A Taste of Honey (film)
Overview
 
A Taste of Honey is a 1961 British film adaptation of the play of the same name
A Taste of Honey
A Taste of Honey is the first play by the British dramatist Shelagh Delaney, written when she was 18. It was initially intended as a novel, but she turned it into a play because she hoped to revitalize British theatre and to address social issues that she felt were not being presented...

 by Shelagh Delaney
Shelagh Delaney
Shelagh Delaney, FRSL was an English dramatist and screenwriter, best-known for her debut work, A Taste of Honey ....

. Delaney adapted the screenplay herself, aided by director Tony Richardson
Tony Richardson
Cecil Antonio "Tony" Richardson was an English theatre and film director and producer.-Early life:Richardson was born in Shipley, Yorkshire in 1928, the son of Elsie Evans and Clarence Albert Richardson, a chemist...

, who had previously directed the first production of the play. It is an exemplar of a gritty genre of British film that has come to be called kitchen sink realism
Kitchen sink realism
Kitchen sink realism is a term coined to describe a British cultural movement which developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in theatre, art, novels, film and television plays, whose 'heroes' usually could be described as angry young men...

.
  • Dora Bryan
    Dora Bryan
    Dora May Bryan OBE is an English actress of stage, film and television.-Early life:Bryan was born as Dora May Broadbent in Southport, Lancashire, England. Her father was a salesman and she attended Hathershaw County Primary School in Oldham, Lancashire...

     as Helen
  • Robert Stephens
    Robert Stephens
    Sir Robert Stephens was a leading English actor in the early years of England's Royal National Theatre.-Early life and career:...

     as Peter Smith
  • Rita Tushingham
    Rita Tushingham
    -Career:Born in Liverpool, Tushingham began her career as a stage actress at the Liverpool Playhouse. Her screen debut was in A Taste of Honey...

     as Josephine ("Jo")
  • Murray Melvin
    Murray Melvin
    Murray Melvin is an English stage and film actor.The son of Hugh Victor Melvin and Maisie Winifred Driscoll, he is best known for having created the role of Geoffrey in the Shelagh Delaney play, A Taste of Honey, a role which he recreated opposite Rita Tushingham in the 1961 film of the same name...

     as Geoffrey Ingham
  • Paul Danquah as Jimmy
  • Michael Bilton
    Michael Bilton
    Michael Bilton was an English actor best known for his roles in the British television sitcoms To the Manor Born and Waiting for God....

     as Landlord
  • Hazel and Stephen Blears
    Hazel Blears
    Hazel Anne Blears is a British Labour Party politician, who has been the Member of Parliament for Salford and Eccles since 2010 and was previously the MP for Salford since 1997...

     as street urchins (uncredited)

The film follows the fortunes of Jo, a 17-year old schoolgirl, and her relationship with her domineering, forty-year-old alcoholic mother, Helen.
Quotations

Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers. Men of bright fancies may in this respect be compared to those angels whom the scripture represents as covering their eyes with their wings.

A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume, Book 1, Section 4, p.225

Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.

Introduction to Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers by Richard Rorty, Volume 3, 1998.

The conception of the necessary unit of all that is resolves itself into the poverty of the imagination, and a freer logic emancipates us from the straitwaistcoated benevolent institution, which idealism palms off as the totality of being.

Our Knowledge of the External World by Bertrand Russell

The true function of logic,... as applied to matters of experience,... is analytic rather than constructive; taken a priori, it shows the possibility of hitherto unsuspected alternatives more often than the impossibility of alternatives which seemed prima facie possible. Thus, while it liberates imagination as to what the world may be, it refuses to legislate as to what the world is.

Our Knowledge of the External World by Bertrand Russell

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

Poetry and Imagination by Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1872.

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.

Introduction to Men at War by Ernest Hemingway, 1942.

There is no life I knowthat compares to pure imaginationLiving there you'll be freeif you truly wish to be

Pure Imagination|Pure Imagination by Gene Wilder, 1971.

Impossibility is only the figment of an insufficient imagination.

The Song Of Sin by Phil Duncan, 1998.

 
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