While out to avoid spending time with her narcissistic and promiscuous mother, sixteen-year-old Jo has a brief affair that leaves her pregnant and abandoned. When her mother remarries, Jo's only support becomes her friend Geoffrey, a homosexual.
Ratings
Curator score: 7.0/10
IMDb: 7.4/10
Letterboxd: 3.74/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 86%
TMDB: 7.0/10
Director
Tony Richardson
Production
Woodfall Film Productions
Cast
Rita Tushingham, Murray Melvin, Paul Danquah, Dora Bryan, Robert Stephens, Michael Bilton, Eunice Black, David Boliver, Margo Cunningham, Rosalie Williams, Veronica Howard, Moira Kaye, Peter Sallis
Where to watch
Max
Curator Review
Verdict
A sharp, compassionate kitchen-sink drama that still feels bracing for its frankness about class, sexuality, race, and unwanted pregnancy. Its rough edges are part of the appeal: the film is emotionally direct, socially observant, and quietly radical in how it centers a young woman’s survival.
Best for
viewers interested in British New Wave and kitchen-sink realism
fans of socially conscious character studies
people drawn to stories about working-class life and outsider bonds
viewers looking for early queer representation in cinema
Skip if
you want a polished, plot-driven drama
you prefer upbeat or comforting coming-of-age stories
you are sensitive to bleak family dynamics and abandonment
you dislike period films with a stark, naturalistic tone
Overview
A Taste of Honey is one of the defining British New Wave films, and its reputation is well earned. It watches like a snapshot of a life under pressure: a teenage girl trying to improvise dignity in a world that keeps failing her, with class hardship, sexual hypocrisy, and emotional neglect all closing in at once.
Worth noting
What gives the film its lasting force is its refusal to tidy up Jo’s experience. The mother-daughter relationship is viciously funny and painful, the romance is brief and consequential, and Geoffrey’s presence adds a tenderness that feels unusually humane for the era. The film’s social daring is matched by its visual confidence, which keeps the realism from feeling merely grim.
Bottom line
It can feel abrupt and emotionally raw, but that’s part of why it endures. Rather than offering catharsis, it leaves you with the sense of having met a character who is still becoming herself. That combination of empathy, anger, and wit makes it a landmark of 1960s British cinema.
Top Letterboxd reviews
Mark Cunliffe 🇵🇸 (4★) · 406 likes
Made in 1961, A Taste of Honey tells the story of a working class Salford schoolgirl who meets, falls in love with, and falls pregnant to, a black British sailor. When he later leaves her, she plans to raise the child with her gay best friend. This was rightly called 'kitchen sink realism' at the time.
If made today in 2020, sneering half-witted cunts would call it 'woke'.
And they call it progress? You can keep it. Shelagh, take a bow.
nora (3.5★) · 324 likes
i love the smiths
mary (5★) · 312 likes
the smiths fans be like holy shit
em (4★) · 237 likes
- broke
- pregnant as hell
- gay boyfriend
- mommy issues
Miss Jo pick a struggle okayyyyyy
Mary (3.5★) · 182 likes
Proof that all British people look like Wallace and Gromit characters