Desmond Davis (1964)
In March 1966, Manny Farber, in his monthly column for Cavalier magazine, wrote a memorably brutal piece, entitled ‘Pish-Tush’, a broadside against particular exemplars of contemporary film acting. They included Jeanne Moreau and Giulietta Masina but Farber reserved his harshest, most extensive criticism for Rita Tushingham – the ‘Tush’ of the title. His preferred actors and acting styles tend to be very different from mine[1] but not in this case. The toughest thing about ‘Pish-Tush’ is that, although it’s very unkind about its foremost target, it’s not unjust.
Rita Tushingham plays the title character in Girl with Green Eyes, Desmond Davis’s debut feature – based, like Davis’s second film I Was Happy Here (1966), on Edna O’Brien material. O’Brien wrote the screenplay, adapted from her 1962 novel The Lonely Girl. In a sense, the end of the first film is virtually the starting point of the second. In I Was Happy Here, the young heroine played by Sarah Miles is disenchanted with life in London and returns to the fishing village in Ireland where she grew up. In Girl with Green Eyes, Tushingham’s Kate Brady, from a small rural community, experiences first love shortly after coming to work in Dublin. At the end of the affair and the film, she crosses the Irish Sea and starts a new life in London.
In Dublin, Kate and her friend and flatmate Baba Brennan (Lynn Redgrave) are convent school girls enjoying their first taste of freedom and independence. Kate works in a grocer’s shop and Baba is training to be a secretary. After a chance meeting, followed by another chance meeting, with Eugene Gaillard (Peter Finch), Kate and he become close friends and, after a while, lovers. The urbane, sophisticated Eugene is a writer, separated from his wife and daughter, who are now in America. The film is no more than moderately engaging until Kate’s father (Arthur O’Sullivan) gets wind of the affair and comes to the big city to retrieve her. Kate is back on the family farm only briefly before she escapes to Dublin again. This time, her father and his rustic posse come banging on Eugene’s door. When he lets them in, the men rough him up. Eugene’s no-nonsense housekeeper Josie (Marie Kean) makes a timely appearance to threaten them with a shotgun and send them packing.
There’s an age gap of twenty-six years between the two main actors but if you’ve had qualms that Eugene is exploiting Kate’s naïvete, the Brady bunch dispels them. They and their behaviour are so unpleasant and the prospect of Kate’s virtual imprisonment in the country is so grim that whatever happens with Eugene seems bound to be a preferable alternative. After provoking this burst of strong feeling, Desmond Davis’s narrative reverts to its previous, underpowered mode and the trajectory of the remaining story is predictable. Kate moves in with Eugene and they live for a while as man and wife. He buys her a ‘wedding’ ring – as a token of their love as well as for appearances’ sake – though he also treats her patronisingly and as a semi-skivvy (it’s not clear what happened to gun-toting Josie). Kate still wants to go to mass on Sundays. Eugene, although he lets her, clearly despises her religion. She feels foolish in the company of Eugene’s culture-vulture friends (Julian Glover and Yolande Turner). She’s increasingly jealous of his wife, with whom he’s still in contact.
The relationship with Eugene founders. Just before it ends, he tells Kate that, when they first met, he was attracted to her because she seemed such a simple girl; but that he now realises she was never that. Their second meeting is in a bookshop, where Eugene discovers that Kate is an F Scott Fitzgerald fan. It’s frustrating that this aspect of her – which isn’t proof of high intelligence but doesn’t fit with anything else in the story – isn’t further explored. The lack of layering in Rita Tushingham’s portrait of Kate probably doesn’t help. Tushingham’s better here than in the same year’s The Leather Boys or the following year’s The Knack … but she presents her character’s changing moods and feelings so deliberately and with such lack of nuance that, thanks also to her extraordinary face, the result often verges on cartoonish. Desmond Davis puts up a succession of photographs of Tushingham during the film’s opening credits: it’s striking that, still by still, she’s more interestingly photogenic than she is in acting action. Eugene’s world-weary melancholy comes almost too easily to Peter Finch (though it may not have seemed so at the time the film appeared, with Sunday Bloody Sunday several years in the future). But at least Finch’s expert underplaying complements (sort of) his co-star’s in-your-faceness. (‘It’s not that Tushingham hogs the screen exactly’, wrote Manny Farber, ‘but she does chew her way through another actor’s scene with bulldog incisors’.) Finch doesn’t need words to convey Eugene’s mixture of desire, affection and unease as he pursues the affair with Kate.
The presence that’s hardest to ignore after Tushingham’s is that of John Addison’s incessant music. He’d written an effective score for Tom Jones the previous year but Addison regresses here to the same kind of hyper-explanation that disfigured A Taste of Honey two years before that. Among the supporting players, Lynn Redgrave is obvious but entertaining as Baba. Julian Glover, who went on to succeed against the odds with his role in I Was Happy Here, is stiffly uncomfortable here. The brilliantly eccentric David Kelly registers in a five-second appearance as a ticket collector.
9 April 2018
[1] One particular sentence in ‘Pish-Tush’ gives a flavour of these preferences: ‘A good actor is usually one who has picked up the tricks that made Lee Tracy better than Spencer: a talent for (1) retreating into a scene, (2) creating an effect of space, and (3) becoming a combination of fantasy figure and the outside world, but always a fragmental blur’.
