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Country: UK
Director: Tony Richardson
From time to time national cinemas seem to experience bursts of creativity that result in concentrated periods of inspired output. To my mind the British film industry had two such “golden ages.” One was the 1940s, when directors like David Lean, Carol Reed, and Michael Powell turned out one masterpiece after another. The other was the 1960s, when the young directors of the British New Wave like Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz (all of whom turned to directing after stints as critics at Sight and Sound), Bryan Forbes, and John Schlesinger made their greatest films. These young filmmakers were inspired both by the freedom of style of their French New Wave counterparts and by the politicized class-consciousness of the “Angry Young Man” writers like John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe, and Harold Pinter.
The most productive of these filmmakers during this time was Tony Richardson. Although like the rest of his contemporaries he eventually moved on to more mainstream projects, he directed no less than five notable British New Wave films between 1959 and 1963, when he won an Oscar for directing Tom Jones. The classic films of the British New Wave focus on alienated young men played by the likes of Albert Finney, Alan Bates, and Tom Courtenay. Richardson’s A Taste of Honey (1961) is one of the few films to come out of the movement whose main character is a young woman.
Jo (Rita Tushingham) is a dreamy, introverted teenager in her last year at school who lives with her mother in a dreary flat in the industrial north of England. Her mother, Helen (Dora Bryan), is an irresponsible, unemployed, depressed woman nearing the wrong side of forty and just beginning a relationship with a somewhat younger man, Peter (Robert Stephens). Jo and her mother have a curious relationship based on a kind of role reversal in which Jo tries to moderate her mother’s excesses (cigarettes, booze, too many late nights down the pub, and a string of unsatisfactory short-term relationships) while clinging to her for emotional support. The first half of the movie concentrates on their sometimes pathetic, sometimes quite funny relationship. When Peter asks Helen to marry him and makes it clear that he has no intention of accepting Jo along with her, Helen chooses to marry Peter and leave Jo behind. As her mother prepares for a new life, Jo, rightly feeling emotionally abandoned, begins a romance of her own—her first—with a gentle, likable black cook on a ship temporarily in port.
I’m so tone-deaf when it comes to pop culture, and especially movie stars, that I always have to turn to my secret whiz kid for help on casting my books as movies. None of them have been picked up for film yet, but I’m hopeful, especially after my pal came up with what I think is our best line-up yet: 
Once upon a time, and in a galaxy far, far away I was once asked to tackle the challenge presented by “My Book, The Movie” for my novel Lucky Man. At the time I expressed a handful of desires and recommendations.One, that when Lucky Man was optioned, and for the record it’s still available, so please do contact my representatives, quickly, I hoped that one result would be that Diane Lane would become so enamored with the movie’s writing she would be compelled to finally return one of my calls. Still waiting for that, though my hopes are on the rise again with the release of my new novel You Can Make Him Like You.
