Taglines: The prize winning comedy-drama of a young girl’s passionate love for life!…
A Taste of Honey movie storyline. Jo (Rita Tushingham) is an awkward, shy 17-year-old girl living with her promiscuous alcoholic mother, Helen. Desperately longing to simply be loved, when her mother’s latest “romance” drives Jo out of their apartment, she spends the night with a black sailor on a brief shore leave. Jo’s mother abandons her to move in with her latest lover.
Jo finds a job and a room for herself, meets Geoffrey, a shy and lonely homosexual, and allows him to share her flat. When she discovers that she is pregnant with the sailor’s child, Geoffrey, grateful for her friendship, looks after her, even offering marriage. Their brief taste of happiness is short-lived for Jo’s fickle and domineering mother, her own romantic hopes dashed, appears on the scene, determined to drive the gentle Geoffrey from the flat and take over the care of her daughter, rearranging everything to suit herself.
A Taste of Honey is a 1961 British film adaptation of the 1958 play of the same name by Shelagh Delaney. Delaney wrote the screenplay with director Tony Richardson, who had directed the play on the stage. It is an exemplar of a gritty genre of British film that has come to be called kitchen sink realism. The film opened on 15 September 1961 at the Leicester Square Theatre in London’s West End.
The film won four BAFTA awards: Delaney and Richardson won Best British Screenplay, and the film Best British Film. Bryan won Best Actress and Tushingham was named Most Promising Newcomer. Tushingham and Melvin won Best Actress and Actor at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival.
In spite of dealing with several topics then rarely touched on in Hollywood movies, the film won Tushingham a 1963 Golden Globe for Most Promising Female Newcomer and got Richardson a 1963 Directors Guild of America award nomination. Delaney and Richardson also won a Writers’ Guild of Great Britain award.
A Taste of Honey (1961)
Directed by: Tony Richardson
Starring: Rita Tushingham, Dora Bryan, Robert Stephens, Murray Melvin, Paul Danquah, Margo Cunningham, Michael Bilton, Hazel Blears, Stephen Blears, Valerie Skardon, Janet Rugh
Screenplay by: Shelagh Delaney, Tony Richardson
Production Design by: Leigh Aman, Roy Millichip
Cinematography by: Walter Lassally
Film Editing by: Antony Gibbs
Art Direction by: Ralph W. Brinton
Makeup Department: George Frost, Bill Griffiths
Music by: John Addison
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: British Lion Films
Release Date: September 15, 1961
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