A Taste of Honey

The 1960's brought about many of my favourite films about the English working class experience: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner; Saturday Night, Sunday Morning; This Sporting Life and - naturally - Kes. Coming from the North and being around - just - during the sixties helps naturally.

I dislike the term "kitchen sink" because it puts too many people off a film that while bleak remains so true it almost hurts. There isn't a word, phrase or scene in this movie that I don't believe and remember: I was there, although not in Salford!

A dimly lit world of booze, cups of tea, canals, seaside trips, bonfires, repressed emotions, unprotected sex (and what follows) and the limits and cheap thrills of the Northern English working class.

In 1961 this must have looked like the start of a new age of film. Real stories about real life. Almost a docu-drama in the modern parlance. However it never really happened. Why? Because there is more skill required than you might imagine and even this verges on going over the top. You could say it is tries to tick too many boxes. And isn't really true drama because it stops at a point in which so many threads remain loose.

(I suppose you could say it ends with the characters facing up to the realities that they have been so long running away from - but will they actually achieve it?)

Star of the show is Rita Tushington who never went on to do much with her career after being given the part of a lifetime to start it all off. Murray Melvin is also good as the homosexual boyfriend who wants to help out - although maybe in a misguided way.

A Taste of Honey has its limits and you could attack it for being snobbish. It is an artistic product born of the middle class - but it remains utterly true in a way that is mostly absent in cinema today.