to sea leaving her pregnant. There are a number of fine performances, from Murray Melvin as the gentle, sensitive Geoff, Dora Bryan as the promiscuous Helen and from Robert Stephens as the relatively affluent but coarse and vulgar Peter. The best is probably from the nineteen-year-old Rita Tushingham, making her screen debut as the naïve and vulnerable yet determined and strong-willed heroine. She was to become a well-known figure in the British cinema of the sixties and seventies, even though she was far from having classic "film star" looks.

The film contains a number of elements which would have been highly controversial in the early sixties, in particular its non-judgemental attitude towards premarital sex and pregnancy and the mixed-race love affair between Jo and Jimmy. The British cinema was, in some respects, more liberal than its American counterpart at this period. I cannot imagine the Hollywood of 1961 making a film about a sexual relationship between a black man and a white woman. Still less can I imagine a Hollywood film about a sexual relationship between a black man and a white teenage girl, a theme which would probably still be off-limits in 2008.

There were, however, limits to British liberalism. A number of reviewers have assumed that Geoff is gay. Certainly, Melvin plays him with what might be seen as stereotypically gay characteristics- he is, for example, rather effeminate in his voice and gestures. He is also much more "domesticated" than Jo, being better than her at cooking, needlework and housekeeping. He is never, however, identified in the script as a homosexual; there is no reference to his having sex with, or being sexually attracted to, other men. Indeed, it is suggested that Geoff is romantically in love with Jo, and he even proposes marriage.

It should be remembered that, at the time this film was being made homosexuality was still illegal in Britain and there had never been a British film with an explicitly gay theme; the first such was "Victim", which opened in August 1961, only a month before "A Taste of Honey". When "The Trials of Oscar Wilde" came out the previous year it refused to admit that Wilde actually was a homosexual, but rather tried to give the impression that he was the victim of unfounded gossip, of a deliberate conspiracy to blacken his name and of perjured evidence.

Like a number of "kitchen sink" films, it has a strong sense of place, conjured up by its atmospheric black-and-white photography of Manchester scenes, especially the terraced houses of the working-class districts. We see recognisable landmarks such as the city's Town Hall, the Ship Canal and Blackpool Tower (Like many working-class Mancunians from this period, Jo and Helen take their holidays in Blackpool).

Another notable feature of the film is the presence of children. The film opens and closes to the accompaniment of the nursery rhyme "The Big Ship Sailed on the Alley-Alley-O", and in several scenes we see children playing outside. (Among them, apparently, is the future Government minister Hazel Blears). Richardson's intention was presumably to contrast the innocence of childhood with the cares of adult life and to stress that Jo is little more than a child herself. Indeed, when the film opens she is still a schoolgirl, probably aged fifteen, that being the age when most pupils left school in the early sixties, unless they were intending to obtain formal educational qualifications such as O-levels. Delaney herself was only seventeen when she wrote the play on which the film is based.

"A Taste of Honey" perhaps lacks the dramatic power of some of the social-realist films of this period, such as J. Lee Thompson's "Tiger Bay" or John Schlesinger's "A Kind of Loving". It is, however, a sensitive, well-acted and occasionally humorous look at human relationships and one of the better British films from this period. 8/10

The 1960's brought about many of my favourite films about the English working class experience: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner; Saturday Night, Sunday Morning; This Sporting Life and - naturally - Kes. Coming from the North and being around - just - during the sixties helps naturally.

I dislike the term "kitchen sink" because it puts too many people off a film that while bleak remains so true it almost hurts. There isn't a word, phrase or scene in this movie that I don't believe and remember: I was there, although not in Salford!

A dimly lit world of booze, cups of tea, canals, seaside trips, bonfires, repressed emotions, unprotected sex (and what follows) and the limits and cheap thrills of the Northern English working class.

In 1961 this must have looked like the start of a new age of film. Real stories about real life. Almost a docu-drama in the modern parlance. However it never really happened. Why? Because there is more skill required than you might imagine and even this verges on going over the top. You could say it is tries to tick too many boxes. And isn't really true drama because it stops at a point in which so many threads remain loose.

(I suppose you could say it ends with the characters facing up to the realities that they have been so long running away from - but will they actually achieve it?)

Star of the show is Rita Tushington who never went on to do much with her career after being given the part of a lifetime to start it all off. Murray Melvin is also good as the homosexual boyfriend who wants to help out - although maybe in a misguided way.

A Taste of Honey has its limits and you could attack it for being snobbish. It is an artistic product born of the middle class - but it remains utterly true in a way that is mostly absent in cinema today.

Taste of Honey is evocative of life in Lancashire in the 1960's. The scenes of what were called the "Whit Walks" must bring back memories to many Lancashire folk, as must the scenes of England's most famous seaside resort; Blackpool. The film made Rita Tushingham a houshold name. Her portrayal of the the schoolgirl "done wrong" is second to none. Her large wide eyes show the fear and her innocence at the same time. Dora Bryan is magnificent as the "couldn't-care-less" mother who's quest for a good time is at the expense of all others. The film is well worth a watch, particularly if you are a fan of British films of the 60's. Watch out for a continuity gaff in the scenes on the pier!