MOVIE CHRONICLE: LITTLE MEN
A TASTE OF HONEY
The audiences at popular American movies seem to want
heroes they can look up to; the audiences at art houses seem to want
heroes they can look down on. Does this mean that as we become more
educated, we no longer believe in the possibilities of heroism? The
"realistic," "adult" movie often means the movie in which the hero is
a little man like, presumably, the little men in the audience.
A year or so ago art-house audiences were carried away by
Ballad
of a Soldier
and its "refreshing" look of purity and innocence. The new
refresher may be
A Taste of Honey.
The inexperienced young hero of
Ballad of a Soldier
was too shy and idealistic to make any direct overtures
to the heroine; the hero of
A Taste of Honey
goes beyond inexperience,
he's inadequate-and audiences love him all the more for it. I didn't
much like the material of
Ballad of a Soldier,
but it was well handled
to achieve its effects; I
do
like Shelagh Delaney's material, but the
movie treatment is rather coarse. Tony Richardson is beginning to
gain assurance of the wrong kind: in
A Taste of H o.ney
his direction is
more
controlled
than in
Look Back in Anger
or
The Entertainer,
but
it is at the expense of some of the best material in the modern theater.
His treatment of
A Taste of Honey
is both more pretentious and less
exciting than the slender material of the play. He has learned how to
package the material and build in the responses like an American
director. He doesn't take a chance on our reaching out to the characters
or feelings; everything is pushed at us. What should be a lyric sketch
is all filled in and spelled out until it becomes almost a comic melodrama.
The play, written by an eighteen year old working-class Lancashire
girl, has fresh dialogue and feeling and warmth. The story is simple:
Jo (Rita Tushingham), a schoolgirl, temporarily abandoned by her
fun-loving mother who goes off with a new husband, has an affair with
a Negro seaman, and then meets a lonely fellow-spirit, a homosexual,
