Read more
The revolutionary British New Wave films of the early 1960s were celebrated for their uncompromising depictions of working-class lives and relations between the sexes. Directed by Tony Richardson, a leading light of that movement, and based on one of the most controversial plays of its time, A Taste of Honey stars Rita Tushingham, in a star-making debut role, as a disaffected teenager finding her way amid the economic desperation of industrial Manchester, and despite an absent, self-absorbed mother. With its unapologetic identification with social outcasts and its sensitive, modern approach to matters of sexuality and race, Richardson’s classic is a still startling benchmark work of realism.
- New, restored 4K digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- New interviews with actors Rita Tushingham and Murray Melvin
- Audio interview with director and coscreenwriter Tony Richardson, conducted by film critic Gideon Bachmann at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival
- New interview with Kate Dorney, curator of modern and contemporary theater at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, about A Taste of Honey’s onstage origins
- Excerpt from a 1960 television interview with A Taste of Honey playwright Shelagh Delaney
- Momma Don’t Allow (1956), Richardson’s first theatrical film
- Plus: An essay by film scholar Colin MacCabe
Dora Bryan