Cinema Retro writer David Savage revisits a key film from Britain's golden age of movie-making.
Leading The Charge: Woodfall Film Productions and the
Revolution in ‘60’s British Cinema, July 13-26, 2007. Walter Reade Theater,
Lincoln Center, New York
Celebrating one of the most influential studios in the
development of cinema and bringing back to the big screen an era’s most
important films, the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York is presenting a two-week
showcase of the key films of Woodfall Film Productions, formed in 1956 by Tony
Richardson, John Osborne (Look Back in Anger) and American producer
Harry Saltzman.
Taking audiences out of the studio and into the streets,
where the real stories were, Richardson
and his partners favored realism above all: young, fresh actors, location
shooting, and narratives featuring controversial subjects such as interracial
dating and sex, homosexuality and class. Clumsily over-reaching in some parts,
deeply moving in others, but true to their founding spirit, the lasting
legacies of Woodfall were the exciting new generation of British actors it
introduced to Sixties audiences: Lynn Redgrave, Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay
and Rita Tushingham; as well as the example set for succeeding generations of
British filmmakers to examine these subjects with an uncompromising honesty.
A Taste of Honey (1961), directed by Tony Richardson,
is a key example in this cinema of the Angry Young Men, as it was alternately
called. Although time may have blunted the impact of its taboo-busting issues,
46 years on, it’s no less flavorful for its powerful performances, most notably
Rita Tushingham in her breakout role as Jo, through whose wide, expressive eyes
we see a grim world of mean expectations.