La fille aux yeux verts

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.

This is a cute story about a young girl named Kate Brady, (Rita Tushingham) who lives with another girl named Baba Brenan, (Lynn Redgrave) and Baba sort of leads her roommate Kate around with her and is very talkative and has had plenty of relationships with men. However, Kate Brady becomes very interested in a man who is twice her age and begins to do everything she can to capture his attention. This man is Eugene Gaillard, (Peter Finch) who is a writer and a married man with a daughter and Eugene is not getting along very well with his wife and wants to get a divorce. Kate begins to get Eugene's full attention and before you know it, they are starting a strange relationship with each other which can lead to a great deal of trouble. Kate's family becomes involved and there are big problems facing Kate. This is a rather bitter sweet love story which is very true to what life is really all about. Enjoy.

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.

Poor Rita Tushingham--she did seem to inherit some strangely frustrating parts.

In "A Taste of Honey" she was a young pregnant girl, first abandoned by her itinerant sailor, then landing in a "relationship" with a sadly confused chap.

In "Girl with Green Hair," she's another adolescent who falls for a man twice her age. Won't she ever learn?

Director Desmond Davis' work resembles Tony Richardson's so much that their styles are almost interchangeable. It may be because Composer John Addison also scored Richardson's "A Taste of Honey," and "Loneliness of the Long Distant Runner." It's remarkable how Addison's bleakly dissonant style so greatly influences the moods of these dramas.

With Davis employing a lot of contrapuntal passages played by a thin woodwind ensemble--often featuring a solo oboe--one does feel the emptiness and loneliness of character emotions.

There was no one who embodied the "Cockney Kitchen Sink" dramas of the 60s like Tushingham. She was perfect for her parts. Here ably supported by Peter Finch as a blase older man and Lynn Redgrave as a daftly talkative friend, Tushingham plays her role to the hilt.

By the end, the viewer has come to experience a limited encounter--rather doomed from the start--between a worldly wise Dublin land owner and working class Brit girl . . . the latter of whom is finally able to move on with her education and find acquaintances more her age.

The viewer during this visit has experienced some telling scenes of Irish-English life, and an interesting adolescent/mature fling at a brief encounter.