A Taste of Honey (1961)

A Taste of Honey
1961

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Produced and Directed by Tony Richardson
Screenplay by Shelagh Delaney & Tony Richardson
Based on the play by Shelagh Delaney
Cinematography by Walter Lassaly
Music by John Addison

CAST
Dora Bryan – Helen
Robert Stephens – Peter Smith
Rita Tushingham – Jo
Murray Melvin – Geoffrey Ingham
Paul Danquah – Jimmy
(Other parts are minor and incidental)

The 60s retrospective series

Released October 1961, UK, April 1962 USA

I never intended to go back to 1961, sticking to my statement that the Sixties began in October 1962 when The Beatles sang Love Me Do on TV.

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A Taste of Honey is firmly of the Fifties, but its theme, pregnancy, illegitimacy, women deserted on their own, runs right through the era in British film. Even Tony Richardson’s most famous film, Tom Jones manages the same theme, while being set in 1745. Sparrows Can’t Sing, Alfie, Georgie Girl, Cathy Come Home, Poor Cow. It seemed a British obsession while The French made sophisticated films about menage a trois and the Americans made epics or smart comedies. No, the Brits remained firmly concerned with getting up the spout out of wedlock (or if in wedlock, with a different partner). A Taste of Honey apparently inspired Coronation Street, also set in Salford, and its impact now is muted because it’s the stuff of twice-weekly soap opera.

We watched it again on Sony Pictures Channel (forgetting we had a covermount DVD). They showed Part Two before they showed Part One. Fortunately we’d recorded it, so could reverse it. That took me back to the sixties, when you might decide to go to the cinema which would be showing continuous performances. So you’d go in when you got there, even if you were halfway through a film (there was usually a B-film during which you might arrive). Then if you wanted to see the rest of the B-film, you’d just stay in the seat and watch as it started again, maybe getting up and leaving at a point This is where we came in. A friend from youth club (who was the double of Murray Melvin in this) used to go to watch The Young Ones, enter the cinema at 1.30 p.m. and watch it through perhaps four times. He clocked up seventy plus viewings. Do you want to watch it again? was not uncommon on rainy evenings either. I doubt that I saw the film in 1961. It was X rated and I would have been much too young to get in.

It was critically acclaimed. Tony Richardson got the Best film BAFTA, Richardson and Delaney got the best screenplay BAFTA, Dora Bryan got Best Actress, and Rita Tushingham got Most Promising Newcomer. She won the same in the Golden Globes. Then at Cannes, Rita Tushingham and Murray Melvin got Best Actress and Best Actor.

Rita Tushingham - A Taste of Honey (1961) cobbles

Good morning, Little Schoolgirl

Rita Tushingham got the lead role which 2000 girls had auditioned for. She was only seventeen when she played the part. Therefore she looked convincing in a gymslip at school … the publicity said “seventeen year old” but secondary modern kids in Salford in 1961 left school the term of their 16th birthday, so Jo is fifteen at the start. As I said when reviewing the stage play, a modern audience finds it hard to see what the fuss is about a black boyfriend and a gay best friend, but is shocked at a girl in a gymslip with an older sailor! Friends who recorded the R&B classic Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl insisted it was removed from a reissue of the album.

Murray Melvin, as her gay friend, Geoffrey, had played the same role in Joan Littlewood’s original Theatre Workshop production of the stage play.

Robert Stephens was a National Theatre stalwart, playing the spivvy second-hand car salesman, Peter Smith. It’s a name that annoys me… in 1966 I was in a college production of Richard III. When the programme was going to press, no one could remember my surname (I wasn’t in classes with any if them) and I appeared in the programme and review as “Peter Smith.”

Back to the play …

The themes … teenage pregnancy, poverty (Helen couldn’t never pay the rent), fancy men, race, homosexuality (the gay best friend) … were powerful at the time.

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Paul Danquah and Rita Tushingham

We shocked audiences without intending to. I only learned later that Paul and I did the first interracial kiss on screen.
Rita Tushingham, Guardian 28 January 2020

Seven years before Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhuru on Star Trek too. The Guardian article continues

Nearly 60 years ago, Rita Tushingham was walking through Soho with her friend, the late British actor Paul Danquah, when a passerby yelled: “Blacks and whites don’t mix!” Tushingham looks troubled by the memory. “It happened to Paul a lot,” she says. “I remember he shouted back, ‘Don’t worry! She’s only been on holiday and got a tan.’” That was Britain in 1961, before London swung, before sex between men was decriminalised, before a black man and a white woman walking in Soho might pass unremarked.
Stuart Jeffries, Guardian 28 January 2020

THE PLOT

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Doing a runner with budgie – Helen (Dora Bryan)

Jo (Rita Tushingham) is a schoolgirl, living with her mum, Helen, (Dora Bryan), who only vaguely recollects who her father was, but thinks he might have been a touch retarded. They live in Salford, near the Manchester Ship Canal. Right at the start they’re doing a runner, climbing out of their basement flat through the window because they can’t pay the rent. A passing sailor (Paul Danquah) helps them with their cases.

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Helen (Dora Bryan) gets ready to go out

Helen has started bringing Peter Smith (Robert Stephens) home. He’s a spiv and runs a second-hand car sales lot. They are having a furtive snog on the stairway when Jo sees them:

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Jo looks downstairs at …

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Peter Smith (Robert Stephes) and her mum (Dora Bryan)

There’s a classroom sequence at school, where Jo is caught taking the mickey out of the English teacher.

Rita Tushingham: I was given freedom to express myself. In the classroom scene where I’m misbehaving, Tony (Richardson) just said: “Do what you want.” It helped that I was near Jo’s age. There’s this sort of jump-cut to my eyes when I realise the teacher has caught me. It’s one of those moments where, thanks to brilliant editing, there’s no need to say anything.
Guardian interview, 10 April 2018

Jo falls down some steps and hurts her knee.The black sailor comes to help her, Jimmy (Paul Danquah) and takes her to the ship to treat her knee. He is a cook.

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Jo (Rita Tushingham) and Jimmy (Paul Danquah)

Jimmy and Jo have a romantic relationship, and he meets her from school etc (very dodgy nowadays!).

Jo: Did your ancestors come from Africa?
Jimmy: No, Liverpool!

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“Good Evening, Little Schoolgirl”? Jo (Rita Tushingham) and Jimmy (Paul Danquah)

Meanwhile Helen is getting closer to Peter. We have a scene where Jo has to wash her mum’s back in the bath.

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As a possible reflection on Helen, I noticed the street name is ‘Prosser Street.’ It is a real street. I was reminded that the 17th century alley parallel to the dock in Poole is called “Paradise Lane.”

As the romance progresses, Jimmy gives her a ring … from Woolworths.

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Jo (Rota Tushingham) and Helen (Dora Bryan). A day at the seaside in Blackpool. Have you ever been on a holiday with teenagers who don’t want to be there?

Peter and Helen set off for a day with friends in Blackpool in his Vauxhall Victor (sorry, I like early 60s cars). At the last minute Helen drags Jo along with them.

It’s a great vision of 60s Blackpool … roller coasters, piers, silly photos, hall of mirrors, some sort of freak vampire show.

Peter’s spivvy pal, Peter Smith (Robert Stephens) gets the finger from Jo.

Jo gets lippy, Peter gets nasty, and she is given the bus fare and packed off home on her own.

Back in Salford, Jimmy is off to sea again.

Peter and Helen get married (he has a bungalow with bay windows, no less!) Jo is on her own and takes a job in a shoe shop.

Here she meets Geoffrey (Murray Melvin) who is buying some casual shoes. He is studying textiles.

Rita Tushingham: Murray Melvin had already played Geoffrey, the gentle homosexual, on the stage. He taught me so much about preparation and relaxing. His is the character your heart bleeds for, whereas Jo and her mother, unusually for the time, are presented as two females with a certain power. Whenever there is a problem, they go in with all guns blazing.
Guardian, 10 April 2018

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Geoffrey (Murray Melvin) and Jo (Rita Tushingham)

Jo has rented an old industrial workshop which she is doing up. She meets Geoffrey again, watching a children’s parade with him, and he suggests going to the fair. He escorts her home, and she realises he has nowhere to live. She invites him to stay and he moves in and they do up the workshop.

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Geoffrey (Murray Melvin) and Jo (Rita Tushingham) on a day out.

Jo realizes she is pregnant and Geoffrey suggest he marries her:

Geoffrey: You need somebody to love you while you’re looking for somebody to love.

Peter, now her step-father is contemptuous of the obviously gay (but apparently celibate) Geoffrey. Not as contemptuous as in the play though.

The pregnancy is progressing. The baby is due in November. One day, Helen turns up, carrying her budgie in a cage (as when they fled the flat at the beginning). Peter has chucked her out and she wants to move in,

Geoffrey (Murray Melvin) and Helen (Dora Bryan) do not get on

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Helen gets unpleasant towards Geoff, telling him to take away the cot he’s made for the baby. Geoff decides he has to go (it’s Guy Fawkes Night, November 5th) and leaves Jo with Helen, expecting the baby.

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The End: Jo (Rita Tushingham) with sparkler, 5th November

THE PLAY & THE FILM

The film dilutes the dialogue considerably on the racism and homosexuality. Tony Richardson eradicated some of the more savagely controversial lines, which was a pity, I think. It still got banned in several countries.

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Murray Melvin as Geoffrey

The play was quite unique. In retrospect, I think how daring I was to go out in front of the public, and perform that. So the same feeling with the film, I was very wary of what the reaction would be. But of course it’s always been wonderful. As I’ve got older, I’m still amazed when somebody young, which to me, is anybody under thirty, comes up and says, ‘Oh, you played that boy in A Taste of Honey. Thank you,’ and I say, ‘What for?’ and they say, ‘You see, when I saw that, you changed my life. You made it possible for me.’ And I am truly humbled.
Melvin Murray, ‘Breaking Barriers’ on Joan Littlewood, 2017.

The last time I saw the film of A Taste of Honey was in 2014, while reviewing the National Theatre production of the play. That review has much to say on the background of the play, which dates from 1958, on Shelagh Delaney (eighteen when she wrote the play) and the play’s impact.

Desmond Davis (camera operator): Because of its realistic style, A Taste of Honey was sneeringly called a kitchen-sink drama. Yet the film has great lyricism, making beautiful use of locations in Salford found by our art director, Ralph Brinton. There’s one scene where a heavily pregnant Jo walks with Geoffrey along the canal. Tony had this idea of having a singing, wandering band of children passing them. It’s a moment of pure cinema and typically Tony.
Guardian 10 April 2018

LINK TO 2014 review of the play.

I’ll repeat one section of the review:

Reviews also keep picking out the 1961 film as superior, and I tended to that view, which is easy when you last saw the film several years ago, when the Sunday Telegraph gave it away as a free cover mount DVD. It was scripted by Shelagh Delaney and Tony Richardson. It’s very good, but it is a major step away from the play.

The camerawork excels in invoking Salford 1961

A director can’t resist smoky gritty shots of Jo walking beside the Manchester Ship Canal, relevant or not.

The cinematography is stunning black and white work. Jimmy leaves at the dock gate

In Anger and After John Russell Taylor took the opposite view on comparative merit. He praises the dreamlike way in which Jo is the centre of the play. She gets on with whatever happens, not raging against any of it. People drift in and drift out of her life. For Taylor, the film version with its trips to Blackpool, netball match, school and work scenes and fleshing out of the meetings with Jimmie, Peter and Geoffrey, loses the centrality of the confined room and its dreamlike nature. Taylor says:

The (film) treatment is uncompromisingly realistic and exterior, and consequently the script-writers find themselves trapped into devoting an excessive amount of time to useless illustration and explanation … the special quality the play has of just letting things happen, one after the other (as in a dream) disappears, and modifications clearly intended to strengthen the material succeed, paradoxically, only in making it seem thinner and more contrived.
(John Russell Taylor, Anger and After, 1963, revised 1966)

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I’d conclude that you have to treat film and play as related, but quite different works of art, treating the same story. The play is more powerful, more centred, more aggressive. The filming throughout beautifully shows the area and the era. All the actors are perfect in their film roles.

SOUNDTRACK

The Big Ship Sails runs right through the film, chanted by kids, in orchestral arrangements … whatever. It’s a children’s ditty, said to date from the opening of the Manchester Ship Canal (seen often in the film) in 1894.

The 1961 song A Taste of Honey has nothing to do with it, being written after the composers had seen the film.

Paul McCartney has said Your Mother Should Know was inspired by the film.

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Shelagh Delaney

Morrissey liked it so much that he recycled lines in songs, and used Shelagh Delaney as the ‘cover star’ on two Smiths singles. Coincidentally, one (Work Is A Four Letter Word) appears in the review directly before this one. It saved scanning it twice.

RITA TUSHINGHAM

A Taste of Honey (1961)
The Knack (1965)
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
The Trap (1966)

THE 60s REVISITED REVIEWS …