Cinema: A Radiance

Girl with Green Eyes. She looks, at a glance, like somebody’s stenographer. Ski-jump nose, ratty hair, teeth a bit askew. But a fuller inspection finds something special in the face, a radiance. The eyes have it. They are large, the eyes of a night animal. They shine in a night of their own like stars in a dark pool.

The eyes are the eyes of Rita Tushingham, the 22-year-old daughter of a Liverpool grocer who in her first screen role, the pregnant tomboy in A Taste of Honey (1962), played like an adolescent Duse but seemed almost too good to be true. In this picture she demonstrates beyond doubt that she is no one-time wonder. She is a woman to the camera born, a magnificent natural actress with a face of inexhaustible expressiveness, the face of an English Gioconda.

She is cast here, however, as an Irish colleen, still in her teens and fresh off the farm, who falls in love with a man (Peter Finch) more than twice her age, a writer of sorts who lives on Dublin Mountain alone and seems to like it. But he likes Kate too, and he meets her for tea. “Young girls fill me with sadness,” he tells her with a little sigh. “They want so much.” Kate wants everything life and love have to offer, and one night she decides she has waited long enough. “Kate, you soft wild girl,” he murmurs, shaking her gently, “what are you doing in my bed?”

Nothing the first time—she’s afraid she might go to hell. But a few weeks later she comes to live with him. “With this ring,” he says fondly but cautiously, “I thee bed and board.” But bed and board are not enough for Kate. She is jealous of his work, of his friends, of his wife—who has filed for divorce in America but seems inclined to forget it. Her moods at first amuse but at last infuriate him. They quarrel. She runs away, sure he will follow and take her back. He doesn’t.

And that’s all there is to it: an affair pretty much like any other affair. But in his first feature film Director Desmond Davis, a top-tick cameraman who shot Tom Jones and A Taste of Honey for Tony Richardson, has transformed a rather banal business into skillful cinema of sensibility, a warm and witty examination of a young girl changing painfully from a big child into a little woman.

Davis shows talent as a composer—his picture lilts along in an allegro of lively little scenes. And he shows range and spirit as a humorist—some of the bedroom bits are shy but sly, and the house comes down when Kate, playing the woman of the world with a cigarette she can’t quite get the hang of, drops it down her cleavage and has to be royally sloshed with the nearest pot of milk.

Most of all, Davis shows tact and imagination as an adviser of actors. He spurs the phlegmatic Finch to a thoughtful portrait of the middle-aged man attempting simultaneously to play papa and pitch woo. And he gentles the excitable Tushingham into a performance of wonderful precision and variety.

One instant she is a charming young woman, the next she is a snotty little brat. She can be soulful as a seraph and coarse as a muckman’s missus. She can be funny, earnest, innocent, cunning, anxious, brassy, cute and cruel all at once. “I just let the character take me over,” she says, but there is more to it than that. When the character takes Rita over, Rita takes the picture over, and at that point Finch and the rest of the cast just seem to fade away. To share a screen with Rita, when Rita catches fire, is to hold a farthing candle to the sun.