Weak But Still sweet
HERR, MIKE
ON SCREEN Weak but Still Sweet By Mike Herr A Taste of Honey is about the painful growth of an adolescent girl living in one grimy English town after another with a mother who has no...
...They are not much more than caricatures...
...It looks like the same footage I have seen in six or seven English films that have played here during the last few years, and it is as dull as ever...
...She is a non-professional whose natural acting is most wonderful when it is most crude...
...If there was any gap between the girl Miss Delaney imagined and the one she wrote, Miss Tushingham has more than filled it...
...As drama, it is formless and talky...
...He may be a brilliant theatrical director, but he is a clumsy man with a camera...
...Her scenes, especially with the homosexual (wonderfully played by Murray Melvin), generate enormous poignancy...
...The main character, Jo, is a first-rate creation, full and painfully touching...
...Richardson is honest, energetic and well-meaning...
...In outline, this sounds grim...
...Deserted when her mother marries a used-car salesman, she accepts the first comfort that comes along: a Negro sailor, who leaves her pregnant...
...But none of this really counts much...
...Their work is all mugging and labored detail, with too much relish of the grotesque...
...Most of the actors suffer from a similar kind of trouble, particularly Dora Bryan as the mother and Robert Stephens as the salesman she marries...
...ON SCREEN Weak but Still Sweet By Mike Herr A Taste of Honey is about the painful growth of an adolescent girl living in one grimy English town after another with a mother who has no particular feeling for her...
...These things could have been used subtly, worked with precision into the fabric of the story, the way Michelangelo Antonioni works his backgrounds...
...She becomes friendly with a young homosexual who, in a curious way, acts as both mother and lover to her...
...The film was based more or less on the activities of an American-Swedish oilman who spied on the Nazis in order to get his name removed from an Allied blacklist...
...The "liberation" of A Taste of Honey from the stage is a superficial one...
...What beauty there is in A Taste of Honey is there only because of two young women...
...There is too much insistence on shots of the filthy industrial smoke stacks, the barges bobbing in polluted canals, the saloons, dance palaces and carnivals (complete with funny mirrors) that the characters live among...
...It was exciting, but it was quite a bit more—a story of espionage with some ambition and depth...
...That he is committed to the Allied cause by the end of the picture is neither implausible nor harmful to the complexity of his screen characterization...
...As a film, it is affected by that creeping thrombosis I am beginning to think of as characteristic of British cinema...
...Here they are photographed with a tepid competence that makes them dreary in a way that Richardson clearly did not want them to be...
...Then, near the end of her pregnancy, the mother returns to drive out the homosexual and take over her daughter's life again...
...A Taste of Honey is often funny, usually charming and, finally, quite moving...
...The film's attractiveness, however, seems to have little to do with Tony Richardson, who directed it in that tradition of the English arts that probably goes back to Charles Dickens ("I wants to make your flesh creep...
...Although her play is badly flawed, Shelagh Delaney has observed more and created better than I had thought possible for a 19-year old girl...
...George Seaton has written and directed it with some intelligence, and William Holden and Lilli Palmer are good enough so that you can overlook the times when that intelligence lags...
...There is a self-conscious relentlessness about his work, a studied approach to seaminess that barely manages to stay on the right side of sensationalism...
...More than good material, though, the thing that finally carries A Taste of Honey from the third-rate into the unclassifiable is the performance of Rita Tushingham as Jo...
...I went to see The Counterfeit Traitor because I like spy pictures, and because this one looked exciting...
...Mike Herr regularly writes on the world of film for The New Leader...
...If the older characters are inflated portraits of villainy, and the sailor is a kind of cardboard plot convenience, her play is accurate and alive where it means most...
...They should have been restrained...
...It is not exactly stagey, but it certainly is not cinematic...
Vol. 45 • June 1962 • No. 12
