A Taste of honey

A kitchen sink drama from the early 1960s, “A Taste of Honey” is about a young Englishwoman, who lives with her hard drinking, floozy of a mother, Helen. When Helen impulsively marries her current boyfriend, Jo is turned out and moves in with Geoffrey, a kindly homosexual friend, himself an outsider. Their peaceful domesticity is interrupted when Jo falls pregnant after an affair with a black sailor. After the birth of the baby, Jo and Geoffrey are effectively co-parenting until Jo’s opportunistic mother re-emerges to stake her claim in her daughter’s life. Despite its depressing subject matter “A Taste of honey” entertains a blackly comic tone that keeps it from sliding into a draining melodrama. The film is a fascinating ‘slice-of-life’ view of working class life in Britain of the 60s, whose entrancing black and white cinematography, reminiscent of Bill Brandt’s photography of working class England, contrasts with the gauche and drab reality of the characters’ surrounds. This controversial film dealt with many taboo topics on the day - teen pregnancy, inter-racial romance, homosexuality, child abandonment, without excessive sermonising on the topics, typical of American moral dramas of the 1950s. Cast includes Dora Bryan, Rita Tushingham, Robert Stephens, Murray Melvin, Paul Danquah and David Boliver.