Monthly Archives: May 2015

  • A Taste of Honey

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Tony Richardson (1961 )

    You could read the plot of the stage play as a mixture of fantasy and realism on the part of the author:  a working-class girl, acutely aware of what’s expected to lie ahead for her, imagines unexpected, in different ways impossible, relationships with two men, and ultimately recognises their impossibility.  Shelagh Delaney’s protagonist Jo has fun with a black sailor and gets pregnant by him the night before his ship sails and he disappears forever; the homosexual art student Geoffrey then moves in with and mothers her – in ways that Jo’s own mother Helen has never done.  Just before Jo’s baby is due, Helen’s affair with her latest fancy man ends and, with nowhere better to go, she moves back in with her daughter and ousts Geoffrey.   Delaney was eighteen when she wrote A Taste of Honey.  Her self-assurance and intelligence come across loud and clear in Ken Russell’s Monitor film about her and her home town of Salford – broadcast in September 1960, just a few weeks before Coronation Street began and the year before the release of the film version of A Taste of Honey.  It wouldn’t be fair to describe Delaney as a flash in the pan:  she’s written again for the stage and for radio and published short stories; she did the screenplays for Charlie Bubbles (1968) and Dance with a Stranger (1985). But she’s never come close to repeating the scale of the success she enjoyed with A Taste of Honey.  This, in combination with the evident elements of autobiography in the piece, makes it hard not to see Delaney’s first work as the work in which she fully expressed herself.

    We think of a stage play as the work of a writer, of a film as the work of a director.  Tony Richardson went on to make movies as differently good as Tom Jones (1963) and Blue Sky (released in 1994, three years after his death) but A Taste of Honey, from Woodfall Films (the company Richardson formed with John Osborne), belongs firmly to the period when he was the natural choice to direct screen adaptations of stage hits with socially relevant themes – following Look Back in Anger (1959) and The Entertainer (1960).  A Taste of Honey offers the possibility of ‘opening out’ the action more than either of the other two.  (Look Back in Anger depends on the claustrophobia of Jimmy and Alison Porter’s cramped flat.  The Entertainer has to be rooted in the theatres that Archie Rice plays.)  Richardson makes plenty of use of the streets of Salford, where the film was largely shot; there’s also an expedition to Blackpool.  The latter is one of the strongest sequences:  the documentary setting and the fairground attractions (especially the hall of mirrors) are the context in which the tensions between Jo, Helen and her seedy beau Peter simmer and boil over – and Jo is given her bus fare back to Salford.  It’s that evening that she and the sailor Jimmy have sex and Jo gets pregnant:  there’s a rather beautiful pair of shots of the landscape, dominated by a gasometer, before and after the sexual episode (that we don’t see).   The whole film is well shot and lit by Walter Lassally and a lot of the dialogue is excellent (Delaney and Richardson shared the screenplay credit).  But A Taste of Honey is unsatisfying:  I think this is largely because Richardson on the one hand pushes for social commentary, as if Jo’s experience is entirely typical, and on the other presents the ‘good’ characters in A Taste of Honey – that is, the youngsters, who seem to be paying the price for the rotten society the older generation created – in a way that overemphasises their sweet innocence and comes across as condescending.

    Shelagh Delaney was clearly socially (self-)conscious but implying that Jo isn’t unusual seems a travesty of the original material.  At one point (which Richardson shoots rather too ostentatiously), Jo and Geoffrey lyrically celebrate their uniqueness:  ‘I’m one of a kind … and so are you … we’re bloody marvellous!’   There are childlike elements in the pair’s relationship – it can’t be sexual and they like reciting nursery rhymes to each other, and inventing new words to these.    Unfortunately, Richardson links this to what seems to have been a standard detail in any British film of the period that wanted to be grittily urban – children’s rhymes and songs in the street (cf Tiger Bay, Term of Trial and so on).  It’s OK, given the importance of a nautical character in the story, to have kids singing ‘The Big Ship Sails on the Alley-Alley-O’ over the title credits but this is only a drop in the ocean of what follows and, because it’s so familiar from other contemporary films, detracts from the distinctiveness of the story.  Worse, the score by John Addison is also infuriatingly typical of the period:  a character can’t express any kind of mood without the music supplying an unnecessary explanation of what an actor’s just shown; Addison mixes this with variations on the childhood songs heard or suggested by images (eg Jo washes her face, blows a bubble and sets off ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’).   The effect is rather like when someone in a cinema audience is giving a running commentary to the person next to them.

    Some things don’t make a lot of sense – whether or not this is because of bits being clumsily cut out or the play not being sufficiently rethought for the screen is hard to say.  Jo doesn’t shine academically or in sport at secondary school but she has a portfolio of drawings and, when Helen discovers them, she asks her daughter if she’s interested in going on to art college.  Jo says not (she goes to work in a shoeshop when she – very suddenly – leaves school) but it seems odd that she doesn’t, as far as we can see, even tell kindred spirit and art student Geoffrey about her own work.   Geoffrey talks about what Helen’s like when he’s not yet met her:  this wouldn’t be a problem if Jo went on about her mother so often and vividly that he felt he already knew her, but there’s no virtually no evidence of that.  A cat appears in a basket in Jo and Geoffrey’s flat at one point and is never seen again.  The improbability of Peter actually wanting to marry, rather than have a fling with, Helen is pointed up by how very short-lived their married life turns out to be – the twists and turns in this relationship are driven purely by the demands of the plot.  There are a few bits that stick out as the kind of thing you accept in a stage play but which, in a story set in a real world, become incredible – such as seventeen year old Jo asking her mother, supposedly for the first time, what her father was like.

    The acting is a puzzle.  Much of it is very good but all four principals sometimes suggest they’re reprising stage roles – even though Murray Melvin (Geoffrey) is the only one actually doing so.  Rita Tushingham, a new face at the time, must have made a great impression.  Her unusual looks – how hard it is to decide whether she’s ugly or plain or beautiful – would have been enough for audiences not to notice that she’s much more convincing when she’s not speaking:  her readings are competent enough but lack the variety of the physical side of her performance.   She’s especially expressive when she’s doing something simple like washing her face and splendid fooling around in class, mimicking the teacher.  Although her success as Jo set Tushingham up for roles in other big films made during the next few years (The Knack, Doctor Zhivago), she’ll always be associated with this role.  The same goes for Dora Bryan as Helen, who’s occasionally overeager with a laugh line but, all in all, impressive – particularly in the moments when we see Helen’s helpless, slightly guilty fecklessness.  Tony Richardson sometimes wants to make physical fun of Bryan’s character in her tight-fitting, mutton-dressed-as-lamb costumes but the actress is largely sympathetic.  She sings a song in a pub with a perfect fusion of coarseness and vitality.  Robert Stephens has Peter down pat:  although he occasionally overdoes the loutish grotesqueness, he makes a strong impact.   Murray Melvin’s comical melancholy is very likeable and his line readings, even if they don’t always sound fresh, are always thoughtful and sensitive – although the most successful ones are throwaways.  Melvin and Paul Danquah, as the good-looking Jimmy, are perfectly complementary physical types, and this brings out their shared good nature effectively.  Danquah gives Jimmy depth and mystery – it’s a pity this actor didn’t do much subsequently.

    21 April 2011

  • A Streetcar Named Desire

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Elia Kazan (1951)

    Elia Kazan had directed Streetcar on Broadway and he handles the screen adaptation – with a screenplay by Tennessee Williams himself – with confidence.  Kazan strikes the right balance between opening out and closing in the material.  He places the Kowalskis’ shabby dwelling in a larger physical context then keeps much of the main action in the cramped apartment so as to maximise the impact of the collision between the desperate sensibilities of Stanley Kowalski and Blanche DuBois.  (We see Blanche’s arrival at New Orleans train station, then in the street where her sister Stella and her husband Stanley live, as well as hearing about her journey to Elysian Fields via the eponymous streetcar.)   Of the ones I know, this is Williams’s best play by some distance:  the writing is both imaginative and precise, the lines always convincingly belong to, and deepen our understanding of, the characters.  When Blanche is about to leave the apartment for the mental institution that is her eventual destination, Stella and her neighbour Eunice admire her going away outfit:   Eunice says ‘What a pretty blue jacket’ and Stella that ‘It’s lilac-coloured’.  Blanche corrects them:  ‘You’re both mistaken.  It’s Dellarobbia blue’.   (Seeing the film again really brought home how many famous lines Streetcar contains:  ‘I don’t want realism … I’ll tell you what I want.  Magic!’; ‘Sometimes – there’s God – so quickly’; ‘I have always depended on the kindness of strangers’.)

    Stanley – the inarticulate ‘Polack’ brute – is one of the few major figures in the Williams canon not to have a surfeit of lines.  Because of his creator’s irrepressible love of words, however, even an inarticulate brute, in Williams’s world, has more to say than the conception of the character might suggest.  Stanley has a pungent, slangy wit which at first gets under Blanche’s skin – as her fancy, fanciful talk gets under his – then becomes a bludgeon.  (This development adumbrates the later shift from verbal to sexual aggression towards Blanche.)  The relatively laconic writing of the role – combined with the quality of what lines there are – gives Marlon Brando his opportunity and his portrayal of Stanley Kowalski is deservedly legendary.  Of course we can’t get a sense of how excitingly original Brando’s playing must have felt at the time (perhaps even to those who had seen him in the role on stage).  I was anxious that it would be difficult to detach the performance from knowledge of its seminal influence on screen acting (or even from the many parodies of the performance) but I needn’t have worried.   Brando is truly spellbinding (and both those words are the mots justes). I’d seen the film in its entirety only once before (over 20 years ago) but I’ve often seen excerpts of the most famous moments.  When Stanley imitates a yowling alley cat it never fails to startle me, as well as Blanche.  We can see and hear that Stanley isn’t dumb in either sense of the word and Brando makes his powerful presence unsettlingly ambiguous:  we’re never quite sure how much Stanley is shaped by his social background, or by his lack of education, or whether he’s inherently morally defective.   In any case, Brando gets us to believe that Stanley believes he’s an emotionally honest man – just as he believes that Blanche is a fraud.

    There’s a gripping convergence between this element of the story and the styles of the two leads.  Brando came to loathe Stanley Kowalski – perhaps as an epitome of what went wrong with his Hollywood career – but he was kidding himself if he refused to accept how innovatively truthful his playing of the role was.   Vivien Leigh, from the moment we first see Blanche arriving at the station, is acting – and we can see that she’s acting, whereas we can’t see how Brando achieves his effects.   His art here conceals art and Leigh’s displays artfulness.  I first saw the film with a friend who, when there’s a commotion at the Kowalskis’ home and people in the street wonder what’s going on, said, ‘It’s that woman upstairs trying to win an Oscar’.  It’s this quality in Leigh’s performance that prevents me from admiring it in the way I admire Brando’s; but because pretence and illusion are essential to Blanche and because Leigh’s artificiality is so brilliantly sustained, I realised, seeing the film again, that her acting develops its own truth – it’s mannered but the mannerisms acquire depth.  And the fact that Leigh is acting in a style different from the styles of the other actors resonates strongly with Blanche’s increasing disorientation.

    Leigh was the only one of the main players who’d not been in the Broadway cast.   She and Brando get great support from Karl Malden and Kim Hunter.   As Mitch, the awkward bachelor who doesn’t fit with the other members of Stanley’s poker game and who courts Blanche admiringly, unseeingly, Malden uses his physical solidity and lack of grace to express Mitch’s potential for devotion and the emotional obtuseness which are two sides of the same coin.  Hunter, although she enjoyed much less success than the other three in her subsequent screen career, has an emotional candour and fluidity as Stella which seem remarkably modern.   The film won four Academy Awards, including three acting awards – for Malden, Hunter and the woman upstairs.  (It also won for black-and-white art direction.)   Brando, famously, didn’t get the Oscar.  It was a very strong field and Montgomery Clift’s performance in A Place In the Sun would have been a deserving winner in most years.  The Academy, in one of its most notorious spasms of sentimental belated recognition, gave the award to Humphrey Bogart for The African Queen.

    18 November 2008

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