To me, this movie is perfection.

Strong and Moving!

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

How sad is this?

Desmond Davis may be the finest director ever to have been 'overlooked' by the British film establishment. A former camera operator Davis directed his first feature in 1964 and it's a small masterpiece and one of the most beautifully shot black and white films in all of British cinema, (Manny Wynn was the DoP). "Girl with Green Eyes" was adapted by Edna O Brien from her novel "The Lonely Girl" and it's set in Dublin where friends Kate and Baba share lodgings and where Kate meets a much older English writer, (an excellent Peter Finch), with whom she has an affair.It's a very simple picture, closer in tone to the French New Wave than the British Kitchen Sink and while now it's largely been forgotten it was surprisingly successful in its day, winning the Golden Globe for Best English Language Foreign Film while Davis took the National Board of Review's Best Director prize. Davis followed it with two more superb 'small' films, "The Uncle" and another O'Brien story "I Was Happy Here" before a brief breakthrough into more commercial fare and then an awful lot of television. Still alive at ninety, his name may not mean much to the present generation of cineastes but his first three films alone, and "Girl with Green Eyes" in particular, have earned him his place in the sun

There's not a lot to this movie, which details the relationship of a young woman who sets her cap for a much older man. Not a lot happens, and while the actors are skilled, they are given little to work with. Rita Tushingham seems a bit dim, and Peter Finch is given a series of world- weary lines that are too stylized to fit with the movie's naturalistic pretensions. Those looking for something akin to a story will be disappointed.As a middle-aged man, I see the movie mainly as a warning against dating young women. The girl's conflicted emotions and crazy family are exactly the sort of things a middle-aged man shouldn't have to deal with. I'd be curious to know what moral a young woman would take from the movie though.

"Girl with Green Eyes" is a coming-of-age story - a nice Catholic girl has an affair with a much older man and morphs from an ugly duckling into a worldly young woman. It is set in a society which harshly condemns such things, to the point where a young woman's life is not really her own, but the property of family and Church. Shades of "The Magdalene Sisters".Rita Tushingham plays the girl, who imagines she's good and innocent, but who's unaware of the guile and jealousy lurking inside herself. She's looking, I think, for a ticket out of her former life. Peter Finch is the man, middle-aged, separated from his wife and kid. The last thing he wants is an emotional entanglement to send his life off balance. He's protective of his privacy and tends to be a tad arch and patronizing. Sometimes he finds the girl rather juvenile. I found it interesting that the upper-crust society he's entrenched in also condemns this May-December romance, only it does so, not with pronouncements about sin, but with winks and whispers.This movie is set in Ireland, and the moody, evocative black-and-white photography is gorgeous. It is crisp with a full palate of greys. The images were so palpable I wanted to reach out and touch the screen. The camera moves like a feather. The scene, near the end, where the girl is on the boat leaving Dublin, and the shore recedes further and further away, is a beautiful metaphor, describing the passage from one chapter of the girl's life to another.

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.