Come Here To Me!

In 1961, Tony Richardson’s magnificent big screen adaptation of Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (see my recent Irish Times piece on the play here) made a star out of Rita Tushingham. It also demonstrated that there was a public hunger for films which dealt with real life issues, far removed from glitz and glamour escapism. It was a time for Angry Young Men, or Angry Young Women in Delaney’s case.

Tushingham scooped up a number of high profile awards in its aftermath, including the Cannes award for Best Actress and Most Promising Newcomer at the BAFTA’s. Three years after Honey, she played the leading role in Richardson’s Girl With Green Eyes, an adaptation of Edna O’Brien’s novel The Lonely Girl. Just as Salford’s industrial built landscape became a character in Honey, 1960s Dublin was crucially important to Girl with Green Eyes, the story of a young rural woman moving to Dublin and finding love with a sophisticated older man. Looking at it today, it is an important piece of Dublin archive footage and social history, capturing since departed institutions like the much loved Greene’s Bookshop on Clare Street.

Edna O’Brien had burst into Irish consciousness with The Country Girls in 1960, a book which dared to talk about sexuality and which instantly attracted the unwanted attention of the censor. In her memoir, O’Brien recalls the difficulty the response to the book created even in her own family, as “in her letters my mother spoke of the shock, the hurt and the disgust that neighbours felt. I had sent her a copy, which she did not mention as having received, and one day, after her death, I would it in a bolster case with offending words daubed out with black ink.” The publication of the book infuriated Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, who was moved to discuss its content with Minister for Justice Charles Haughey, writing that “like so many decent Catholic men with growing families, he was just beaten by the outlook and descriptions.”

Such opposition to her work only served to enhance O’Brien’s appeal to young readers, and having taken the familiar path of an Irish writer into exile, O’Brien achieved international renown as a writer in the 1960s. Given that Richardson had grappled with themes with homosexuality and single parenthood in Delaney’s Honey, Girl with Green Eyes likely appealed in part because of its taboo nature.

Walking along the Liffey in Girl With Green Eyes.

Among other things, the film captures disappeared Dublin landmarks like the Four Provinces Ballroom and Greene’s, both shown in the below clip.  Tushingham was a mere 21 at the time of the release of the film, with Life magazine proclaiming that she was “a remarkable young actress, visible through nearly every inch of this film. She cannot be called pretty by a long stretch: her nose is long and thin, her mouth a wide slash,and her hair is a Beatles mop. It is her large, lustrous eyes that have it.”

From a deeply Catholic background, Tushingham’s character, Kate Brady, finds it difficult to embrace any kind of sexual activity, eventually departing Dublin for London, a familiar path O’Brien had taken for different reasons.

O’Connell Bridge

Girl with Green Eyes is not a perfect film, and I find it difficult to disagree with Mel Healy’s view that ” It has some awful central casting, forgettable music and truly terrible attempts at Irish accents by several of the English actors.”

Since 1912, when Herbert Heymour Pembrey established the business, the Greene’s bookshop on Clare Street was a much-loved institution, which The Irish Times rightly noted not long before its closure had “a past, an atmosphere and a story to tell”, while one Dublin travel guide beautifully described it as “a dusty wonderland for bibliophiles.” Frequented by George Russell, Jack B. Yeats, Paddy Kavanagh and others, it had the feeling of a Shakespeare & Company or other continental bookshop about it, with books for sale outside in all seasons and endless shelves inside. Just as Joseph Strick’s 1967 masterpiece Ulysses did us all a favour by capturing the interior of the then already doomed Irish House pub on Winetavern Street, Richardson’s film captures Greene’s forever.

To the annoyance of some, Edna O’Brien never lost her voice or influence in Irish life, and became a fearless opponent of censorship, speaking at a packed meeting in Dublin’s Gate Theatre in 1966 which proclaimed that “the system of censorship branded authors as pornographers, obscene and indecent.” Her work had a crucial impact in breaking taboos down and highlighting the normality of sex and sexual attraction, in a country that often scoffed at such things. Just as he had done with Shelagh Delaney’s work, Richardson managed to use the local environment beautifully, and while it is old classic Dublin that shines brightest on screen (in particular her Georgian squares and her river), it is the changing face of Irish society and sexuality that is most important here.