© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
‘I'm not a lady!’: Tiger Bay (1959) and transitional girlhood in British cinema on the cusp of the 1960s
Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Hull. Her work on British cinema has appeared in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Journal of Popular British Cinema and in the edited collections British Cinema of the 1950s (Manchester University Press, 2002) and The Cinema of Britain and Ireland (Wallflower, 2005). Her PhD was on female representation in J. Lee Thompson's British films, and she is currently working on a book on David Lean for Manchester University Press
This article looks in detail at the film Tiger Bay (J. Lee Thompson, 1959) and in particular the representation of girlhood it offers through its eleven-year-old heroine, Gillie, played by Hayley Mills. On one level, we can view Gillie's progress as conventional and conservative: a gun-fixated young tomboy switches her affections from her longed-for weapon to a handsome young man, in a clear allegory of Freudian theories of female developmental. However, I would argue that the image presented by Gillie of active, mobile, confident young femininity (via Mills's ebullient performance) exceeds the boundaries of the narrative and offers a site of potential identification for young female viewers. Gillie is on the cusp of a personal transformation, between childhood and adulthood, but she is also representative of a larger societal transformation, between the 1950s and the 1960s (and all that those respective decades connote). To use Pam Cook's phrase, Gillie is a ‘daughter of transition’: between fifties and sixties femininity but also between fifties and sixties British cinema. To underline just how far Gillie is a prescient figure in British cinema, particularly in the representation of girls and young women, the article concludes with a comparison of Tiger Bay and the only female-centred film of the British New Wave, A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson, 1961), and discovers many remarkable parallels that suggest a hitherto unrecognized kinship between the two texts.