Stranded at the Drive-In

by Garry Mulholland

  If you’re wondering why a film this wild, woolly and exciting isn’t routinely touted as a classic of British and teen cinema, the answer mainly lies in dodgy film-making. While Gréville is fantastic with music set-pieces, set design and chiaroscuro light, he seems deeply uninterested in basic editing techniques or, indeed, actors. And one has some sympathy when the support players – particularly Faith, McEnery and Lee – are superb, but Beat Girl’s leads are memorably, laughably awful. Hills gets away with it through sheer presence, but Farrar and Adam . . . well, David Farrar had been one of the great Michael Powell’s leading men, and he looks deeply embarrassed that he is now in movies that are aimed at geezers in dirty macs as much as rebellious teens. And while you can make excuses for the very French Ms Adam based upon her struggling with a second language, that really doesn’t explain the blank, bewildered look on her face throughout, as if the casting director bumped into her at a bus-stop, kidnapped her and pushed her in front of the camera when Farrar or Hills needed a moving prop.

  The bad acting does have some fringe benefits, though. In one early scene, Jenny taunts her dad’s new fancy piece by undressing for bed in front of her, flirting outrageously. If Adam was capable of any other expression except startled rabbit on drugs, then we would be told what to think about this scene. Does Jenny want to shag a woman she met ten minutes ago? Is she competing with her for her father’s incestuous favours? Or is she on commission at the local bra shop? We’re left to laugh and ponder the polymorphous perversity of it all and make up our own dirty minds.

  A TASTE OF HONEY

  1961

  Starring: Rita Tushingham, Dora Bryan, Murray Melvin, Robert Stephens, Paul Danquah

  Dir.: Tony Richardson

  Plot: A very English lament for the unwanted child.

  Key line: ‘A bit of love, a bit of lust and there you are. We don’t ask for life. We have it thrust upon us.’

  Tony Richardson and Shelagh Delaney’s seminal snapshot of life in a ’60s northern town deserves its place as one of the best of all British films. It was adapted from Delaney’s hit play, which was also directed by Richardson. It stars the wonderful Rita Tushingham in her debut role as the quintessential mousy teenage Goddess and the equally wonderful Dora Bryan as the world’s worst mother. And the kind of ribald and poetic dialogue that befits a tale set in Manchester, home of the sharpest tongues in England. A Taste Of Honey is a key example of what came to be known as ‘kitchen sink drama’ and the British new wave. Oh . . . and the song of the same name, which The Beatles covered in 1963 and was initially written as a recurring instrumental motif for the American version of the play, doesn’t appear here at all.

  Tushingham is Jo, a 15-year-old about to leave school, parentified by her slutty and neglectful mother who has never hidden the fact that she never wanted a child. When Lovely Rita dreams, you dream right along with her. Her eyes – huge, slightly off-centre, blank yet full of vim and vigour – express something quintessential about longing to be anywhere but where you are. Broad hips and chubby legs aside, there’s a startling resemblance between Tushingham and Malcolm McDowell, star of If . . . (see here) and A Clockwork Orange (see here). His slight femininity and her edge of butch make them equally unnerving. There is some special knowledge in their eyes and voices, a feeling that they represent not just threatening youth but the rise of a New North. More than occasionally, Richardson just puts a close-up camera on Tushingham here, knowing that her thousand-yard stare says more about frustration and imminent change than any amount of self-conscious speechifying. In a different age that fierce androgyny would have made her a superstar. But the ’60s and ’70s offered worse parts for subversive actresses than any other period of screen-time, and this was not a face to play vapid romantic lead, nor victim, nor whore.

  The opening credits – which occur after scenes of Jo playing netball at school and explaining to a friend that she can’t go out because she has no clothes and ‘we might be moving home again’ – show the influence of The 400 Blows, as does the brutal, documentary-style monochrome and relentless authenticity of light and location. Jo and her ma Helen (Bryan) have had to do a ‘flit’ – that is, leave their flat in secret owing rent – and take their worldly belongings on a bus to who knows where, giving us a tour of Manchester as the credits roll and a kiddie choir sing the children’s song ‘The Good Ship Sails’. Richardson’s camera is rightly obsessed with Tushingham’s face, an unforgettable mix of big-eyed soulfulness, startled rabbit and sulky pout, topped off with androgynous pudding-bowl haircut. This is the stuff of Smiths’ record sleeves and working-class beauty amidst damp northern grit and poverty. Like Truffaut, Richardson chooses a lyrical orchestral soundtrack that lightens the mood, reflecting the optimism of the young and their ability to endure the worst possible starts in life.

  Because A Taste Of Honey is a love letter to mordant pessimism, the life-blood of the British northern working class. Barely a conversation passes without a mention of death, and an implication that it would be a blessed relief. A definitive exchange between daughter and mother occurs early when Jo remarks that the new bed is like a coffin and Mother replies, ‘Well, that’s where we all end up, in the end.’

  I find this strangely comforting. I’m a born and bred Londoner but my mother’s family all hailed from Hebburn, a tiny town near Jarrow in the north-east of England. Their entire narrative was drenched in mortality and miserabilism, and their favourite reading matter was The Spiritualist News, as if they’d all been waiting to die since they’d been born. Considering they’d all been born into service, raised as children to know their place, wait on the rich and never move on, they all had a fair point. The constant sighing resignation to life-stinks-and-then-you-die can and did suck the joy out of a young ’un. But . . . they all meant well. And, in hindsight, it was both funny and true, and militated against the kind of five-a-day, salad-munching, hair-shirt, no fun today lest we suffer tomorrow, Western middle-class delusion that if one behaves and does what one’s told, one will never, ever die.

  By this time we’ve met Helen’s beau, Peter (Stephens), who, with his too-bright suit and bow tie, rakish moustache and used car business, is the very essence of slippery spivery, a wolf in wolf’s clothing. We’ve also seen how uncomfortable he looks when Helen entertains the boozers with a mildly bawdy song in the pub. This surely won’t end well.

  It turns out that Jo wants to get a job after leaving school, and leave her mother as quickly as possible, and that she is an artist . . . something she’s never bothered to share with Mother. But a far more controversial Jo secret becomes the meat of A Taste Of Honey. She begins a relationship with a sailor who happens to be black. Or rather, coloured. Brits of that generation still think ‘coloured’ is the enlightened term, what with it being less abusive than most of the terms used at the time. These were times when a white girl could say to a black man, ‘There’s still a bit of jungle in you somewhere’, and he would, apparently, think it was a funny joke. No black people were involved in the writing of this film.

  Oddly, the age difference . . . he looks at least 25, Jo can be no more than 15 . . . is not raised as an issue, whereas the eight-year difference between Helen and Peter is, repeatedly. But have things changed that much in this regard? Isn’t older man-younger woman still seen as more ‘natural’ than older woman-younger man?

  By now we know that Jo is condemned to repeat the unwanted pregnancy mistakes of her mother. But who can blame her? There’s a shot of Jo and her beau standing beneath a street light, shot from below, framing them in shadow against the windows, walls and fences of a dark street, that captures every thrill of young night-time romance. Besides, the boy’s hot, kind, attentive and represents exoticism and escape.

  Despite the snotty insults to mother – ‘You don’t look 40. More a well-preserved 60’ – and professed desire for independence, Jo is more vulnerable and childlike than she wants to admit. She insists on joining Helen and Peter on a day-trip to Blackpool w
hen, theoretically, she could have had Jimmy The Sailor-Man and the flat all to herself. She may be an outsider, but she is still lonely.

  The day-trip, which also includes a couple we haven’t met until now, is a small and beautiful nightmare, and one that can only be dreamt in cramped, grey England. Peter, who we learn has a glass eye, sees Jo as both an impediment to sex and a terrifying bringer of home-truths. He reveals that he’s already bought a house for his impending marriage to Helen . . . a bungalow with bay windows, every working-class Brit’s paradise.

  But the childish seaside japes that delight the adults leave the child cold. She’s a fabulously disapproving onlooker, a study in blank, bored insolence. By now, Richardson has unleashed the trashy British rock ’n’ roll and the shaky hand-held camera, and, like many a middle-class Brit director of the ’50s and ’60s, he is not a fan of the working class at play, as they laugh manically at things that aren’t funny, eat junk and chase cheap thrills. Still, can’t really knock him for that. I love my background but largely hated its idea of fun. That’s why we peasants needed all these working-class bohemian art-schoolers – The Beatles and The Who and Bowie and the Sex Pistols – to make intellectual noise and allow us to believe we could find better things to do, to be. The Swinging ’60s hasn’t really hit this Blackpool yet. It needs Jo to grow up, put that disgruntlement to good use and become the Shelagh Delaney she obviously is. Of course, the day turns to disaster when Peter loses patience with Jo’s taunting and gives Helen the me-or-her ultimatum. And of course, it rains. And of course, Jimmy is waiting for Jo when she gets off the bus, injecting life and love and the old I-sail-away-tomorrow spiel into her bleak world at a time when she’s far too vulnerable to say no. Uh-oh.

  The film is haunted by the biggest English obsession of the 1960s – the unmarried mother. Helen’s offhand description of Jo’s absent-presumed-dead father as ‘a bit simple’ is cruel and exactly the kind of thing ashamed working-class single mothers tell their children. Again, I know, from experience. No matter what happens at the end of A Taste Of Honey, Jo will live her life convinced that she has inherited an unimaginable madness. Helen tells her she has her father’s eyes. It is not a compliment. The Pill may have turned out to have side-effects, medically, emotionally. But it was, briefly, the salvation of the woman who refused to be a virgin until marriage. This was all such a short time ago, really. It feels like another millennium.

  Dora Bryan is quite brilliant in these scenes. As she explains that Jo was conceived in her first sexual encounter, she makes something that seems initially kind and romantic – that our first time is something we always remember – into something frightening and charged with dread, using little more than a wayward glance, a thoughtful pause, a wrinkle of her angry mouth. She then goes off to get married, having never considered inviting her own daughter, utterly uninterested in the fact that her only child left school yesterday and enters the world of work in two days’ time. The pessimism of A Taste Of Honey touches everything, but nothing is tainted quite as firmly and finally as love and sex, the working-class woman’s killer drug of choice. ‘I hate love,’ Jo whimpers, in a cave, which is fitting.

  With Helen and Jimmy gone, the film moves from superior soap to something altogether more extraordinary. It becomes a kind of travelogue through the life of a precocious teenager’s first taste of independent adult life in atmospheric Manchester, made yet more non-conformist by the introduction of Geoff, Jo’s gay best friend, charismatically played by Murray Melvin. One of the first fully rounded and utterly believable gay characters in mainstream cinema, Geoff is a gaunt and sallow student of ‘textile design’ who understands, at first glance, that Jo is not like everybody else. With him, a night at the fair is pleasure not trauma. He introduces Jo – and the young female viewer of the time, one imagines – to the delights of male friendship without sexual agenda. Although the bullying way she demands information about ‘you people’ proves that Jo is her mother’s daughter, when all is said and done. He becomes her flatmate – and domestic Goddess – anyway.

  Inevitably, Jo’s one night of comfort and joy has left her in the family way. Geoff tries to make himself straight for her, ‘for the baby’s sake’, but this is one stroppy modern girl who isn’t marrying anyone for anything’s sake. ‘I’d rather be dead than away from you,’ he confesses, and, again, the summoning of The Void feels unavoidable. Jo is soon looking ruefully at a boy with Down’s Syndrome, her pessimism an engulfing shroud.

  Helen’s attempts to reconcile with Jo are undermined by drunk lunk Peter in a scene of rich and tragi-comic character acting. When Helen inevitably gets dumped and moves herself into their brilliant bohemian loft, you just know that poor Geoff’s days are numbered.

  But the best scenes belong to Tushingham and Melvin, playing out their strange kinda love by the dirty side of the Manchester Ship Canal, where Jo’s lover seduced her and sailed from her. They are often surrounded by urchin children and they say things like: ‘You need someone to love yer while you’re looking for someone to love.’

  ‘Have you been unhappy with me?’

  ‘Who’s happy?’

  Bloody marvellous. The pair fittingly won Best Actor and Actress awards at 1962’s Cannes Film Festival.

  The movie’s other great supporting actor is Manchester itself, shot in all its dank, sinister, post-industrial glory. There are no dark satanic mills, but plenty of dark satanic factories, looming over the drama, impervious except for providing physical proof that there’s no point cheering up, because it probably will happen.

  If all this sounds like one long Smiths’ song, you are not wrong. Morrissey fans will already know that he pinched one of his most famous lines – ‘I dreamt about you last night/And I fell out of bed twice’, from ‘Reel Around The Fountain’ on The Smiths’ debut album – straight from the mouth of Jimmy The Sailor-Man. The Smiths’ love of pretty-ugly working-class glamour, and view of Manchester as a beautiful but dangerous place with ‘so much to answer for’, finds its absolute definition in these 96 minutes, right alongside Moz’s identification with the young outsider, too clever to conform but too fatalistic to ever escape a chronic loneliness. All this, and its smart placing of black, gay and working-class woman as equally excluded outsiders whose time is fast approaching makes A Taste Of Honey prophetic and inspiring.

  And, for me, A Taste Of Honey holds a special place. I look at it as being as close as I can get to story of my mother, before I was born. OK . . . my mum was in London. Her mother was depressed puritan rather than strumpet extrovert. And she was 23 when she had me, not 16. But . . . she had an accidental child in the early ’60s with a black man called Jimmy who quickly disappeared. She painted. She had friendships with men who volunteered to be stepdads, but chose her mother, for better and for worse. And, like Jo, she was something new in her family, modern and angry and doomed to never marry. I don’t know that Jo would never have married, but I suspect that, like my mother, by the time she’d devoted every last second to her child in order to avoid making the mistakes of her own mother, she wouldn’t have had anything left to give a man, especially trust. So I watch A Taste Of Honey and feel both illuminated and somewhat uncomfortable, as if I’ve watched something I was never supposed to have seen.

  It’s got to be a pretty great movie to do that to someone who wasn’t even born when it was made. The best British teen film bar none, and far more besides.

  WEST SIDE STORY

  1961

  Starring: Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer, Russ Tamblyn, George Chakiris, Rita Moreno

  Dir.: Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise

  Plot: The jazz hands Romeo And Juliet.

  Key line: ‘Life can be bright in America/If you can fight in America/Life is all right in America/If you are white in America.’

  How different would the greatest teen musical of all time have been if one of the many other actors considered for Tony had got the part? Let us consider, for a moment . . . Anthony Perkins? Nah . . . too
psycho. Burt Reynolds? Too moustachy. Warren Beatty? Too vain. Bobby Darin? Too vapid. Richard Chamberlain? Too smooth. Dennis Hopper???!!! Really, I don’t know where to start or finish with that level of weirdness.

  But here’s one to think on. At one point it was a real possibility that the tragic Romeo in this New York gangland/hoofer orgy could have been . . . Elvis Presley.

  No, really. The producers of this movie version of an already huge Broadway hit dearly wanted Elvis to be their juvenile lead. Apart from his looks, voice, popularity and all-round Elvisness, he had form: he’d played a knife-wielding punk with a heart of gold in King Creole (see Popcorn) and been great. How perfect: the biggest pop star of the day in the biggest pop musical of the times?

  But Hollywood didn’t reckon with Presley’s huckster manager Colonel Tom Parker. Once Elvis had done his patriotic stint in the US Army, Parker wanted Elvis to make the smooth transition to family-friendly MOR entertainer. Despite having already made millions out of rock ’n’ roll, Parker believed this jungle music was a teenage fad and that his protégé had to move away from it as quickly as possible. Of course, West Side Story doesn’t have a note of rock in it; it is based around the immaculate jazz-classical compositions of Leonard Bernstein (music) and Stephen Sondheim (lyrics). But it had rock ’n’ roll attitude, with its jive-talkin’ juvenile delinquents and themes of inner-city poverty and racial tension. So Parker kept his boy well away from the project.

  Picture poor old Elvis, kicking back with his Memphis Mafia at one of the private screenings he would demand at his local cinema, watching a movie that won Ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture – more than any other musical in history – and spawned the biggest-selling soundtrack album of its times, while he pondered making a fool of himself in one of the musicals Parker preferred; maybe Fun In Acapulco, Tickle Me or Clambake. What a sap.