Remembering lassi film a ter death o an unsung ueer ioneer

Murray Melvin’s queer performance in ‘Taste of Honey’ proved groundbreaking

By JOHN PAUL KING

Last week, with the April 14 passing of English actor, director, and theater archivist Murray Melvin at the age of 90, the world lost a queer cinema icon.

If you feel bad for wondering, “Who’s that?”, don’t worry. Although the film with which he made his name “A Taste of Honey,” directed by British New Wave filmmaker Tony Richardson was an acclaimed and popular award-winner when it was released in 1961, it’s likely only familiar to the most ardent cinema buffs today, especially among younger generations and though Melvin remained a familiar fixture of the London theater world and made several significant further film and television appearances, his fame outside the UK was limited so you’re easily pardoned for not knowing who he was.

Yet while popular memory may have moved on from the era in which “A Taste of Honey” made waves on both sides of the Atlantic, its historical importance not just as a milestone of queer inclusion on the screen, but as a seminal work in a major art-and-cultural movement still looms large.

Based on a 1958 play by Shelagh Delaney, it was part of an aesthetic wave in Britain known as “Kitchen Sink Realism” or alternatively, the “Angry Young Man” movement, though in this case both the writer and the lead character were female), which focused on the gritty lives and hardships of the working class to explore the social ills and ine uities of British society. It centers on Jo, a 17-year-old schoolgirl who lives with her alcoholic single mother after a brief romance with an itinerant Black sailor, she discovers she is pregnant, and moves out on her own with Geoffrey, an ac uaintance who has been kicked out of his at for being homosexual. For a time, they build a household together, taking care of each other as they face the uncertain realities of their grim working-class existence.

Delaney’s play had been a success in London perhaps as much because of the controversy it stirred as despite it before transferring to America for a Broadway production featuring Angela Lansbury and a very young Billy Dee Williams. Both stagings had been mounted by director Tony Richardson, who by 1 1 had established himself as a filmmaker and become a driving force in the rapidly evolving British cinema. He wanted to bring the play to the screen with the same candid and unsentimental attitude that had defined the stage version and thanks to his status as Britain’s hottest young filmmaker, he was given free reign do it. He collaborated with Delaney on a screenplay adaptation that left the original work intact, complete with all its controversial elements, and underscored its slice-of-life realism by filming it entirely on location the first British film to do so in Salford, the rundown industrial district of Manchester where the story takes place.

To further distance his movie from any semblance of show biz artificiality, Richardson relied on the casting of Dora Bryan whose popularity on British screens in “loose woman” roles through the 1950s made her an ideal choice to play Jo’s neglectful mother as a bankable “name” and chose to cast mostly unknowns as his leading players. For the central role of Jo, he auditioned thousands of hopefuls before choosing Rita Tushingham who said in a 201 interview that her only previous acting experience had been as “the back legs of a horse” at a small playhouse in Liverpool and settled on a student actor named Paul Danquah to play Jimmy, the other participant in his movie’s “shocking” interracial kiss.

None of these performers had been part of the play’s original cast, but when it came to one crucial role, Richardson turned to the actor who had originated it Murray Melvin, who had won the part of Geoffrey while still a edgling member of Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, where the play had first been staged. Seen today, it’s a remarkable performance, as fully authentic and unapologetically queer as one would expect from any modern actor, yet given in a time and place when to be “out” was to be shunned, stigmatized, and open to criminal prosecution as well. Hailed by a contemporary critic as “a miracle of tact and sincerity”, Melvin’s Geoff was an instant touchstone for countless gay audience members who never saw themselves represented on the screen, and the fact the almost that he was presented in a positive light without stereotype, clich , or judgment must have felt like nothing short of a miracle.

The film’s other performances are e ually strong, of course. Tushingham won many accolades, including Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival although, likely thanks to the film’s refusal to dilute its taboo subject matter, she was snubbed for recognition at the American Academy Awards), and went on to become something of an “It” girl in trans-Atlantic ‘60s cine- ma Dan uah is engaging and eminently likable as Jimmy, in a performance that is remarkably free of the racist trappings of the era and goes against the generic tropes that might otherwise cause audiences to view him with moral disdain thanks to the chemistry he enjoys with Tushingham not to mention the open-hearted treatment with which Richardson bestows upon their relationship), their interaction is never anything other than sweet and genuine, far from the exploitative or predatory nature with which it might have been endowed in other, more sensationalistic films of the day. As Helen, Jo’s boozy mom, Bryan makes a potentially hateful figure into someone we can understand, even if we can’t quite sympathize with her priorities or get behind her life choices.

Still, the performance of Murray Melvin is arguably the movie’s most significant legacy, and stands to this day as a testament to the power of cinema to speak truth to power or at least, to promote empathy in the face of senseless bigotry. It’s a singular performance, a unique outlier from a time when ueer experience was usually represented as deviant and dangerous when it wasn’t being ignored completely.

Like Tushingham, he won top acting honors at Cannes, but being named “Best Actor” was a short-lived triumph his openly queer persona rendered him un-castable in most mainstream films of the era, and he was denied the stardom he might have enjoyed in a more enlightened time. Nevertheless, he would go on to enjoy a long and respected career, taking on key roles in films by Ken Russell “The Devils”, “The Boy Friend” and Stanley Kubrick “Barry Lyndon” and making prolific contributions in British theater and television. He would even eventually serve on the board of the Theatre Royal, where he had once painted sets out of a passion for the art itself, and become renowned as an archivist for the Joan Littlewood Theatre Workshop, which had been his entry into a rich and vibrant career as a stage and cinema artist.

These accomplishments, surely, gave Murray Melvin a sense of fulfillment. For the rest of us, his trailblazing, thrillingly ueer presence in one of the most important films of the 1960s is more than enough cause to celebrate him.