Criterion, now the foremost rescuer of films formerly consigned to an unworthy oblivion, has once again restored in a pristine transfer a preeminent movie in LGBT history, A Taste of Honey (1961), one of the so-called kitchen-sink British features based on a hit play written by Shelagh Delaney, directed by the great Tony Richardson. Both the play and the movie broke barriers with its social realism tackling hitherto taboo topics like interracial relationships, single mothers, dysfunctional families, and homosexuality. Releasing it for the first time on DVD, Criterion has reminded us that this formerly obscure movie deserves to be recognized for the milestone it is.
Critically lauded, it made a star of Rita Tushingham, who played the heroine Jo. Delaney gave the rare female screenwriter perspective. Written at 18, Taste would be her creative zenith. It moved to the West End and became a huge hit, as did the Broadway production starring Angela Lansbury and Joan Plowright as Jo. Delaney set her drama in Salford, with its industrial slums and dank docks near Manchester in 1950s Northwest England. Richardson was part of the British New Wave/Free Cinema movement that chronicled working-class lives, rejecting English reserve and bourgeois civility. Delaney's play, with its dreary landscape and trapped lives, became an ideal subject. He directed both the play and movie versions of Osborne's landmark Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer . After the success of Taste, he went on to direct another classic of this genre, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), and reached his career peak with Tom Jones (1963), which won Oscars for Best Picture and Director. Richardson was bisexual, having briefly married actress Vanessa Redgrave, adding thespian daughters Natasha and Joely to the dynasty. He died of AIDS in 1991.
Taste is the story of feisty 17-year-old Jo and her mother Helen (Dora Bryan, in a British Academy Award-winning performance), an alcoholic not quite a prostitute, but dependent on her lovers to survive. Their relationship is fraught with tension (and saucy repartee), as Jo resents her mother's absence and narcissism. They move from one shabby flat to another because Helen can't pay the rent. She entertains men at a local pub singing songs at the piano. Jo has a dream of attending art school, but is left alone when Helen runs away with Peter (Robert Stephens, Maggie Smith's first husband), her financially secure and much younger lover, who dislikes Jo. Jo has a romantic relationship with Jimmy, a black sailor. He proposes marriage, but, returning to the sea, leaves Jo alone and pregnant. Jo gets a job working at the local shoe store, where she first encounters Geoffrey Ingham (Murray Melvin, who also originated the stage role), a homosexual studying to be a textile designer. Evicted from his flat due to his sexuality, he moves into Jo's large, dilapidated apartment, becoming her surrogate husband/caretaker, cooking and cleaning but paying no rent. He offers to marry her for respectability sake, but despite being conflicted about motherhood, Jo realizes they can only be "girlfriends." Helen returns after Peter throws her out. What happens to Jo becomes the focus of the film.
A trenchant study of class, race, gender, and sexual orientation, the film employs gallows humor. When Jo thinks about drowning herself in the river, Geoffrey advises against doing so since "it is full of rubbish." Geoffrey's homosexuality is treated matter-of-factly, even sympathetically, and Jo is fascinated, not repelled by it.
In one of the many superb bonuses on the DVD featuring May 2016 interviews with Tushingham,75, and Melvin, 82, he comments that through the years men came up to him to say, "You changed my life. You made it possible so I could be me." Initially the gay Melvin disliked the role because Jo's mother was so insulting to him, yet he realized later that his performance on stage and in the movie "was the start of gay pride in England in 1958. Of course everyone knew Geoffrey was homosexual, but you couldn't actually say it. It was on my shoulders, and I am very proud of it." It is certainly understandable why the British Film Institute named A Taste of Honey the 56th greatest English film of the 20th century. Tushingham and Melvin won Best Actress and Actor at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival. This movie is a jewel and a must-have addition to one's DVD collection.