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| Rita Tushingham and Peter Finch in Girl With Green Eyes |
Rita Tushingham had a brief period as a movie star after a striking debut in Tony Richardson's A Taste of Honey in 1961. For a time she was the embodiment of British young womanhood, with an appeal that suggested a more homely, down-to-earth Audrey Hepburn. Girl With Green Eyes, her fourth feature, captures her at her best. She plays Kate Brady, a bright young Dublin shop-girl, raised on an Irish farm and educated in a convent school, who finds herself out of her depth when she gets involved with Eugene Gaillard, a much older intellectual, married but on the brink of divorce, played by Peter Finch. He's taken with her girlish frankness, she with his maturity and wealth of the kind of experience she has only read about in books. Yet a clash of cultures is inevitable: She's still clinging to her Roman Catholic upbringing, attending Mass every week, and although he prides himself on being a kind of lone wolf, a writer and translator who lives alone in his large house on the outskirts of Dublin, he's still tied to a coterie of cynical sophisticates. It can't work, and it doesn't, especially when her family learns that she's sleeping with an older man who is about to commit the mortal sin of divorce. At the end, she sets sail for London with her boisterous friend Baba (Lynn Redgrave) and a life more in keeping with her age and experience. It's a coming-of-age movie, and a pretty good one, with fine performances all round, solidly directed by Desmond Davis -- it was his first film as a director after working as camera operator for many years. It was Tony Richardson, for whom he had worked on A Taste of Honey, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), and Tom Jones (1963), who gave him the Edna O'Brien novel on which the film is based and suggested he direct it.
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