566
PAULINE KAEL
camera emphasizes their qualities until even their best work seems
overdone.
If
only we could discover the lyric qualities in Rita Tushing–
ham's Jo--but Richardson doesn't give us credit for enough vision
(perhaps because his own eye isn't very good) ; he keeps shoving close–
ups at us until we've had too much of her homely gamin beauty. And the
mother (Dora Bryan), in particular, is handled with low comic crudity.
It's enough to see her singing and on a dance floor; do we also need
the easy laugh of seeing her in a room alone bending over, with the
camera glued to her corseted backside? Do we need to see her aging
flesh in the bathtub?
Do
we need to have her behaving like a crude
villainess, turning the hapless, unwanted little Geoff out of the house?
As a director, Richardson
does
moralize. He's always looking for
points he can drive home, for larger social nuances-for the obvious
that he finds so meaningful. (The working-class author couldn't
be
expected to have the social-consciousness that an educated liberal
can supply.) He isn't content with the material; he wants to make a
statement.
And what can make a statement so
visually
as the grimy
working-class watelands of industrial England? Richardson uses actual
locations, but he uses them like sets; the backgrounds are cleverly
selected, but merely cleverly selected. The documentary backgrounds
are
additional
visual material: they don't so much help to tell Jo and
Geoffs story as to reveal the director's story.
A Taste of H one-y
doesn't do anything for the art of the film, but
it has, nevertheless, altered our environment. The sad-eyed queen is the
new hero.
The crazy mixed-up kid is an "exhausted" theme-exhausted be–
cause the movies couldn't deal with the boring, prosperous, conformist
society the kids were reacting against, and had to pretend the kids
were simply unloved and misunderstood. Audiences longing for a hero
to lavish their sympathies on have a new unfortunate they can clasp
to their social-worker hearts: the ideal "little man," the homemaker,
the pure-in-heart, childlike, non-threatening male, the man a girl can
feel safe with-and who could be more "deprived"? They can feel
tender and tolerant, and they can feel contemptuous, and in-the-know
at the same time: the man a girl can feel safe with is a joke, he's not
a man at all. The role-confusion of the story becomes the source of
gratification for the audience : Geoff is poetic because he's inadequate,
and you're not just having a dirty laugh, you're accepting life. Romance
and comedy are one: the hero is the butt. And the audience, having
had him both ways, feels worldly and satisfied.
