Forty five years after A Taste of Honey, Rita Tushingham is still at the top of her profession, inspired by the bravery of her daughter who has overcome breast cancer. David Charters reports
HER eyes were so big and so round and so green that it seemed then that they could hold all the dreams of the boys and girls sitting in the stalls of the picture palaces, clutching hands in the hope that everything would work out happily for her and for the baby swelling in her tummy.
Now the eyes are still big and round and green and they look back with affection on the great British film that really opened the 1960s as the decade of change, when bold young people snapped the seals to release the old taboos.
Of course everybody, or nearly everybody, knew that such things happened in dark corners; but no-one ever mentioned them in our pinched, grey, wheezing country, crawling like a snail from post-war austerity, not even on the foggy streets of gossip, where the bell on the corner shop orchestrated the day.
That was before the release of A Taste of Honey 45 years ago when Rita Tushingham, the grocer's daughter from Hunts Cross, Liverpool, became one of the most famous faces in the country and we were singing the film's song, The Big Ship Sails on the Ally-Ally-O.
Lust, greed, booze and parental neglect were all there, but it was the sensitive and tender telling of the friendship between the easy-going black sailor Jimmy (Paul Danquah) and 15-year-old school girl Jo (Rita) that set the film apart.
Her mother Helen is a pub-singing floozy struggling to contain her curves and belches, superbly realised by Dora Bryan.
Helen hops off with Peter (the late Robert Stephens), a spiv, whose flash car stands out on the kerb like a light bulb in a candle factory.
Jimmy returns to his ship not knowing that Jo is carrying his child and she sets up home with Geoffrey (Murray Melvin), whose homosexuality has made him an outcast. In fact, they are both outcasts and Jo's unborn baby offers him something that he yearns, but will never achieve, the chance to be a father.
In the profoundly moving final scene, Geoffrey hides in the shadows, quiet as a ghost, while children dance around a spitting bonfire outside their house. Helen, who has been jilted by the spiv, comes back to look after Jo. Geoffrey is alone again.
The film was based on the play of the same name written by Shelagh Delaney, a passionate young writer from Salford, who, like many others, had wearied of seeing working-class northerners either parodied, as a black-pudding version of the Cockney "sparra", or ignored in British drama, which was only just breaking free from the restraints of drawing-room manners and lush lawns.
