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.
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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