Girl With Green Eyes (Desmond Davis, 1964)

Rita Tushingham and Peter Finch in Girl With Green Eyes

Cast: Rita Tushingham, Peter Finch, Lynn Redgrave, Marie Keen, Arthur O'Sullivan, Julian Glover, T.P. McKenna, Liselotte Goettinger, Pat Laffan, Eileen Crowe, May Craig, Joe Lynch, Yolande Turner, Harry Brogan, Michael C. Hennessy, Joseph O'Donnell, Michael O'Brien, David Kelly. Screenplay: Edna O'Brien, based on her novel. Cinematography: Manny Wynn. Art direction: Edward Marshall. Film editing: Brian Smedley-Aston, Antony Gibbs. Music: John Addison.

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.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Tony Richardson, 1962)

Tom Courtenay in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

Cast: Tom Courtenay, Michael Redgrave, Avis Bunnage, Alec McCowen, James Bolam, Joe Robinson, Dervis Ward, Topsy Jane, Julia Foster. Screenplay: Alan Sillitoe, based on his story. Cinematography: Walter Lassally. Production design: Ralph W. Brinton. Film editing: Antony Gibbs. Music: John Addison.

Tony Richardson's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner owes some of its prominence in film history to being grouped with other "Angry Young Men" films, such as Richardson's own Look Back in Anger (1959), Jack Clayton's Room at the Top (1959), Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), and Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life (1963), working-class dramas that gave a boost to such young actors as Richard Burton, Laurence Harvey, Albert Finney, and Richard Harris. Tom Courtenay also got a leg up on his career, largely because he, more than director Richardson, is what holds The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner together. Richardson's direction lacks focus and tension. For example, he occasionally resorts to brief bursts of sped-up action that almost make me hear "Yackety Sax" playing in the background. The essence of Alan Sillitoe's screenplay is that, as Kris Kristofferson put it, freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. Courtenay plays Colin Smith, sent to a reformatory, called a Borstal in Britain, for robbery. The oily, autocratic governor of the institution, played by Michael Redgrave, quickly spots Colin's aptitude for running and grooms him for a race he has arranged between teams from the reform school and an upper-class public school. Colin relishes the illusion of freedom that long-distance running gives him, but when the time comes for the race, he realizes that he's just being used by the governor to enhance his image, so he throws the race at the finish line. The bulk of the film deals with Colin's rebellion against the family in which he grew up, his involvement with a young woman, and the small crimes he and a friend commit before he finally gets caught for the theft. But there's not much shape to the film's flashback integration of this background story, and the film falls slack when it should be building to a climax. Still, Courtenay's performance and solid support from Redgrave, from Alec McCowen as a smarmy school counselor full of hack psychology, and from the fine character actress Avis Bunnage as Colin's mother help keep the film alive.

Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg, 1971)

Girl: Jenny Agutter
White Boy: Luc Roeg
Black Boy: David Gulpilil
Father: John Mellon

Director: Nicolas Roeg
Screenplay: Edward Bond
Based on a novel by James Vance Marshall
Cinematography: Nicolas Roeg
Production design: Brian Eatwell
Film editing: Antony Gibbs, Alan Pattillo
Music: John Barry

Walkabout is both provocative and provoking. It stimulates thoughts about humankind's relationship to nature, about the fragility and even perniciousness of civilization, and about what happens to everyone as they grow up and learn to "fit in" to societal expectations. It's a film in which brutality jostles beauty. But it's as provoking, as annoying in its way, as a 3-year-old's constantly questioning "Why?" You start out trying to answer, but eventually realize that there's no end to the game. Nicolas Roeg has so loaded the familiar tale of the clash of civilization and the primitive with images and narrative incidentals that defy explanation. We begin with trying to understand the film's initial shock, in which the Father drives his children into the desert for a picnic and then tries to kill them before setting fire to the auto and turning the gun on himself. We want to know what brought him to such a terrible moment, but Roeg has no interest in giving us an answer. We want to know why the Girl so stoically accepts this horror, in the face of which most children would break down. Later in the film, we want to explain interpolated scenes like the one of the scientific crew in the outback -- what are they doing, and why is the one female in the crew so provocatively sexy? And the ending, in which we see the now-grown and -married Girl preparing dinner for her husband, who is crowing about his job advancement, juxtaposed with a scene of the three children playing naked in a pond, has a heavy-handed voiceover quoting A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad:

Into my heart on air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
 I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

It feels oddly false and sentimental, an evocation of something untrue to the events shown in the film.  Does Roeg intend this ironic jolt, this disjunction of reality and sentiment? If so, he does little to prepare us for it. It's a fascinating film, but it feels incoherent.