Cinema Retro writer David Savage revisits a key film from Britain's golden age of movie-making.
Leading The Charge: Woodfall Film Productions and the
Revolution in ‘60’s British Cinema, July 13-26, 2007. Walter Reade Theater,
Lincoln Center, New York
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.
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), 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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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 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. 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.)