A TASTE OF HONEY

Thrown out by their Salford landlady, Helen and her schoolgirl daughter Jo escape through the basement window, leaving the rent unpaid, and take another dingy furnished room. Helen immediately speeds off to the local pub to meet her latest boy friend Peter leaving Jo alone. Wandering by the dockyards, Jo meets Jimmy, a coloured sailor Helen has decided to marry Peter and goes on a trip to Blackpool. Jo spends the night with Jimmy. The next day he leaves with his ship. Helen returns, gives Jo a preoccupied goodbye kiss and drives off with her florid new husband to the bungalow he has bought. Jo finds herself a job in a shoe shop and moves into a big, bare room of her own. She takes up with Geoffrey a homeless, sisterly young homosexual, who moves in and takes over the cooking, cleaning and decoration. When Jo discovers that she is to have Jimmy's baby, Geoffrey does his best to look after her even offering her marriage. But Jo does not appears to want the baby, and Geoffrey goes to tell Helen her daughter is pregnant. Having been abandoned by her husband, Helen comes back to Jo as relentlessly selfabsorbed as ever. She drives Geoffrey out of the home he has made, and Jo and her mother face each other in a room that suddenly seems as bleak as all the others they have known.

"A Taste of Honey arrives an advance, theatremade reputation exceeded only by that of Woodfall's John Osborne adaptations. It is remarkable that so shapeless, slender and unpretentious a film manages almost completely to stand up to this reputation. But then in some ways it is a realisation rather than an adaptation of Shelagh Delaney's play, with the musichall mannerism of the stage production largely removed and the locale vividly filled in. The film has the advantage of some livedin, nonstudio settings by Ralph Brinton, and the script, though it misses a little of the verbal richness and precision of the original achieves a warm feeling for relationships." ("Monthly Film Bulletin", n. 333, October 1961, p. 141)

Director: Tony Richardson.
Screenplay: Shelagh Delaney, Tony Richardson, dalla commedia di Shelagh Delaney.
Director of photography: Waiter Lassally.
Editor: Anthony Gibbs.
Art director: Ralph Brinton.
Music: John Addison, eseguita dal Virtuoso Ensemble.
Sound: Roy Hycle, Don Challis.
Cast: Rita Tushingham (Jo), Dora Bryan (Helen), Murray Melvin (Geoffrey), Robert Stephens (Peter), Paul Danquah (Jimmy), David Boliver (Bert), Moira Kaye (Doris), Herbert Smith (il proprietario del negozio di scarpe), Valerie Scarden (la cliente), Rosalie Scase (Gladys), Eunice Black (l'insegnante).
Production company: Tony Richardson per la Woodfall.