Girl with Green Eyes

This is a cute story about a young girl named Kate Brady, (Rita Tushingham) who lives with another girl named Baba Brenan, (Lynn Redgrave) and Baba sort of leads her roommate Kate around with her and is very talkative and has had plenty of relationships with men. However, Kate Brady becomes very interested in a man who is twice her age and begins to do everything she can to capture his attention. This man is Eugene Gaillard, (Peter Finch) who is a writer and a married man with a daughter and Eugene is not getting along very well with his wife and wants to get a divorce. Kate begins to get Eugene's full attention and before you know it, they are starting a strange relationship with each other which can lead to a great deal of trouble. Kate's family becomes involved and there are big problems facing Kate. This is a rather bitter sweet love story which is very true to what life is really all about. Enjoy.

Poor Rita Tushingham--she did seem to inherit some strangely frustrating parts.

In "A Taste of Honey" she was a young pregnant girl, first abandoned by her itinerant sailor, then landing in a "relationship" with a sadly confused chap.

In "Girl with Green Hair," she's another adolescent who falls for a man twice her age. Won't she ever learn?

Director Desmond Davis' work resembles Tony Richardson's so much that their styles are almost interchangeable. It may be because Composer John Addison also scored Richardson's "A Taste of Honey," and "Loneliness of the Long Distant Runner." It's remarkable how Addison's bleakly dissonant style so greatly influences the moods of these dramas.

With Davis employing a lot of contrapuntal passages played by a thin woodwind ensemble--often featuring a solo oboe--one does feel the emptiness and loneliness of character emotions.

There was no one who embodied the "Cockney Kitchen Sink" dramas of the 60s like Tushingham. She was perfect for her parts. Here ably supported by Peter Finch as a blase older man and Lynn Redgrave as a daftly talkative friend, Tushingham plays her role to the hilt.

By the end, the viewer has come to experience a limited encounter--rather doomed from the start--between a worldly wise Dublin land owner and working class Brit girl . . . the latter of whom is finally able to move on with her education and find acquaintances more her age.

The viewer during this visit has experienced some telling scenes of Irish-English life, and an interesting adolescent/mature fling at a brief encounter.

Rita Tushingham, the it girl of British cinema in the 60's (she made a few pics w/Richard Lester) stars as a young Irish lass who falls in love w/a separated writer played by Peter Finch. Shot in beautiful black & white on Irish locales, this sobering romance hits all the right notes when a love affair sounds good via the heart but makes no sense in the head. Look for Lynn Redgrave (Vanessa's sister) as Rita's roommate & Julian Glover, who's still acting strong (he played one of the maesters on Game of Thrones), as one of Finch's friends.

Bitter sweet tale beautifully adapted for the screen by Edna O'Brien from her own novel. It is a difficult subject. a young girl's infatuation with an older married man but the dialogue is so good it even convinces when you initially feel that a scene is unlikely to work. Her inviting him out to tea, her opening his bedroom door are prickly moments dealt with so well they seem perfectly natural. Rita Tushingham and Peter Finch are perfect in their roles and director Desmond Davis' light touch in the first of a short run of successful films ensures that there is almost something magical now and again. Of course, such a subject would be controversial anywhere, anytime but early 60s Ireland it must have been very much a no, no and the film does not avoid this. Indeed it confronts the hypocrisy of family and church very well including a devastating eulogy from the local priest which absolves men from just about anything, except the matter in hand. You can take a girl out of a convent but not the convent out of the girl, is the ardent hope of these primitive souls but perhaps no more as recently uncovered horrors have exposed even greater hypocrisy and criminality in the name of the Lord. In the end the film says more about the making and keeping or changing friends (and lovers) and is a surprisingly insightful outing.

It's just an episode but charmingly well done, Rita Tushingham shining with her eyes all through the film, well seconded by the slightly more reticent and laconic Peter Finch as the middle-aged writer with a failed family behind him and no illusions left, trying to be alone working by writing, which is difficult as Rita Tushingham keeps haunting him, and his family in America making themselves reminded by commenting on an aging man's relationship with a teenage girl with no experience - it could have been equivocal, but it isn't at all, since it is set in Ireland among angily bigotted catholics who also object against the unorthodox relationship and even try to do something about it by hard methods - there is some drama on the way. Lynn Redgrave assists Rita as well as she could and actually saves the situation in the end.

I saw this film when it was new, it was likeable enough already then, but made no lasting impression, wherefore I gave it a chance 50 years later just to refresh my memory and see what it really was all about - but it imported nothing new. It was still just an episode, charmingly well done, with the Rita's shining eyes and Peter's morose introversions - well done, indeed, but hardly universal, just local.