I Lost It at the Movies by Kael Pauline

Author:Kael, Pauline [Kael, Pauline]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
Published: 1965-02-24T16:00:00+00:00

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 Honey 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, Geoff (Mur­ray Melvin), who moves in with her and looks after her dur­ing her preg­nancy. I use the nov­el­et­tish term “fel­low-spir­it” in­ten­tion­ally, be­cause I think it helps to es­tab­lish the idyll­ic frame of ref­er­ence. The story is about a little mock para­dise that is lost: the moth­er comes back and throws Geoff out, but Jo has had her taste of the honey of sweet com­pan­ion­ship. A Taste of Honey is a fairy tale set in mod­ern in­dus­tri­al ugli­ness. Little, sad, shy, dig­ni­fied Geoff in this story is a com­bin­a­tion Peter Pan and home­mak­ing Wendy who had to have a pre­tend baby, and he’s a fairy god­moth­er as well. The girl Jo is her­self a Peter Pan fig­ure: stub­born, in­de­pend­ent, caper­ing and whim­sic­al, ig­nor­ing most of the world, moved only by what in­terests her. The back­ground mu­sic — chil­dren’s songs — fur­ther aligns Jo and Geoff with the world and the charm of chil­dren.

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