A Taste of Honey is a 1961 British New Wave drama film directed by Tony Richardson and starring Rita Tushingham, Dora Bryan, Robert Stephens and Murray Melvin.

Once the landlady leaves, Jo and Helen sneak out the window and move across town on a bus, which is apparently not a unique occurrence for the pair.

She meets Geoffrey Ingham, a gay textile design student, and invites him to live with her after learning he has been evicted due to his sexuality.

Tushingham reflected in 2020 that "a lot of the reaction was 'People like that don't exist' – by which they meant homosexuals, single mothers and people in mixed-race relationships.

But then in some ways it is a realisation rather than an adaptation of Shelagh Delaney's play, with the music-hall mannerisms of the stage production largely removed and the locale vividly filled in.

The film has the advantage of some lived-in, non-studio settings by Ralph Brinton, and the script, though it misses a little of the verbal richness and precision of the original (as in Jo's persistent request for details of Geoffrey's amatory activities, here muffed), achieves a warm feeling for relationships.

Murray Melvin's wistful homosexual, with his pinched, troubled face and nervous kindness, and Dora Bryan's restless, casually effusive Helen, her broad shapeless features occasionally clouded by bitter self-awareness, could hardly be bettered.

Something of a cross between Joan Plowright and Harriet Andersson, Rita Tushingham's Jo lacks technical accomplishment, but makes up for it with a spirited North Country protest and grave, haunting eyes which express exactly that bleak independence, the sudden snatching after ephemeral happiness in the midst of drab hopelessness, which is at the core of the play.

His Blackpool fairground sequences are obviously handled along lines familiar from his previous films; and there is still too much putting-on of style (crowds of singing or playing children) as opposed to the natural lyricism of the sailor's leavetaking in silhouetted long-shot on the bridge.

H. Weiler of The New York Times gave the film a positive review, stating: "In being transported out of the theatre, this "Honey" has been enriched.

"[17] James Powers wrote in The Hollywood Reporter that the film was "the best British drama since Room at the Top", and contended that it "contains the only true portrait of homosexualism in the entire literature of modern books, plays and movies.

In 2017, The Radio Times Guide to Films gave the film five out of five stars, writing: A ground-breaking movie of its time, this features the mousy Rita Tushingham in her screen debut as the unwanted teenage daughter of Dora Bryan, a hilariously vulgar Salford lass who is being courted by a flash and pimpish Robert Stephens.

Set in dank bedsits amid the grimy smokestacks, polluted canals and the tacky prom at Blackpool, this movie – a romance of sorts, and a comedy – survives as a priceless barometer of England in 1961.

[27] Tushingham won a 1963 Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer[28] (tied with Patty Duke for The Miracle Worker and Sue Lyon for Lolita).